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March 6, 2006

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Welcome to the March 6, 2006 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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HPCC - Twenty Years and Counting
HPC Wire (03/03/06) Vol. 15, No. 9,Feldman, Michael

This month the High Performance Computing and Communication (HPCC) Conference will mark its twentieth anniversary in Newport, R.I., as it addresses the topic "Mainstream Supercomputing: The Convergence of HPC and Grid Computing." The conference began when supercomputers emerged in the 1980s, attracting the interest of the Navy and other divisions of the Department of Defense. While he was president of the Federal Information Processing Council of New England, HPCC founding organizer John Miguel launched the first supercomputing conference, attracting manufacturers and government officials. While originally intended as a one-time-only event, the conference was so popular that it became an annual occurrence, which has spread into a variety of non-defense related sectors. Miguel notes that the conference is a forum for sophisticated discourse on the state and future of supercomputing technology and networking among representatives of the government and private sector. The focus of the conference has evolved away from a vendor showcase in favor of a more general discussion of the issues facing the community, having included sessions on information security, information assurance, and homeland security in the last few years. This year's conference will feature a discussion from Intel's Stephen Pawlowski, entitled "HPC: Into the Mainstream," a presentation from Procter and Gamble's Tom Lange on "The Aerodynamics of Pringles," and a discussion of multicore technology from Louisiana State University computer science professor Thomas Sterling. Another panel devoted to the real-world issues facing supercomputing will take up the issue of the disconnect between users and vendors, as well as assessing the most pressing needs of government and industry.
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The Art of Building a Robot to Love
New York Times (03/05/06) P. 16; Fountain, Henry

Speaking at a conference on human-robot interaction last week in Salt Lake City, University of Southern California computer science professor Maja Mataric discussed the emotions that humans wish to see robots express. Carnegie Mellon graduate student Rachel Gockley found that people are more likely to engage with a robotic receptionist when it appeared unhappy. Reporting the findings of his driving simulations, Stanford communication professor Clifford Nass said that people interact most effectively with robots when the devices act like humans, suggesting that researchers must formalize human emotions to the point where they can be modeled. Nass believes that the shortest path to optimizing human-robot interaction will be for robot developers to pinpoint how humans fake sincerity and incorporate that capability into their devices. Given that emotional cues guide people in their interactions with each other, Notre Dame's Matthias Scheutz believes that predicting emotions will be central to a human's understanding a robot's motivations and predicting its actions. Conversely, when robots take on human-like qualities there often arises a host of expectations. "As soon as it shows the characteristics of anything animate, then they start projecting or anthropomorphizing," said Scheutz. The roboticists at the conference agreed that the technology is still far from maturity, and that people are best advised to view the robots with whom they interact more like pets, rather than expecting them to function with the cognitive and emotional abilities of a fellow human.
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BlackBerry Case Could Spur Patent-Revision Efforts
Wall Street Journal (03/06/06) P. B4; Heinzl, Mark; Guth, Robert

Although the recent $612.5 million settlement between BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) and NTP appears to have ended the long-running patent fight between the two, legal experts and technology executives say the case could ultimately spur efforts to amend the U.S. patent system. Defenders of the U.S. patent system say stiff measures are needed to protect the rights of inventors and encourage innovation. However, many technology executives argue that injunction provisions under U.S. law are outdated and enable patent-holding firms to extract prohibitive payments from others seeking to bring useful products to the market. "It won't be too long before this brand of litigation triggers a backlash, in the form of patent reform, proposals for which have languished in Congress for years," says patent lawyer Matthew D'Amore. Though RIM still believes the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office will eventually completely reject NTP's patents that were at issue in the BlackBerry dispute, the legal battle's negative effect on BlackBerry sales in the United States helped force the company's hand, said RIM Chairman Jim Balsillie. "There is an urgent need for patent reform," Balsillie said. D'Amore agreed: "Already the Oracles and Microsofts--the formidable technology companies that use patents defensively--are starting towards a serious push towards reform," he noted.
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Security Tackles Smartcard Hackers
Electronics Weekly (UK) (03/06/06) Evans-Pughe, Christine

