Citing Problems, U.S. Bars Lab From Testing Electronic
Voting
New York Times (01/04/07) P. A1; Drew, Christopher; Urbina, Ian
Inadequate inspections of voting machines were highlighted by the Election
Assistance Commission's (EAC) temporary ban on Ciber's testing of
electronic voting systems following the discovery that the Colorado lab was
not complying with quality-control procedures and was unable to document
that it was performing all the necessary tests, which are considered
imperative to bolstering confidence in the results. Criticism was also
leveled against Ciber concerning its plan to test new voting machines for
New York State by Nystec analysts, who determined that Ciber failed to
specify any procedures or testing methods for the bulk of the requirements,
and also did not elaborate on how Ciber would seek bugs in the computer
code or test defenses against hacking. "What's scary is that we've been
using systems in elections that Ciber had certified, and this calls into
question those systems that they tested," noted Johns Hopkins University
computer science professor Aviel Rubin. Ciber is the leading tester of
U.S. voting machine software, and the company insisted that it is
correcting its problems and will soon obtain EAC certification. It is only
recently that the labs testing voting hardware and software became subject
to federal oversight. The EAC has lacked a significant budget and it only
completed creating the oversight program in December. There will be three
EAC staffers and eight part-time technicians tasked with passing test plans
for each system and checking the results, but Rubin feels it would be
better if the labs were required to employ teams of hackers to find
software vulnerabilities. For information about ACM's e-voting activities,
visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm
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Immigrants Big in Tech Startups
Associated Press (01/04/06) Konrad, Rachel
One in four U.S. technology and engineering companies launched between
1995 and 2005 had at least one senior executive of foreign birth, according
to a new Duke University study. These companies generated $52 billion in
sales in 2005 and employed 450,000 workers. Such a contribution shows the
importance of not only attracting highly-skilled foreign workers to the
U.S., but encouraging them to stay. "If these entrepreneurs leave, we're
really denting our intellectual-property creation," says Vivek Wadhwa, the
Duke project's Delhi-born lead researcher. Duke University School of
Information Dean AnnaLee Saxenian estimates that immigrants started about
52 percent of Silicon Valley tech companies in 2005, up from 25 percent in
1999. "The advantage of entrepreneurs is that they're generally creating
new opportunities and new wealth that didn't even exist before them,"
Saxenian says. Foreigners were most likely to start businesses in the
semiconductor, communications, and software sectors, and least likely to
start defense businesses. Indians led all other nationalities in business
creation. Of 7,300 U.S. tech companies founded by immigrants, 26 percent
have a CEO, president, or head researcher who is Indian. Non-citizen
foreign inventors residing in the U.S. made up 24 percent of the patents
filed last year, up from 7.3 percent in 1998. Wadhwa says these inventors
should be citizens. He says, "We're giving away the keys to the kingdom.
This is a big, big deal once you figure out what this means for [our]
competitiveness."
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As Democrats Take Control of Congress, a New H-1B Fight
Looms
Computerworld (01/04/07) Thibodeau, Patrick
The current 65,000 limit on H-1B visas given out each year is causing
businesses to rush to apply for them while Congress argues over their
future. Cozen O'Connor immigration practice leader Elena Park has told her
clients to act fast if they hope to hire H-1B holders. Park says, "The
fact of the matter is there is an H-1B blackout," since the 65,000-visa cap
was reached in a record-breaking time of two months last year, while the
20,000 H-1Bs offered to graduate student were gone in four months. The
blackout will come to and end in April, when applications will be accepted
for H-1Bs that will be issued October 2007. Many supporters of raising the
H-1B cap limit believe the new Congress will pass pro-visa measures.
However, Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) has said, "I do not support guest worker
programs. I do not believe the myth of the tech worker shortage."
Democrats are opposed to offshoring, especially of call centers, as a
proposed bill sought to discourage the practice. Some H-1B opponents, who
seek an overhaul of the program, say the visas are a means for exploiting
foreign workers. The Department of Labor's only ability to ensure wages
for H-1B holders is to search for errors and omissions in the prevailing
wage data provided by employers in their labor conditions applications
(LCA). A June Government Accountability Office report found that 3,229
applications from companies employing H-1B holders showed they were paying
these employees less than the prevailing wage for doing the same work as
Americans, notes Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.).
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Watch & Learn
Baltimore Sun (01/05/07) P. 1D; Roylance, Frank D.
