Where Are the Women in Tech? At least 1200 Will Be in San
Diego
ZDNet (09/22/06) Foremski, Tom
More than 1,200 women will converge on San Diego in a couple weeks for the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, organized by ACM and the
Anita Borg Institute. In a recent interview, Anita Borg Institute head
Telle Whitney discussed her thoughts on the current state of women in
computing. "Some days it feels like we haven't moved much, but other days
it really does feel that we have made a lot of progress. We just have to
remember that culture changes slowly," she said. The Grace Hopper
celebration, which in the past had been held every two years, becomes an
annual event this year. Sponsors of the meeting, where the competition for
top female talent is intense, include major companies such as IBM, Yahoo,
Microsoft, and Intel. Reliable numbers about female employment in
computing are not available because most corporations will not release that
information, but Whitney says the institute is working to produce an
aggregate figure that would not identify individual companies. For more on
the Grace Hopper Celebration, or to register, visit
http://gracehopper.org/
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New Nonprofit Organization Will Fund IT Education,
Research Projects
InformationWeek (09/20/06) McGee, Marianne Kolbasuk
During its annual SIMposium conference in Dallas on Sept. 19, the Society
for Information Management launched a nonprofit organization that will fund
research projects and programs that aim to develop leadership skills in IT
professionals and attract more young people into the tech field. "Between
the significant drop-off in IT enrollment [at U.S. universities and
colleges] and the baby boomer [retirement] situation, our whole industry
and the business community at large could be in big trouble," said Dave
Luce, chairman of the SIM Foundation and the CIO of commercial real-estate
development company Rockefeller Group International. Luce added that
although it will likely be roughly six to eight weeks before the SIM
Foundation announces its first projects, it has already come up with some
possibilities, including educational programs aimed at parents and high
school guidance counselors to make them more aware of tech career
possibilities for students preparing to enter college. In addition, the
foundation could also create scholarships or IT training programs for
disadvantaged youth. SIM says such efforts could ease IT managers'
concerns about attracting, developing and retaining talent.
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Q&A: Go Back to Paper Ballots, Says E-Voting
Expert
Computerworld (09/20/06) Songini, Marc
Johns Hopkins University computer science professor and Maryland elections
judge Avi Rubin heavily criticizes e-voting in his new book, "Brave New
Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting."
He complains in his book that the United States acted without thinking
when it instigated the transition to e-voting, which is fraught with
transparency and security problems. Rubin calls for a system that is
transparent to average voters and that allows recounts to be monitored as
they happen, which requires a paper trail. He does not think a voter
verifiable paper trail (VVPAT) is a cure-all to e-voting's problems,
explaining that the paper trail "keeps track on a roll in the order of how
people voted, but it's impossible to recount because it's so unwieldy.
It's still vulnerable to software problems, and if you don't check
carefully you can get away with stuff not found in random checking
requirements." The irony of the poor voting system in the model democracy
is not lost on Rubin, who recommends the jettisoning of electronic polling
books in favor of voter registration cards that the voter puts in an
envelope taped to the voting machine. "If we can put something in place
[for voting] in the next seven weeks, we should," he concludes. For
information on ACM's e-voting activities, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm
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Conference to Improve Information Technology Education
Sponsored by Capella University
PRNewswire (09/20/06)
Capella University announced today that it will sponsor and host ACM's
2006 Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education (SIGITE)
conference in Minneapolis from October 19-21, 2006. This year's conference
is called "IT Education: The Engine of Innovation" and will devote much of
its time to the ideals of ACM. Keynote lectures for the conference will be
given by Dr. Eli Cohen of the Informing Science Institute, and Michael
Vinje, Principal, Trissential, LLC. Dr. Cohen will focus on the need for IT
collaboration among special interest groups to create the greatest possible
opportunities for those in IT. Vinje will discuss how improving individual
employees and processes can help businesses become more competitive. Other
topics scheduled to be discussed include addressing the need to integrate
older IT learning information with newer content. Previous SIGITE
conferences have been held at Brigham Young University, the Rochester
Institute of Technology, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Purdue
University. For more on the SIGITE conference, or to register, visit
http://www.sigite.org/content/index.maml
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Horst Simon Talks Petascale
HPC Wire (09/22/06) Vol. 15, No. 38,
In a recent interview, Horst Simon of the Berkeley Lab's Computational
Research Division shared his thoughts on the challenges facing
high-performance computing in the coming years. Simon believes that
scientists will reach the goal of the sustained petaflop in a real
application within the next five years. Simon also says the cost of
petaflop systems is in line with other large-scale scientific projects, but
that new systems must have an immediate impact in order to be worth the
investment. Petaflop systems will also become increasingly specialized, he
argues. The industry is nearing the point where the maintenance of
high-performance computers is more expensive than the initial acquisition,
though more energy-efficient components could help bring the costs down.