Hackers have been able to exploit computers with smart cards or other types of accessible security chips by monitoring execution time, power consumption, and other characteristics and extracting security keys through statistical analysis. Research has demonstrated that microprocessors, DSP, FPGA, and ASIC encryption systems can all be compromised within minutes. The best-known attack method is differential power analysis (DPA), which exploits the fact that the power supply provides power when a zero-to-one transition takes place, providing a window into the machine's power consumption as it processes hundreds of cryptographic computations. Statistical analysis can then retrieve the secret key based on the fluctuation of power consumption. A new technique that uses small coils or other magnetic sensors has made this type of spying harder to guard against, and even smart cards that minimize the signals emitted by the leaky parts of the circuit cannot prevent DPA attacks. Time-dependent preventive measures could throw off the monitoring with dummy calculations or variable clock periods, said Cryptography Research's Ken Warren. Cryptography Research has also developed more sophisticated software and hardware to build randomness into the calculations, as well as developing the ability to change a key faster than it sheds power. "If you calculate the circuit is leaking half a bit per transaction and you change the key every 10 transactions, you know the attacker can't get enough information to find the key," said Warren. This type of diversification technique forms the basis of the leak-proof algorithms that secure data at financial institutions. Other research suggests that electromagnetic emission simulation could improve security. STMicroelectronics, Philips, the University of Nice, and others are also exploring a system-level methodology for incorporating security into device designs.
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Women in IT: Yvonne Parle
Computerworld Australia (03/03/06) McConnachie, Dahna

In a recent interview, Yvonne Parle, the manager of information management at Western Australia's Chamber of Commerce and Industry, described her experience as a woman in the IT workforce. Parle's teachers encouraged her to take science classes, and she first became interested in computers while organizing the library of a pharmaceutical company with an index-card system when a co-worker suggested she design a computer program. Parle's most difficult times in her career came while she was working in London in the 1970s as the only woman in the data center. Her favorite job was at Chase Manhattan, when she first managed a technical team. While female involvement in IT has increased over the years, Parle still believes that people view it as an odd career path for women, particularly when they gravitate toward the more technical vocations. She has encountered frequent disappointment at seeing her own opinions on a technical matter accepted only after being echoed by a male colleague. Because women continue to be judged according to outdated career stereotypes, Parle believes that women in IT must champion the career to female students, particularly as the adversarial perception of "us versus them" between technology departments and the rest of business disappears. Parle is also a founding member if Western Australia's Women in IT (WIT), which promotes IT as a career path to women, and will speak on the historic role of women in technology at the upcoming Go Girl, Go for IT Careers Showcase.
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Artificial Intelligence Gains Momentum
Memphis Daily News (03/01/06) Vol. 121, No. 49,Guy, Rosalind

The FedEx Institute of Technology (FIT) at the University of Memphis is launching a robotics research center later this month to develop a robotic vehicle capable of integrating safely with a human workforce. So far the lone corporate backer, FedEx, has given the center $120,000 in the form of one-year seed money, though the FIT's Eric Mathews is confident that the center's research will attract the attention of other sponsors. The idea for the center came from FedEx's interest in yard management--creating a vehicle that could navigate the tarmac and move cargo bins around while being able to sense and avoid objects. Ultimately, the center wants to create a robot that can safely operate in a warehouse alongside humans. Mathews likened the focus of the center to last October's DARPA autonomous vehicle competition, though instead of a predetermined course, the center aims to create devices that can move objects around in a real-life setting with an awareness of the other machines' location. "We're talking about having a global view of patterns of things being moved around and what needs to go where," said Mathews. "So you have to have global intelligence, but you also need local intelligence so that if a person steps in front of it, that person doesn't get killed." The project is planned over five years, with the early stages to be spent developing smaller robots before moving on to a more ambitious application endowed with the ability to navigate and operate the brakes, gas, and other functions of a vehicle. Mathews does not envision robots ever replacing humans as a source of labor, but rather working alongside them to increase productivity and reduce errors.
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Hunt Intensifies for Botnet Command & Controls
eWeek (03/02/06) Naraine, Ryan

