University of Utah political scientist Thad Hall says the most pressing concern facing voters in this November's general election is not voting machines being hacked into, but their names being deleted from the voter registry. Hall is co-author of the recent book "Point, Click, and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting." The problem, Hall explains, is that there is no standard format for creating voter registries, and thus comparison of databases is very unreliable. "You want states to have common databases so that at least within a state you should be able to know if a person has moved, and you can keep records with a state accurate." Kentucky was sued by its own attorney general earlier this year for attempting to delete 8,000 voters from the rolls, with no notice given to these voters. The attempted removal was the result of a comparison of its database with that of Tennessee and South Carolina, which tried to identify voters registered in multiple states. The process of matching names to identify voters registered in two states needs to be a dynamic one, explains Hall, so that registry in one state would lead to immediate removal of the voters name from the rolls of his previous state of residence. Currently, the process is done in a one-time bulk comparison of databases. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and IEEE are currently working on election standards that provide uniformity for difficult issues such as how addresses are to be broken down. Another way the voting process lacks standardization it that hardware from one manufacturer and software from another cannot be used together, severely limiting the choice officials have in creating the most reliable election infrastructure. The Help America Vote Act, the first intervention of the federal government into elections, does not give the four-year-old Election Assistance Committee power to enforce federal standards, to do so would require an act of congress, but Hall foresees increasing pressure for this power to be granted. For information about ACM's e-voting activities, visit http://www.acm.org/cacm
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Researchers Devise Algorithm to Prevent Information Overload
InformationWeek (10/16/06) Babcock, Charles

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are working on what they believe will be a system capable of digging through massive amounts of random data and highlighting that which is most important. "Getting the information we need is not the problem; sorting it and deciding what is useful without being overwhelmed is the challenge," explains Robert Ghrist, associate professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois, who will co-lead the Stomp (Sensor Topology & Minimal Planning) project, which won $8 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Ghrist says the system being devised could also be used for detecting and exploring holes in the coverage of a wireless phone network. After locating these gaps, topology, the study of abstract spaces, can provide guidance as to how they can be fixed. The goal is to create "a global picture" by combining the readings of numerous local sensors, explains Ghrist. Yuliy Baryshnikov, lead engineer of Bell Labs, a contributor to the project, described how such a large number of sensors often turning up irrelevant results could cause a human observer to miss a critical piece of information, but the topology algorithms being developed would not let anything of importance go unnoticed. A central aim of the project is to create the smallest sensor network needed to perform a required task.
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Anita Borg Institute Sets Plans for 2007 Grace Hopper Celebration
Business Wire (10/11/06)

The success of the recent Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) conference has led the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) to make some changes to the event. GHC, which has been a bi-annual event since its beginning in 1994, will become an annual gathering in 2007, and ABI will also co-locate and bridge the conference with the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing conference. ABI has scheduled next year's GHC for Oct. 17-20, in Orlando, Fla., and it will follow the Richard Tapia conference, which is set for Oct.14-17. GHC is the largest technical conference in the world dedicated to women in information technology and computer science, and it is jointly sponsored by ABI and ACM. This year's GHC, which ended Saturday in San Diego, had a 49.9 percent increase in attendance by technical people from 2004, and had a record number of students attending on scholarship and a record number of corporate sponsors. "ABI's Board of Trustees has recognized a groundswell of support for Grace Hopper technical conferences among all our constituencies, who believe that these events underpin their efforts to attract, develop, and retain more women and underrepresented groups in the technical and computer science professions," says ABI President Telle Whitney.
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IT Industry Lobby Group Says Germany Lacks Specialists
Heise Online (Germany) (10/16/06)