Scaling to hundreds of thousands of processors will also be a significant
challenge for the industry, requiring a substantial investment in system
software. Meanwhile, heterogeneous processing will lead to cheaper, more
efficient systems. From a policy standpoint, Simon believes that the HPC
community should be careful to ensure that the first system to reach a peak
speed of a petaflop is not construed by politicians and other outsiders as
the complete solution to the petaflop problem.
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Research Looks at How Open Source Software Gets
Written
UC Davis News and Information (09/20/06) Fell, Andy
The NSF has awarded a team of researchers from the University of
California, Davis, a three-year, $750,000 grant to study the development of
open-source projects such as the Apache Web server. Unlike other
engineering projects, there is no comprehensive roadmap for how an
open-source project should develop. Unlike most collaborative projects,
where the pace is set by the slowest member of the team, progress in
open-source development moves at the pace of the team's fastest member, and
adding more workers actually makes things go faster, not slower, says
Premkumar Devanbu, a professor of computer science at UC Davis. The
project will concentrate on the Apache Web server, the PostgreSQL database,
and the Python scripting language, collecting information from message
boards, email exchanges, and bug reports to find out how the teams organize
themselves. The researchers suspect that open-source software reflects the
way that the developers are organized, and that the nature of the project
itself will have an effect on how the programming teams are structured.
Projects that are broken into large chunks of code might have a different
structure than one with a group of small chunks, for instance.
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UC Business Migration Drivers vs. IT Implementation
Obstacles
TMCnet.com (09/20/06) Rosenberg, Art
The question arises as to which enterprise perspective--the IT perspective
(with a primary focus on implementation costs and ease of support and
maintenance) or the operational, end user perspective (seeking value and
ease of use in functionality adoption)--should be prioritized in unified
communications (UC) migration planning, writes Art Rosenberg. "In the case
of IP telephony and UC, one would expect that future enterprise user needs
would be identified and perhaps even quantified before implementation
decisions can be made," the author notes. Rosenberg mentions a recent UC
migration-related article in BCR magazine in which he cited business
communications research that was instigated by the effects of the Sept. 11
attacks on business travel and face-to-face business meetings. The
research, which was published in the Communications of the ACM, pointed to
the importance of face-to-face meetings and videoconferencing, but also
ascribed a nearly identical value to asynchronous email and phone calls as
tools for maintaining business contacts; from these findings, Rosenberg
reasoned in his article that the perceived necessity for traditional phone
calls to people will be blurred by frequent messaging interactions such as
voice/unified messaging and instant messaging. The author projects that
enterprise staff will increasingly become more mobile and/or remote
teleworkers, increasing the importance of efficient and effective
distributed business contacts and supporting UC return-on-investment (ROI)
benefits such as IT administration/support costs, communication equipment
and services costs, and micro- and macro-productivity. Rosenberg contends
that a solid UC migration plan's first step is to carry out "operational
homework" such as "pilot" studies that focus on mobile and multimodal
devices in addition to legacy communication devices, and an objective
"needs analysis" founded upon the job requirements for all the
organization's end users. "The flexibility of contacting people more
efficiently will pay off at both the 'micro' and 'macro-productivity'
level," insists the author.