A tema of security researchers is stepping up efforts to locate and disable the command-and-control infrastructure that powers millions of zombie drone machines, or bots, hijacked by malicious hackers. "If that command-and-control is disabled, all the machines in that botnet become useless to the botmaster," says Gadi Evron, a CERT manager in Israel's Ministry of Finance. "It's an important part of dealing with this problem." Evron and the team, which consists of representatives from anti-virus vendors, ISPs, law enforcement, educational institutions, and international DNS providers, have launched a public, open mailing list to encourage the general public to help report botnet C&C servers. The mailing list will be a place to discuss detection techniques, report botnets, send information to the appropriate private groups, and automatically notify the relevant ISPs of command-and-control sightings. Experts say CIOs should put the threat of botnets high on their lists of priorities as they become more dangerous. Command-and-control shutdowns are just a small part of fighting the problem. Evron predicts that experts in the anti-virus, anti-phishing, anti-spyware, and anti-spam industries will all work together on research and development to help stop the growth of botnets.
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Computer Scientist Sorts Out Confusable Drug Names
ExpressNews (University of Alberta) (03/02/06) Smith, Ryan

In an effort to curb the spread of medication errors stemming from similar drug names, the FDA contracted Project Performance Corporation (PPC) to develop a software application to eliminate confusion among the more than 4,400 FDA-approved drugs in circulation. PPC contacted University of Alberta computer science professor Greg Kondrak, who had developed the ALINE linguistic and bioinformatics program to distinguish between similar-sounding words in his doctoral work. Kondrak gave PPC the ALINE program, and devised the BI SIM program to compare and analyze the spelling of words. PPC combined Kondrak's two programs to provide the FDA with a framework for assigning new drug names based on how likely they are to be confused with existing drugs either phonetically or orthographically. "The FDA used to have dozens of people scouring the lists of names to check if the proposed ones were too similar to any of them," said Kondrak. "But now one person using PPC's system can identify sound-alike and look-alike drug names with great accuracy in a matter of seconds." Computer scientists and linguists have embraced the ALINE program for other applications, as well. Kondrak is pleased with the warm reception that his program has enjoyed, particularly in light of the objections he encountered when writing ALINE that it would never have a practical use.
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Digital Entertainment on Every Channel
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (03/06)

The future of digital media will be on display from March 9-15, 2006, at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen envision in-car surround sound, and have combined the MPEG Layer-2 coding used in Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) with the new MPEG Surround technology to create DAB Surround, which will produce surround sound using a bit rate 5 Kbps above stereo data rates. Fraunhofer engineers are also bringing surround sound to handheld devices such as mobile phones or PDAs through Ensonido, which uses special filters that take features of the human head and ear into consideration to adjust acoustic signals, so that sounds can be distinguished in headphones on the left, right, front, and rear. Also at CeBIT, researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI) in Berlin will introduce a system that will harmonize the emerging industry standards for bringing television to mobile phones or PDAs. HHI is working with Siemens, Sony, T-Systems, and Vodafone on an approach that makes use of the Internet Protocol (IP). Meanwhile, the Fraunhofer stand will include a demonstration from researchers at IDMT on IAVAS (Interactive Audiovisual Application Systems), when HHI engineers turn their attention to the high compression of data needed to deliver razor-sharp TV images. A final area of focus has been to develop an ultra-low-delay audio codec for living-room surround sound, via wireless loudspeakers. "The leap in quality is comparable to the transition from mono to stereo," says Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, director of IDMT, which has developed the loudspeakers.
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Push to Create Standards for Documents
New York Times (03/03/06) P. C2; Lohr, Steve

More and more government records and documents are being created and stored in purely digital form, which has raised concerns that public information might become locked into proprietary formats designed for software that may someday be obsolete. In order to address this potential problem, the OpenDocument Format Alliance has been created by 30 companies, trade groups, academic institutions, and professional organizations in an effort to promote government adoption of open technology standards. "The goal is to ensure that the largest number of people possible are able to find, retrieve, and meaningfully use government information," said the American Library Association's Patrice McDermott, who says the problem is bad and is getting worse. The National Archives and Records Administration is currently amid a pricey project designed to ensure that electronic documents it saves from federal agencies are able to be opened and read. The alliance backs the OpenDocument Format for typical word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet documents, which today are overwhelmingly stored in proprietary Microsoft Office formats. Though a number of the alliance's members are Microsoft rivals such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, Sun's Simon Phipps said that "This is not a partisan, anti-Microsoft group." However, Microsoft backs another open document standard called the OpenXML Document Format, which will be the default format for the forthcoming Microsoft Office 2007. Other supporters of the OpenXML format--which Microsoft submitted to the standards body Ecma International in 2005--include Intel, Apple, Toshiba, BP, and the British Library, said Microsoft's Alan Yates.
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Study: Cell Phones a Hazard on Flights
CNet (03/01/06) Termen, Amanda