The German Association of Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (Bitkom) says that Germany does not have sufficient measures in place for educating technology specialists. The argument is based on the number of college graduates majoring in technical and natural-science fields in several major industrial countries. "In a few years, Germany will lack the critical mass of bright thinkers it needs to develop basic innovations and turn them into marketable products and new services," says Bitkom's Walter Raizner. He points to China and India as models for rising educational innovation, and stresses the importance of improving Germany's international competitiveness through education policy. Chinese engineers, of which there are 820,000 produced each year, 30 percent of which can compete internationally, compared to Germany's 37,000, are making there way into the German academic and economic realm, and China's emphasis on research continues to grow. While the number of computer science students in Germany is expected to drop to 14,000 in 2010, from 17,000 in 2006, India produces 200,000 computer science students a year. In order to reverse this trend and protect the status of German specialists, Bitkom feels that education policy must be the focus of the government's "high-tech strategy." Student "coupons" could increase competition among schools, while the schools must become more attractive to private investors through promotion of research sciences. In addition, Germany must do its best to import specialists, which Raizner feels would require universities to improve and the country to adopt less bureaucratic immigration rules.
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Monster Jellyfish? Mapping the Global Internet
IST Results (10/13/06)

Volunteers from around the world are participating in an effort to model the Internet by running a software agent on their PCs that maps the online network. Data collected thus far and a graph theory used to visualize the structure of the Internet reveals that the online network, with its central nucleus of nodes, highly interconnected group outside the nucleus and another group of isolated clusters connected directly to the nucleus, resembles a jellyfish. "The largest, well-connected part is the outer mantle of the jellyfish, the little nucleus is the brain, and the tendrils hanging down are the least connected features that have to send their messages to the nucleus before being fed out," explains Scott Kirkpatrick, EVERGROW scientific coordinator. The project has revealed that the nucleus of the Internet consists of about 100 nodes, the highly connected mantle has about 15,000 nodes, and the simple tendrils contain about 5,000 nodes. The EVERGROW team believes its research could help improve the routing of Internet traffic in the future, and lessen network bottlenecks. For example, the team says sending information via nodes in the outer mantle, and bypassing the nucleus altogether, may be a better way of responding to requests from browsers from a distant Web site.
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Identity Federation Getting Dose of Reality From Internet2 Affiliate
Network World (10/12/06) Fontana, John

InCommon Federation, a facilitator and policy setter for identity sharing, has added 10 universities, four service providers, and an independent security provider to its membership. While some see federation as a technology that will only be realized in the future, InCommon has already displayed its ability to secure data access between partners while maintaining individual privacy. "Federation is something that has been envisioned by those with a long scope to the future as to how networking is going to operate in an information and knowledge based world," says Tracy Mitrano, director of IT policy at Cornell University and the chair of the InCommon Steering Committee. "As we move to that world, we are seeing the value of real federations among universities, information providers, and service providers." The identity federation architecture used by InCommon, known as Shibboleth, is the foundation for regulating resources maintained by its members. Shibboleth is built upon the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and is a foundation technology for Internet2's Abilene Network. "There is no question that higher education is already participating in a flat world, so to speak, and federation makes that possible," says Mitrano. The network requires members to share authoritative and accurate identity information concerning their identity management system, and universities can use the system to set privacy policies that control what type of information is accessible at different destinations. Two standards for trustworthiness must be satisfied by all members: their identity management system must be under the purview of the organization's executive management, and the system for issuing credential to end users must contain a sufficient risk management system.
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Say Hello to Your Robot Self
Globe and Mail (CAN) (10/14/06) P. F4; Hornyak, Tim

Hiroshi Ishiguro is a pioneering robotics designer whose latest creation is a robotic puppet that could actually serve as a stand-in for a real person. Ishiguro, senior researcher at Keihanna, Japan's ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communications Laboratories, has created a replica of himself, which can perform eerily life-like gestures thanks to 46 air actuators. Using a motion-capture system, movements, such as those of his own upper body and lips, can be transmitted to the robot, known as Geminoid. He claims to have had the idea because of his long commute, thinking that he could simply leave the robot at his office to carry out his daily interactions by proxy. Rather than simply projecting image and voice, Geminoid allows Ishiguro to convey physical presence. Ishiguro calls the type of robotic work he conducts "android science," an integration of robotics and cognitive science by which human behavior can better be examined. "A robot is a kind of simulator for expressing human functions," says Ishiguro. The human-looking robots he has designed in the past can detect human presence and conduct conversations, such an interview for a TV broadcast. "Robots are information media, especially humanoid robots. Their main role in our future is to interact naturally with people." Japanese culture embraces robots as helpful, friendly companions that will play a large part in the maintenance of society and economy in a country whose average age is growing rapidly as a result of a low rates of birth and immigration. Ishiguro is currently planning cognitive science experiments where the android will be placed in social situations to help him gain insight into his driving curiosity: "why are we living, and what is human?"
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Brazil's Electronic Voting Has Safeguards Lacking in the US
Associated Press (10/14/06) Lehman, Stan