The University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering and
others are developing behavior recognition software that's being used to
apprehend criminals and look for terrorist activity. Rama Chellappa, a
University of Maryland professor of electrical and computer engineering and
director of UM's Center for Automation Research, developed computer
programs using algorithms that transform digital video into mathematical
patterns; these patterns can then be analyzed by software that looks for
suspicious activity. The software can determine whether or not an
individual is carrying anything, for example. Data from dozens of cameras
can be analyzed by the software; 18 behaviors can trigger the software's
attention, such as people moving very fast or standing around, cars that
abruptly stop or speed up, crowds that form or break up, objects left
unattended, and people who fall down. When an individual is identified as
a threat, a yellow box appears around him on the computer screen.
Chellappa has also created systems that can recognize an individual's gait
as a means of identifying and remembering them, as well as noting changes
in their gait. Gait recognition could also be used to help surgery
patients in rehab, or people with disabilities, but recent pressure and
funding from DARPA has caused the research to focus on security. The
challenge facing behavior recognition software is how to track a person as
they move between non-overlapping cameras, but Honeywell's Automation and
Control Solutions chief technical officer Dan Sheflin says, "I think we're
only a year or two away from having it figured out." Chellappa explains
that discerning normal actions from the abnormal could lead to many
innocent people being stopped, and that for the system to interest the
public, false positives must be cut down on.
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New Directions in Multilingual Information Access
Multilingual Search (01/04/07)
The recent SIGIR FORUM acknowledged that translingual information
retrieval (TLIR) systems are not progressing as planned. In his keynote
address, Clairvoyance Corporation CEO David A. Evans said, "Despite the
remarkable success of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) and
translingual information retrieval (TLIR) systems to perform on a par with
monolingual IR systems in research and evaluation contexts, there has been
relatively little commercial development (or success) of TLIR systems and
applications. This is due, in part, to lack of demand in the marketplace,
but also, in perhaps greater measure, to the special requirements that may
be associated with TLIR applications--requirements that are not typically
addressed (or assessed) in our research evaluations." In his speech, Evans
said the market for multilingual globalization support is "not there yet,"
in part because the quality and scope of machine translation is poor and
that CLIR demand is low. He said that patience, or a reshaping of goals,
is needed by the field, and that CLIR may need to work with "solutions,"
meaning it may have to be used in systems that use CLIR capabilities as a
means to their own ends. From discussions occurring between participants
and workshops held at the forum, the following themes emerged: Real world
use cases must be identified, and user behavior must be focused on and
evaluated; the relationship between cross-language retrieval, machine
translation, and multilingual summarization must be studied; the
possibility of moving studies to mixed or "new" media must be explored; and
that digital content must be designed with access in mind.
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Humanoid Avatar Plays a Competitive Game of Table
Tennis
PhysOrg.com (01/04/07) Zyga, Lisa
Scientists from Germany's Chemnitz University of Technology have developed
an immersive ping-pong simulation that can respond to ball speeds up to 15
meters per second using standard hardware components. The atmosphere
created was so realistic that some users tried to place their paddle on the
virtual table after the game. "All we need is a standard PC with an
up-to-date graphics card which allows us to drive two LCD beamers," says
Guido Brunnett, one of the scientists who worked on the project. "In front
of the beamers, polarization filters are mounted. The beamers project from
behind onto a projection wall made of acryl glass." The player stands
before the projection wall and the player's polarization glasses and paddle
serve as tracking targets; four cameras on the sides of the projection wall
record the objects' movement and send the data to the simulation software.
While making the avatar move perfectly in synch with the human it
represents was difficult, correction algorithms were developed that allowed
the program to use previous frames to predict the movement of the paddle
and glasses; only the location and orientation of the paddle as it made
contact with the ball had to be known precisely. The skill of the opponent
avatar can be adjusted by limiting or expanding the area where it can hit
the ball, changing the speed or height of its shots, or by introducing
random noise or fatigue as factors. Brunnett says that "any applications
that involve high speed interaction between a user and virtual objects
could use this type of technology." He says ping-pong is an ideal sport
for the system, since others would introduce haptic feedback problems, such
as how to "give a human the impression of really catching a virtual
ball."
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Open-Source Personal Tracking System Gets First
Test
IDG News Service (01/02/07) Gohring, Nancy
The developers of OpenBeacon say the open-source wireless tracking system
is an attempt to address some of the limitations of existing commercial
tracking technology. The OpenBeacon team had a crowd-control solution for
millions of Muslim pilgrims to Mecca in mind in developing the technology,
which was on display at last week's Chaos Communications Congress in
Berlin. Though radio-frequency identification technology requires tags to
pass through a specific spot, Wi-Fi systems present cost and power
consumption issues. The tracking devices that OpenBeacon relies on are
designed to transmit and then sleep, to ease demands on battery life, which
is expected to last for several months. Meanwhile, OpenBeacon co-creator
Milosch Meriac says mesh protocols will allow the devices to communicate
with each other, rather than just a central base station. At the four-day
event, attendees who bought 900 tags were able to use touch-screen monitors
to see the whereabouts of other participating volunteers, view their
profiles, and even update them. "We wanted to make this analysis
transparent so that people are more aware of what data they're willing to
give away," says Meriac.