Loose enforcement of the ban on cellular calls on airplanes could have potentially disastrous consequences because the risk of radio emissions from cell phones disrupting vital instruments such as GPS receivers is higher than previously thought, according to a study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University researchers. The research team carried broadband antennas and spectrum analyzers with them onto random U.S. flights to pick up cell phone signals, and discovered that one to four calls are made on every U.S. commercial flight, on average. The study showed that signals emitted by other electronic devices such as laptops and game consoles could also be potentially harmful on flights. The in-flight mobile phone ban was originally established to prevent such calls from interfering with ground-based cell phone conversations and planes' radio communications, and the FCC said this danger could be neutralized through technical advancements. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security responded negatively to the FCC proposal's to lift the ban out of concerns that it would constitute noncompliance with wiretapping guidelines. The Carnegie Mellon researchers are also opposed to the ban's elimination, and they urged the design of special tools flight crews could use to track the use of electronic devices during critical points in the flight.
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RIM: Web Services Will Trump Mobile Browsers
eWeek (03/01/06) Hines, Matt

Though Research In Motion's (RIM) days may be numbered due to litigation over BlackBerry handhelds, senior product manager David Heit believes he has found the key to the future of mobile application delivery for businesses in the design of new Web services-based tools to build new applications and not mobile browsers, as are being pushed by many in the industry. "The assumption is that the mobile browser experience should be the same as the desktop experience, but we believe that the usage patterns are different than when you're sitting at your desktop, versus when you're working with a mobile device," says Heit. "The mobile experience is much more about immediacy and having information available when you need it. Web services represent a third development model beyond browsers and something like Java, and they will greatly increase our ability to extend applications onto the handheld." In accordance to this belief, RIM has launched the Blackberry MDS Studio, a visual platform design and assembly tool that allows software developers to more quickly build applications for mobile devices using the drag-and-drop method. The technology has gained a following: Real estate specialist JJ Barnicke, for example, has built a field sales automation tool for its agents. But analysts say if such technology is to gain a greater foothold, wireless carries will have to embrace it first. "At the end of the day, the U.S. market is all about control by the carriers, and from their perspective pushing Web services through their portals gives them a lot more control, so there could be some resistance," says Current Analysis analyst Brad Akyuz. "I don't think that there's much question that someday the predominant way for delivering applications to mobile handsets will be push-based services built on Web services," he notes. "But the manner in which carriers embrace all of this, which mostly remains to be seen, will have a significant impact on where and when we see these types of applications showing up."
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The Emergence of Interactive Supercomputing Applications
Always On (02/28/06) Wladawsky-Berger, Irving

The steady improvement in the performance quality of computing environments has been driven by their accelerated responsiveness, cutting run times from hours to seconds, writes IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger. From their inception, graphical user interfaces have appealed to their users' instinctive sense of sight and sound, and have become increasingly interactive. Time-consuming, computation-intensive supercomputers are on the verge of embracing interactivity as technologies such as microprocessors and storage have seen major improvements while prices continue to fall as architectures advance. IBM's BlueGene attains a high level of performance from low-power versions of its Power Architecture by using multiple versions in parallel, netting the system five of the top 15 spots on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. IBM has also unveiled a new high-performance version of its BladeCenter architecture that, with an almost exponential increase in internal bandwidth, is poised to take on a host of supercomputing applications. A new blade has appeared based on the Cell processor, a Power Architecture-based high-performance processor that Sony, Toshiba, and IBM jointly developed for the Play Station 3. Today's supercomputing applications are used for modeling, simulation, and analyzing vast amounts of data, and many are already moving toward interactivity. Interactive supercomputing could have significant applications in medical diagnosis, automotive engineering, or oil discovery. Doctors could train on surgical simulators modeled after flight simulators, realistically demonstrating the conditions that arise when things go wrong in a procedure.
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The Next Generation of In-House Software Development
McKinsey Quarterly (02/06) Marwaha, Sam; Patil, Samir; Tinaikar, Ranjit