Brazil began using electronic voting 10 years ago with great trust in the system, but many computer experts think this faith has gone too far. The voting machines operate using Windows CE, but Microsoft, which cites trade secrecy, will not allow independent investigations to assure that malicious programmers have not tampered with the software, and for this reason many advocate switching to an open-source system. Amilcar Brunazo, a computer and data safety engineer who is also the Democratic labor Party's permanent technical representative, founded the Safe Vote Forum to lobby for greater transparency of the electronic voting process. "I agree the electronic ballot box makes it more difficult to defraud the election process, but the system is still not transparent enough, and the best way to address this is by allowing an independent inspection of the operating system used in the machine." A verification system was tried in 2002, where a slip of paper appeared behind glass to assure the voter that their vote was counted correctly, but the manufacturer, Diebold Procomp (Diebold's Brazilian division), was opposed to this and favored a single printout from each machine recording every vote registered. However, this "ballot box bulletins" system cannot assure that the votes were not "flipped" by a malicious program. The problem, according to Dr. Avi Rubin, director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, is not that elections have necessarily been rigged, but that no way to confirm whether or not they were rigged exists. Brazil does conduct random tests of machines hours before its elections, and an independent non-partisan tribunal oversees every step of the election process. "Antonio Dourado de Rezende, a computer science professor at the University of Brasilia says, "The main flaws are not in the software, hardware, or data transmission systems, but in the human links that control the connections between the three--connections held together by the myth of infallibility and incorruptibility of those who run the system."
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UCF Research Team Achieves Milestone Toward More Powerful Computer Chips
University of Central Florida (10/11/06) Abney, Barb

A research team at the University of Central Florida has been very successful in developing extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) as a way to power the manufacturing of the next generation of computer chips. Team leader Martin Richardson, university trustee chair and UCF's Northrop Grumman professor of X-ray optics, showed off an EUV light source that was 30 times as powerful as any previous attempt, adequate for supplying power to the stepper machine used to reproduce intricate circuitry images onto computer chips. Currently, chips are built using longer-wavelength UV light sources, but Richardson's successful use of EUV light is a landmark achievement in the industry-wide effort to find the most economical power source for creating the computer chips of the future. Richardson collaborated with Powerlase, a UK-based company, who provided him with an incredibly strong Powerlase laser to use in conjunction with the specialized laser plasma source technology that his team has developed. The combination eliminates the neutral and charged particles associated with existing EUV plasma sources, which can harm the expensive optics of EUV steppers if they are allowed to stream freely away from the source. In order to keep up with Moore's law, Richardson says considerable changes must be made in the way chips are produced, claiming "we must use a light source with a wavelength short enough to allow the minimum feature size on a chip to go down to possibly as low as 12 nanometers."
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National LambdaRail President Explains Research Focus
HPC Wire (10/13/06) Vol. 15, No. 41, West, Tom

National LambdaRail (NLR) CEO Tom West answers questions about why NLR is so committed to the facilitation of network research and "big" science applications, first explaining that the development and evolution of the research and education (R&E) community has followed a cyclic pattern similar to that of major cities, starting with an overwhelming focus on research, in much the same way that cities' principal concentration has always been location. West writes that revolutionary innovations in packet networks and related technologies originated with university researchers in the late 1960s. When coupled with the implementation of the ARPAnet and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's funding, these advancements yielded the Internet's initial core technologies and seminal deployment. Since then, major networking advancements for the R&E sector as well as society in general have been fueled by research inventions and the researchers' specific requirements. The current needs of the R&E community and society at large demand a major jump in advanced networking on the basis of three factors: The need for increasingly manageable bandwidth for research into "big" or specialized applications; the need for breakable and researcher-controlled networks that include waves for network research; and the need for underlying owned fiber. Fulfilling these requirements is the mission of NLR, through the deployment of a national networking physical infrastructure based on owned and lit fiber connected with multiple Regional Optical Network (RON) physical infrastructure that is also RON-owned, West notes. "By focusing on facilitating Research! Research! Research!, NLR, in partnership with the RONs, continues the network innovation cycle and ensures that all the participants in the research and education community reap the benefits of big, fast, customizable networks," West concludes.
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Photon Computers a Bright Idea
The Gateway (10/12/06) McClure, Sean