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Wikipedia Links Used to Build Smart Reading Lists
New Scientist (01/02/07) Knight, Will
A Ph.D. student in physics at Harvard University has developed software
that is designed to help students and other users of Wikipedia quickly find
more information about a subject. The software would find additional
articles that are relevant to the subject in the free online encyclopedia,
and suggest the order in which they should be read. In developing the
software, Alexander Wissner-Gross learned much from an algorithm that
analyzes the popularity of pages and the number of other pages that are
linked to them, and another algorithm that studies the number of links
between articles. Wissner-Gross believes researchers will embrace software
that would provide them with selected reading material for gaining a quick
overview of a subject, and Cornell University information networks
specialist Jon Kleinberg is optimistic about the new tool's approach to the
surge in information content, adding that Wikipedia's fairly unstructured
state is similar to the early Web. "Given this, it's natural to adapt
analysis techniques that have worked well for Web content," he says.
Kleinberg also sees the potential of delivering reading material based on
the identity of Wikipedia editors. "In this way, one can try making
'Amazon-style' recommendations, like 'people who edited this page also
edited this,'" explains Kleinberg.
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Report: Specialized Skill Shortages to Swell IT
Salaries
eWeek (01/03/07) Rothberg, Deborah
A new report by Yoh sees specialized technology skills being in such a
demand in 2007 that IT salaries will climb this year. Yoh says technology
service providers and device manufacturers in the hardware space, and
clinical researchers and R&D developers of pharmaceutical, medical device,
and biotech-related projects will be the most active in looking for
highly-skilled professionals with a certain level of domain and industry
experience. For example, clinical research associates, biostaticians,
firmware, and hardware engineers are likely to benefit the most from demand
in the R&D space, while Business Objects, Java, MS developers, SAS
programmers, and systems architects will be the focus in software
development. Changes by ERP vendors has helped generate a demand for
Oracle and SAP consultants and veteran database administrators. Yoh says
that Silicon Valley will focus more on firmware engineers, ASIC design
engineers, and embedded engineers, while Seattle will concentrate on
software developer engineers, hardware/firmware engineers, and clinical
data managers. "The technology market continues to grow, which keeps
pushing wages up," says Yoh's Jim Lanzalotto. "Hiring managers are
continuing to look for specialized talent to help them keep up with
maturing technology."
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Gettys, Set, Go, for OPLC in 07
Computerworld Australia (01/03/07) Bingemann, Mitchell
Vice President of Software for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project Jim
Gettys explains in an interview that his focus is on the project's general
software, outside of the educational software and content. The goal of the
OLPC project is to make information and the Internet accessible to the
world's impoverished children by giving them ultracheap portable PCs.
Gettys says two of the major obstacles the project faces are sunlight
readability and power supply, noting that power may be non-existent or
unreliable at home and at school; power availability can be greatly limited
if the laptop comes with a generator, while the fact that many children are
taught out of doors means the machine must have a display that is readable
in direct sunlight. Ruggedness is another key issue Gettys cites, which is
why the designers opted for flash memory and membrane keyboards. Among the
laptop's innovations mentioned by Gettys is the low-power display, which
offers reduced manufacturing costs in addition to sunlight readability, and
low power consumption married to the ability to function in multiple usage
modes and run most contemporary software. "From the base up, our system is
aimed at enabling collaborative applications: Browsing the Web together,
chat, playing music together, and applications where kids learn by doing,"
Gettys says. He notes that the laptop's fundamental technologies are those
of free, open-source software systems, and he says the applications will
concentrate on both static and interactive education. Gettys identifies
the project's most formidable challenge as "Understanding how most of the
world actually lives and designing a system to work in that environment, in
contrast to how the first world lives."
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IT Grads Top Jobless League Table
silicon.com (01/03/07) McCue, Andy
The Higher Education Careers Services Unit (HECSU) says the number of IT
graduates from U.K. universities who found jobs in the industry has risen
for the third straight year. HECSU views the development as a sign that
the sector is recovering and expanding. According to new data in HECSU's
annual Destinations of Leavers From Higher Education survey, nearly half of
the 12,565 IT students who graduated in the summer of 2005, or 42.4
percent, secured IT jobs. Also, other IT graduates (9.6 percent) took
private and public sector general management positions, and some (6.3
percent) became business and financial professionals. The unemployment
rate of IT graduates was 10.3 percent, compared with 6.2 percent for all
U.K. graduates. The new IT workers had an average salary of about $41,000,
compared with the average graduate salary of about $35,000. HECSU believes
there will not be enough new workers for the IT industry in the immediate
future because the number of students pursuing computer science degrees
over the past five years has fallen by 50 percent.