Some trailblazing companies have figured out how to build a customized-applications environment that incorporates the advantages of packaged software by adopting software vendors' "write-once, widely sell" strategy for packaging and selling applications designed to fulfill group rather than individual needs. Standardization of maintenance, support, and software-management processes shared by groups of applications as products is an approach some companies have followed to transform components of custom-applications support into packaged activities. Reduced costs for applications maintenance and accelerated deployment of new applications are among the benefits of this tactic. Application "owners" and developers face less of a burden in going through management issues, while per-seat, per-application prices lower costs and augment cost transparency. In addition, companies that consolidate applications in shared services realize full value, resource utilization increases substantially, service levels become more manageable, and activities for applications of the same archetype become standardized. Early adopters of the product-oriented approach have demonstrated the wisdom of building the right products "prospectively" with both present and future needs considered. Other important steps to follow include organizing groups to deliver products effectively against business needs as well as technology outcomes, and keeping in mind organizational factors to guarantee proper governance and yield business advantages.
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M2M: More Than a Modem
Portable Design (02/06) Vol. 12, No. 2, P. 22; Quinnell, Richard A.

Design teams are often not ready to meet a crucial challenge to developing portable machine-to-machine (M2M) applications: Obtaining the certifications that sanction implementation. This involves complying concurrently with the requirements of government regulatory bodies, wireless standards bodies, and the wireless service developer, each of which has its own unique requirements and certification standards. To acquire government certification, it must be proved that the application's design meets the regulatory limits for the given radio equipment, which requires rigorous testing of broadcast power levels as well as frequency spectra; testing has to encompass the entire product, and any subsequent design changes following certification may require recertification. Developers must also appease different wireless standards entities, depending on whether the product is based on CDMA and/or GSM: The CDMA Development Group (CDG) handles certification for the former while the PCS-1900 Type Certification Review Board (PTCRB) and the Global Certification Forum (GCF) certifies for the latter in North America and Europe, respectively. Products must then be certified by carrier service providers to guarantee compliance with network standards, and this can be an aggravatingly long and arduous stage that may easily entail six additional weeks of work. Design modifications to satisfy the certifying organization may be necessary at any stage, which could force a certification process restart or at least a fast retest; newcomers to the M2M market could get a leg up by jointly going through the certification process with the radio component provider.
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IPod Obedience Training
Discover (02/06) Vol. 27, No. 2, P. 24; Johnson, Steven

As technology becomes increasingly attuned to the preferences of its users, it may be time for an update to the lexicon of verbs that describes their functions. Each successive innovation brings into circulation a new batch of verbs, from the TV's "change the channel" to the CD player's "track up" and "track down." The command of moving to the next chapter or track assumes that the instrument has an understanding of the structure of its own content. The iPod is a prime example of a digital device whose content format has outpaced its menu of functions. The iPod is incapable of expunging a song from its shuffle-mode rotation even if a user consistently skips past it. Smart algorithms are enabling devices to make more and more decisions for us, though even the most sophisticated algorithms can be improved with training. Software that provides recommendations could be improved with the addition of two new verbs: Remove and ignore. Remove would tell the device never to make a particular recommendation again, while ignore would instruct a device that learns by observing behavior not to incorporate a user's action into its future recommendations. With these additions, users could prevent their TiVos from continually recording the same unwanted program over and over again under the assumption that it is of interest to the viewer, and users could stipulate aberrant purchase or content decisions in applications such as Amazon's recommendation system. Some technologies have begun to include variations of this feature, such as TiVo's "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons, and the "no follow" hypertext standard that the major search engines have adopted. Apple's iTunes allows users to take a song out of shuffle circulation, though the process is hardly intuitive. What these functions are missing is universality--the simple iconography that defines a forward arrow as "Play," and the square as "Stop"--which will only become more important as more of our decisions are made by recommendation algorithms.
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Biometrics Becomes a Commodity
IT Architect (02/06) Vol. 21, No. 2, P. 46; Dornan, Andy