Mark Summers, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student at the University of Alberta, has dedicated himself to making computers that use photons to process and transmit information a reality. The concept, known as an "all-optical" computer, would be capable of impressive speeds and would avoid the problem of overcrowded and overheated circuits. "The photon can be thought of as an ideal carrier and superior to the electron in terms of transmitting data," says Summers. "In optics, you can overcome the problems associated with heat dissipation, and you can fit a lot more information at particular wavelengths in the same amount of space." Photonic crystals, highly ordered structures made of silicon using a technique known as Glancing Angular Deposition (GALD), are Summers proposed material to carry out the same function as current transistors with photons. "The process grows isolated columns which look like a field of grass. We use complex compute-controlled substrate motion algorithms to nano-engineer a complicated three-dimensional architecture inside the columnar film," explains Summers. He says three stages are required in order to create photon computers: "the first stage will involve integrating optical interconnects between the various chips... increasing the bandwidth between the devices. The next stage is to integrate microelectronic circuits with microphotonic circuits, and the final stage will be everything optical, all the way to the human interface." Photonic crystals will probably be utilized first in frequency filters or light-directing devices, with the idea of an all-optical computer still existing only as a dream for now.
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Giant Screen, Bold Visions
Courier-Journal (10/11/06) Poynter, Chris

University of Kentucky computer engineers have created what they call "the world's highest resolution seamless display." Christopher Jaynes, an associate professor of computer science and a member of the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, and Stephen Webb developed the 27-feet-wide, 15-feet-high, and 60-million-pixel screen from off-the-shelf products for about $100,000, compared to the millions of dollars normally spent on such projects. Their creation, the result of eight years of research, was revealed at the IdeaFestival, a four-day event in downtown Louisville. The screen, which offers higher resolution than an IMAX screen, was used to show images from the Hubble Space Telescope, National Weather Service satellite images that show Katrina forming, and an inside look at the cockpit of a space shuttle. Henry Fuchs, a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina who is well versed in Jaynes' and Webb's work, refers to it as "a milestone" for projection systems, and acknowledges that it is "the largest, in terms of pixels." He says the screen is the equivalent of having 30 high definition TVs tied together. Jaynes believes the technology would be incredibly beneficial to scientists who currently need to travel the world to get to screens with proper resolution to view their work. "What we are trying to do," he says, "is allow that scientist to take a 15-projector display and put it in his lab and rending high-resolution content without having to get on a plane and fly to Tokyo."
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Five Questions With Alan Page
Dr. Dobb's Journal (10/10/06) Hunter, Michael

In an interview, Alan Page, a test architect on Microsoft's Engineering Excellence team, says he continues to be amazed by how much there is to know about software testing. Page says he started testing software about 15 years ago at a tech startup and joined Microsoft as a tester in 1995, adding that it took a few more years for him to really begin to understand what testing was all about. At Microsoft, Page teaches new and experienced testers, creates and updates courses, and works with test teams. Page says his testing philosophy is to have a big toolbox of techniques, and the experience to know when to use the right tool for a specific situation. At the same time, he does not think the approach of "breaking stuff" is important, when a tester can focus more on finding a problem and its root cause, and using the information to uncover other problems. Page says testers will need to continue to enlarge their toolbox because testing will not get any easier over the next five years. Developers are writing unit tests or using TDD and software engineering teams are performing defect detection and early prevention, which should help with the easy bugs. But testers will have to employ multiple testing strategies to find the more difficult bugs.
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Environmental Sensor Networks: A Revolution in the Earth System Science?
University of Southampton (ECS) (10/12/06) Hart, Jane K.; Martinez, Kirk