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Linux Lab: GPL Clarification Needed ASAP
CNet (09/20/06) Shankland, Stephen
The Free Software Foundation did not ease corporate concerns about the
fate of General Public License (GPL) version 2 during meetings this week in
Chicago. The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has called on the FSF to
explain how software governed by GPLv3-licensed code will interact with
GPLv2-licensed code. After nine months, "it's time for the FSF to write it
down and say what the rules are," said Stuart Cohen, chief executive of the
OSDL. However, Eben Moglen, attorney for the FSF, said his organization is
not ready to address the issue at this time. "It is premature to comment,
in my view, on the relation between GPLv2-licensed code and GPLv3-licensed
code until the final provisions of GPLv3 are known, but this at any rate
does not strike me as an issue," said Moglen. GPLv3 is designed to succeed
GPLv2 and address issues such as software patents and digital rights
management. A consortium of computing companies is behind the OSDL, and
its leadership includes Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux. Torvalds has
not expressed much support for GPLv3 and FSF.
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High-Speed Speech Calls for Hardware
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (09/20/06) Templeton, David
Carnegie Mellon University electrical and computer engineering professor
Rob Rutenbar seeks to improve the capabilities of speech recognition
technology by inventing better hardware, namely a computer chip that can
comprehend speech and process it faster than current software. This is
important, because real-time speech recognition software is about to hit a
wall. The work of Rutenbar's CMU research team has thus far yielded a
prototype chip that can recognize 1,000 words, albeit not in real-time
speed. Rutenbar's long-term objective is a chip capable of understanding
50,000 words at a rate that beats real time 1,000-fold, a breakthrough that
would aid national security initiatives such as wiretap analysis. The
technology's potential commercial applications include improved cell phone
voice recognition. Stanford University electrical engineering professor
Teresa Meng lauds Rutenbar's effort as the most sophisticated speech
recognition research endeavor around, noting that Rutenbar has "put grammar
and structure in the chip in a multistep recognition process to cast a
fairly wealthy set of thinking into hardware." Rutenbar is developing
technology to assist Homeland Security through grants from the Defense
Department, the semiconductor industry, and the National Science
Foundation.
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Roll-Up Screens 'Moving Closer'
BBC News (09/21/06)
Researchers at Cambridge University believe their new metal material could
clear the way for the development of roll-up flat screens for laptop
computers. The scientists have used copper alloys to develop a metal
structure that does not need hinges, latches, locks, or any other moving
parts to shift into shape. Dr. Keith Seffen, the lead researcher who is
from the Department of Engineering, says toy "flick" or "snap" bracelets
were the inspiration for their approach to providing a structure with
flexible movement. "If you think of bending a ruler, when you bend it you
are changing its shape and also the stress within the structure," says
Seffen. "What we have worked out is ways that you can make the shape and
the stress interact with each other in a positive way." The metal sheet is
designed to give way when its stretch level reaches its midway point, and
assume another shape, rather than break. The metal structure could
potentially be used to produce electronic newspapers, keyboards, and
compact mobile phones that could be rolled up and placed in a bag or
pocket. The researchers also envision reusable packaging and self-erecting
temporary shelters.
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Virtual Bees Help Robots See in 3D
New Scientist (09/21/06) Simonite, Tom
Researchers believe that a study of how honeybees forage for food could
improve robots' 3D vision. A new kind of stereoscopic computer vision
system is inspired by the way that explorer bees dance on a specific area
of the honeycomb to report the location of a new source of food after they
return to the hive. The system, developed by Gustavo Olague and Cesar
Puente at the Center for Scientific Investigation and Higher Education of
Ensenada of Mexico, uses virtual honeybees to find specific points of
interest in a 2D image and render them in 3D. Olague and Puente claim that
their system is simpler than the computationally intensive method of using
two cameras and comparing the views taken from different angles to produce
3D information. The simulated bees can be programmed to find features of
interest in 2D images based on criteria such as edges and texture, which
could enable a robot to focus on a person or object in an otherwise empty
space. The software randomly assigns the explorer bees to different areas
in the picture. Once they have identified features of interest, the
explorer bees then recruit other virtual bees, called harvesters, to
explore the area in greater detail. "This algorithm can save time," said
Olague. "The harvesters are targeted by the explorers to look only at
promising areas." The researchers hope to incorporate the system into a
mobile robot by the end of this year.