The limitations of password-based security are driving the growth of biometric solutions, but IT departments considering biometrics must be mindful of three facts: The only physical biometrics set for widespread use in authentication for the foreseeable future are fingerprints; biometrics' effectiveness depends on the technology being incorporated into a multifactor authentication framework that includes passwords or hardware; and physical biometrics is the optimal choice for local physical security rather than direct access to networked resources. Authentication by automated face recognition systems is currently beset with a high rate of false positives, while DNA authentication is likely to remain in the realm of science fiction because of cost, privacy, and feasibility issues. Voiceprints have a better chance of mainstream acceptance, but the ease of voiceprint analysis and counterfeiting is a major drawback, though blending voiceprints with other techniques could be advantageous. The inability to keep biometric identifiers private is a weakness common to all biometrics solutions, which is why IT departments must establish privacy safeguards to protect a user's fingerprints, as well as ensure the prints have not already been exposed by some other system to which the user has authenticated. Preventing the transmission of biometric templates across a network or their storage in a central repository, usually through a combination of the biometric factor and a hardware device, is the best strategy for shielding user privacy. An attacker can be deterred from accessing either private keys or the biometric template by storing them on the PC's cryptographic coprocessor, or TPM. The TPM could provide a layer of interoperability--a capability lacking in all fingerprint-based authentication systems--because it is a standardized technology.
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Next-Gen Libraries
Campus Technology (02/06) Vol. 19, No. 6, P. 43; Villano, Matt

Digital library efforts are in a constant state of flux, but several projects are encouraging. One such initiative is the Plowshares Project, a collaboration between Indiana's Goshen, Manchester, and Earlham colleges to digitize local historical archives focusing on studies of peace and social justice affiliated with the Quaker, Brethren, and Mennonite denominations; the library is but one component of a larger institutional effort, according to Earlham's Tom Kirk. Copyright issues and metadata quality and uniformity have been challenges for the Plowshares Project, notes Goshen College library director Lisa Guadea Carreno. The University of Washington's DigitalWell, or D-Well, project seeks to archive large audio and video files, and its file management architecture consists of a standard central computer with clustered, scalable-on-demand servers. D-Well can also interoperate with other digital library systems throughout the academic sector thanks to the proprietary Storage Resource Broker and a middleware system built by the University of California at San Diego's San Diego Supercomputer Center. The University of Michigan is compiling digital collections through the use of Digital Library eXtension Service, standalone content scanning and management software that aids schools without digital libraries in the rapid setup of such archives. The University of Virginia, meanwhile, is digitizing collections of old documents and images, while most of its library consists of scanned, multilingual content or "e-texts" that are searchable by topic, word, and character.
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Model-Driven Engineering
Computer (02/06) Vol. 39, No. 2, P. 25; Schmidt, Douglas C.

Software developers can use third-generation languages and reusable platforms to better protect themselves from the complexities associated with generating applications using earlier technologies. But the evolution of platform complexity has overtaken the ability of general-purpose languages to conceal it, leaving several major problems unaddressed and increasing developers' difficulty in determining which application segments are vulnerable to side effects stemming from changes in user requirements and language/platform environments. Model-driven engineering (MDE) technologies show promise as tools for handling platform complexity and third-generation languages' inability to ease complexity as well as effectively express domain concepts. This is accomplished through a combination of domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) that can formalize structure, behavior, and requirements within specific domains, and transformation engines and generators that facilitate the analysis of certain model types and the synthesis of artifacts. MDE tools are informed by the results of prior initiatives to develop higher-level platform and language abstractions, and can dictate domain-specific restrictions and execute model checking to find and deter numerous errors early in the life cycle. For MDE tools to successfully migrate from early adopters to mainstream software developers, useful standards that enable effective and portable tool/model interoperability must be defined. Standards must also be complemented by a sturdy infrastructure for supporting the development and evolution of MDE tools and applications. Complex systems cannot be developed with just models, so MDE is designed to integrate, enhance, and leverage other tools such as patterns, model checkers, third-generation and aspect-oriented languages, application frameworks, component middleware platforms, and product-line architectures.
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