Environmental sensor networks (ESNs) will significantly augment environmental monitoring and broaden the array of methods for taking measurements or deploying sensors, and Jane Hart and Kirk Martinez of the University of Southampton expect ESNs to completely revolutionize earth system and environmental sciences. "We suggest that ESN's are the next step in the understanding of the environment, and a key component of environmental analysis," the authors write. An ESN consists of a sensor node array and a communications system that transmits the sensors' autonomously collected data to a server. A comprehensive understanding of the physical environment and implementation is necessary prior to the design and installation of an ESN. The sensor nodes should be low-power, low-maintenance, robust, pollution-free, and designed to blend into the environment to keep human interference to a minimum. The scale and function of ESNs are variable, depending on the environmental conditions and what role the network is supposed to play: Large scale single function networks (such as weather stations and the Global Seismographic Network) usually monitor large geographic areas, are big and expensive, and use large nodes that typically measure one or more variables; localized multifunction sensor networks tend to monitor a smaller area in more detail, typically with wireless ad-hoc systems; biosensor networks use sensors with biological sensing elements linked to a physical transducer in order to monitor environmental processes and develop proxies for immediate use; and heterogeneous sensor networks monitor the environment at varying scales using data from the other kinds of ESNs. Hart and Martinez believe heterogeneous networks represent the future of the ESN. Among the issues that are challenging the development of the ESN are power management, management and usability, standardization, data quality, security, data mining and harvesting, and new sensor development.
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Teenager Moves Video Icon Just By Imagination
Washington University (St. Louis) (10/09/06) Fitzpatrick, Tony

A 14-year-old boy was able to complete two levels of the two-dimensional 70s video game Space Invaders by simply looking at an object on a screen and imagining it moving. A team of neurologists and neurosurgeons and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis carried out the experiment meant to test the feasibility of biomedical devices that patients could use to control prosthetics simply by thinking about it. The study used a grid placed atop the boy's brain, an invasive technique that uses electrocorticographic activity directly from the surface of the brain. The Atari game console software was programmed to accept signals from the brain-machine interface. The grid was already in place because the boy is an epileptic, and scientists were hoping that when he had his next seizure they could find the part of the brain that causes it, and remove the section. This type of brain-machine interface is an alternative to non-invasive electroencephalographic systems that use electrodes attached to the scalp. The boy was first instructed to move his hands so brain function could be correlated with physical movement. He was then told to play the game by moving his hand and tongue, then to imagine performing these movements, but keep completely still. By looking at the cursor (spaceship) on the screen he was able to direct its movement. "He learned almost instantaneously," says Eric C. Leuthardt, MD, assistant professor of neurological surgery at the school of Medicine.
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Electronic Voting Machines May Not Eliminate Election Problems
Ottumwa Courier (10/09/06) Milner, Matt

Despite the uproar over a need for electronic voting machines after the 2000 Florida "hanging chad" controversy, many are doubting the reliability of these new machines. Some of them do not supply a print out of each vote, meaning should the machines fail, or fraud is suspected, there would be no paper trail to consult. With so much riding on these machines, the risk of a hacker or virus tampering with the election is a danger that must be taken seriously. E-voting expert Dr. Douglas Jones, associate professor in the University of Iowa's computer science department, says a tension exists between transparency represented by the paper ballots and the secret ballot process represented by the machines. When using machines, he says, only computer experts can tell if anything has gone wrong, but anyone can understand a paper ballot. Jones also points out that "far more frequent than fraud in elections are mistakes." Jones cites that fraud drops off significantly if only 10 percent of voters look over again their ballot after making their mark. Poll workers are not professionals, are generally inexperienced, and pose as a large a threat to a smooth election as any element. Jones's problem with voting machines is in the standards to which they are tested after fabrication and before distribution, which are no stricter than any other consumer good coming off an assembly line. Each state has different laws on printouts from voting machines or if paper ballots can be used at all. Iowa's laws, which provide paper ballots in the case that the machines malfunction "come as close to perfect as you can get," says Jones. What Jones really thinks is needed is for election officials to increase emphasis on research and development of voting machines.
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Leading the Blue Brain Project
sciencecareers.org (10/06/06) Pain, Elizabeth