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New Research Institute to Bridge Science and Arts
Divide
IT Week (09/18/06) Brown, James
De Montfort University will officially unveil its new Institute of
Creative Technologies (IOCT) in Leicester on Wednesday. The IOCT will
focus on using collaborative research methods in computer science to bring
science and the arts together. Microsoft is supporting the IOCT, which
initially has plans to create an Internet orchestra, cylindrical projection
hologram animation, and pursue research in artificial intelligence.
Internet expert Howard Rheingold will deliver a keynote address on the
importance of open, common resources online. "It is important to
understand the interdisciplinary foundations of cooperative behavior that
enable people to act in their self-interest and at the same time create a
resource that enriches everyone--such as the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, or
open-source software," says Rheingold. Professor Andrew Hugill will serve
as the director of the IOCT.
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Imaging Technology Restores 700-Year-Old Sacred Hindu
Text
Rochester Institute of Technology (09/19/2006) Gawlowicz, Susan
Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology have used imaging
technology to preserve 700-year-old sacred Hindu writings. P.R. Mukund, a
professor of electrical engineering, and Roger Easton, who imaged the Dead
Sea Scrolls, are scheduled to return to a monastery in Udupi, India, in
November to present a printed and electronic version of the Sarvamoola
granthas, a collection of 36 works written in Sanskrit by the Dvaita
philosopher Shri Madvacharya (1238-1317). Along with Mukund and Easton,
the team consisted of Keith Knox, an imaging senior scientist at Boeing
LTS, and Ajay Pasupuleti, an RIT doctoral candidate in microsystems. In
June, the team used a scientific digital camera and an infrared filter to
image the palm-leaf document. "It is literally crumbling to dust," Mukund
says of the sacred Hindu text. They processed and digitally stitched 7,900
images using several image-processing algorithms, Adobe Photoshop, and
custom software created by Knox. The processed images can now be stored
electronically, published in books, and etched on silicon wafers to ensure
the Sarvamoola granthas is preserved for a long time. Mukund says the
original manuscript will not have to be opened and handled any longer.
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U.S. Agency to Extend Oversight of ICANN
Associated Press (09/21/06) Caterinicchia, Dan; Jesdanum, Anick
The U.S. Commerce Department has signaled that its memorandum of
understanding with ICANN will be extended past this month's expiration
while the agency finds ways to address concerns over the power of the U.S.
government in Internet governance. When the last agreement was extended in
2003, Commerce had suggested that ICANN would be ready for self-oversight
by the close of the current contract, but few in the industry believe the
organization is ready to handle those responsibilities. The new agreement
"is extremely important in that it dictates the extent to which the U.S.
government will continue to play a unique role in the oversight of the
Internet's Domain Name System," says David McGuire of the Center for
Democracy and Technology. "What we ultimately would love to see would be a
completely non-governmental, bottoms-up management body. At this point,
that's just...not something we think is necessarily even viable." Among
the issues Commerce says it will address are greater transparency and
accountability in its decision-making processes. However, John Kneuer,
Commerce's acting assistant secretary for communications and information,
says the current agreement works and did not discuss any changes to the
agreement or the length of the extension; ICANN President Paul Twomey also
had no comment. Paul Kane, chairman of CENTR, an association of Internet
country code top-level domain registries, warns that unless Commerce is
able to open up ICANN to greater participation by its constituents, it
risks having ICANN's duties taken over by another organization.
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Trends in Cyberinfrastructure for Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology
CTWatch Quarterly (08/06) Vol. 2, No. 3, Stevens, Rick
University of Chicago computer science professor Rick Stevens points to
three trends in biology research that are impacting cyberinfrastructure for
bioinformatics and computational biology: The increasing availability of
high-throughput (HT) data, the ramping up of queries that can by addressed
by computation and HT experimentation, and the start of simulations and
modeling technologies that will eventually serve as a platform for
predictive biological theory. "It is possible to imagine that, in the
future, laboratories will be directly linked to data archives and to each
other, so that experimental results will flow from HT instruments directly
to databases which will be coupled to computational tools for automatically
integrating the new data and performing quality control checks in
real-time," Stevens explains. He points to several notable road-mapping
documents authored by the community, including a report from the National
Science Foundation committee for constructing a biological sciences
cyberinfrastructure; a National Academy of Sciences study on computing and
biology; and a program roadmap devised by the Energy Department for its
Genomes to Life initiative. Web services will be important to biology as a
means for enabling teams worldwide to collaborate on building new tools
that take advantage of each other's information and computational services
without prior coordination. Stevens expects several commercial search
engine companies to consider combining biological searches of open
literature and databases with computational services with access to
commercial databases and tools, and mentions TeraGrid as a project that is
developing grid infrastructure for the purpose of biological research. The
author believes petascale computing can tackle biological problems such as
large-scale sequence analysis and sequence-based phylogenic analysis;
large-scale molecular dynamics; large-scale molecular dynamics and
electronic structure, stochastic modeling, and mesoscale structural
modeling; graph-theoretic and network analysis techniques and stochastic
modeling and analysis methods; numerical solution of PDEs, ODEs, and SODEs;
and linear-programming and optimization.
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Progressing With Parallel Processing
eWeek (09/18/06) Vol. 23, No. 37, P. D5
Multithreading skills are becoming essential as parallel processing
hardware proliferates, and developers ignore at their own peril indications
of this trend such as Intel's investments in college curriculum and
resources for multithread development training. The Java programming
language supports the expression of concurrency in the same language
developers are already employing for application logic, while powerful
abstractions for C++ are also offered by concurrency toolkits and
frameworks. Being able to count the threads developers are using on the
fingers of one hand is folly, according to principal author of "Java
Concurrency in Practice" Brian Goetz. He and his five co-authors note that
"The need for thread safety is contagious," because "frameworks may create
threads on your behalf, and code called from these threads must be
thread-safe." It is the authors' contention that developers should never
lose sight of the application state and avoid becoming overwhelmed by
threading mechanisms. Developers must also keep in mind that careless
habits that are acceptable in single-thread environments may be exposed in
multithread environments.
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Designing Urban Pervasive Systems
Computer (09/06) Vol. 39, No. 9, P. 52; Kostakos, Vassilis; O'Neill,
Eamonn; Penn, Alan
Vassilis Kostakos and Eamonn O'Neill of the University of Bath, together
with Alan Penn of University College London, present a conceptual framework
for the design and analysis of urban pervasive systems that relates degrees
of publicness to a trio of pervasive system aspects--architectural space
where artifacts are situated, interaction space that the artifacts
generate, and the sphere of information they access or share. Degrees of
publicness span one axis of the framework, ranging from public to private,
with a social tier in between: The public tier denotes open access in
which no single person controls access; the private tier denotes the
opposite case; and the social tier denotes access that is neither public
nor private, with no single person in charge yet less accessible than
public access. These tiers are differentiated with fluid barriers based on
the theories of control and restricted access. In pervasive systems,
technology-induced barriers enable individuals to grant or deny information
access, in keeping with control theory, while privacy zones required by
restricted access theory are created by the barriers introduced by the
built environment's spatial properties. Space-induced barriers are any
barrier that hinders access, be it economic, social, physical, etc.
Identifying the degree of publicness hinges on the connection between
people, space, and barriers. Architectural spaces, interaction spaces, and
information spheres correspond along the spectrum, and their categorization
as public, social, or private depends on the manipulability of barriers.
Mapping existing systems and situations can uncover recurring patterns in
the design and utilization of pervasive systems, such as the
insulating-technology pattern (used to characterize technologies that
isolate individuals from their physical environment) and the
secrets-revealed pattern (used to describe scenarios wherein private or
social information is publicly disclosed).
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