A team of computational neuroscientists in Switzerland is currently building a digital 3D model of the human brain, in its every detail. The Blue Brain Project, which takes its name from the IBM Blue Gene Computer it uses, is a joint effort between IBM and the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. The project confronts the problem in computational neuroscience that, "theoreticians [who] do not have a profound knowledge of neuroscience build models of the brain," says Henry Markram, founder of the Brain Mind Institute. The project's leader is Max Schurmann, a German physicist with a background in computer engineering and experience building hardware neural models, which Markram calls "perhaps the most challenging task possible in computational neuroscience." Schurmann says, "The brain is the computer in the world that does the most fabulous things. Finding how computing can be done differently will change our technological environment." He chose to work with those developing hardware-implemented neural networks, because "they are physicists who develop microchips" containing analog integrated circuits, rather than less intricate digital microchips. By incorporating experimental neuroscience data into complicated computer simulations, the team is better able to study the diverse array of cells, which a model can not provide. The team has "built and simulated 10,000 compartmental neurons with over 30 million dynamic synapses and are fine tuning the biological parameters. This is several orders of magnitude larger and more detailed than any previous attempt," says Schurmann. The team must now carry out the calibration phases, making sure every piece of the simulation is backed up by experimental data.
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Princeton Establishes Leading Research Computing Facility
Princeton University (10/02/06) Cliatt, Cass

Three supercomputers have been brought together in a single research facility, asserting Princeton University's place at the top of university-based research. The need for such a facility has been known for some time: "The community of scientists and engineers at Princeton whose research and teaching depends on high-speed computing is very rapidly growing," says Jeremiah Ostriker, director of Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering, and former provost from 1995-2001. He estimates that the total number of faculty requiring this technology doubles every three years, and includes those who were not heavily involved in computing in the past. "Each of the three high-performance machines...has a different performance profile suitable for handling different kinds of computational tasks. Together these three machines provide Princeton faculty a world-class computational research environment," says Betty Leydon, Princeton's VP for information technology and chief information officer. The computers include the Dell cluster known as Della, which has 512 processors capable of very high speeds; an IBM Blue Gene brand machine known as Orangena, which has 2,048 processors, and the SGI Altix computer, Hecate, which has 64 processors with large memory capabilities. "There are some scientific models which can't be broken down in small enough pieces for Orangena, and there are some kinds of problems that can't be broken down at all, and the entire problem needs to fit into one big piece of memory, which is what the Hecate is good for," says Curt Hillegas, manager of computational science and engineering support in the Office of Information Technology academic affairs department. Princeton says its machines can handle a vast array of science and engineering systems, and refers to them as "three legs of a stool," upon which the research needs of the entire facility may rest.
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In the Beginning Was the Word
Economist Technology Quarterly (09/06) Vol. 380, No. 8496, P. 10

As text-to-speech synthesis technology improves, so does the number of ways it can be put to use. A voice is recorded and the words are chopped up and reconfigured by a computer. The larger the chunks that are put together, the more natural the voice sounds, and vice versa. However, smaller pieces, sounds such as "eh" or "ar," known as phonemes, require less storage space, and are crucial in the development of text-to-speech technology. SVOX, a Swiss company, is developing algorithms to gauge pitch, rhythm, and phrasing in order to perfect the context of the voice created at a lower cost than the current $100,000 price tag. Dr. Jan van Santen of Oregon Health & Science University is working on a system that is meant to take into account neighboring phonemes, and actually be able to change the pronunciation of phonemes to avoid a robotic sound. This technique would require a relatively minute sample of the actual voice being mimicked. A simpler and easier technique known as "voice transformation" uses a synthetic voice model that can have any voice placed onto it, like a costume. The use for such technology spans from making characters in a video game say what a player wants them to, to allowing people, who have a medical condition that makes speech difficult or impossible, to speak again in real time, using earlier voice samples. Other uses include in-car navigation systems that could pronounce intricate names of places and streets, phones that can read text messages aloud, and even as one researcher at IBM imagines, having a personal Internet interface in your ear.
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