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Ensuring You Find What You Seek
The Hindu (01/04/07) Parthasarathy, Anand
Making sure users find exactly what they are looking for on the Internet
is in every search engine's best interest, but their ability to do still
needs improvement. "We have to improve the experience," says Yahoo
Research global head Prabhakar Raghavan, a consulting professor of computer
science at Stanford University. "People are not interested in the
mechanics of search--they just want to get things done ... The Web and
Internet are utilities now. Looking at Internet through the lens of Search
is too limiting... we need to invent a new science which will tell us how
people interact with other people, using the Net." Yahoo is currently
hiring social scientists, psychologists, and micro-economists, and using
Auction Theory and Game Theory to address these concerns. While Google's
search engine is totally based on computers, Yahoo also uses ontologists,
specialists in classification and categorization. Another search engine,
created by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, will be released soon and will
utilize the same user-dependent technology as Wikipedia. Yahoo is
involving India in its research in the form of a quarterly lecture series
called "Big Thinkers India." The lectures will be titled "Community
Systems: The World Online," "Web Search and Online Communities," "Price
models," and "Web mining."
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Cornell University Awarded NSF Broadening Participation
in Computing Grant
Cornell News (12/14/06) Cima, Laura
A project aimed at developing ways to attract women and underrepresented
minorities to computing fields will be undertaken by Cornell University
researchers, thanks to a $600,000 NSF grant. The project, Worlds for
Information Technology and Services (WITS), is part of the NSF Broadening
Participation in Computing program (BPC). Associate dean for undergraduate
programs in Engineering and computer science Dr. David Gries, who will
co-lead the project, says the "grant will help us to not only attract
Cornell students into computing but will also serve to build awareness of
and excitement for computing in secondary schools." Service learning,
which has been found to appeal to women and underrepresented minorities,
will be taught in "Computing in Context," a class designed to contextualize
learning and perform community enhancement. The WITS project will also
develop CYCentr/CYFair, in which Computing in Context students act as
mentors for middle school students. CYCentr will build on the earlier CTC
SciCentr/SciFair outreach program, which utilized virtual online worlds to
educate middle school students. CYFair will concentrate on computing and
information science and building fundamental computing skills in the middle
school students. The program model developed must be scalable and
adaptable to different schools and situations, and it will be tested
simultaneously at Penn State, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the San
Diego Supercomputing Center.
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Energy Star Launches Server Initiative
Government Computer News (12/29/06) Jackson, Joab
The EPA has six months to study the issue of building more
energy-efficient servers and present its findings to Congress. The report
is required under legislation President Bush recently signed into law that
mandates the promotion of energy-efficient servers in the country. The
EPA's Energy Star program will oversee the initiative, and program manager
Andrew Fanara recently informed server component and system manufacturers
about its efforts in a letter. "In the coming months, EPA will conduct an
analysis to determine whether such a specification for servers is viable
given current market dynamics, the availability and performance of
energy-efficient designs, and the potential energy savings," Fanara wrote.
The Energy Star program's focus on servers comes at a time when concerns
about data center power consumption and potential power shortages are on
the rise, due to the anticipated power demands of new servers in the
immediate future. Over the past year, industry officials have discussed a
specification for servers with program officials.
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Predicting the Top Security Threats for 2007
TechNewsWorld (12/30/06) LeClaire, Jennifer
McAfee Avert Labs expects identity theft and other efforts by malicious
programmers to be on the rise in 2007. McAfee says that of the 217,000
known security threats, the leading security concerns for this year will be
password-stealing sites with fake sign-in pages resembling well known
services, adware, mobile phone attacks, and the use of video files to
infect users with malware. Due to the computer's increasing role in
everyday life, "there is a huge potential for monetary gains by malware
writers," said Jeff Green of McAfee Avert Labs. He adds that increasingly
sophisticated malicious methods make it more difficult for the average user
to evaluate threats. IM attacks, in the form of spam over IM (SPIM), are
predicted to rise, as are instances of hackers posing as familiar IM
identities. Meanwhile, botnets will benefit from peer to peer
architecture, encryption, and custom packing, and although botnets will be
used to attack more common multimedia programs, the central control points
of botnets will be far more difficult to find. "Money mules" are expected
to play a large role in the year's botnet scams by physically transporting
stolen goods, allowing cyberthieves to get around shipping regulations.
The openness being driven by "Web 2.0" puts security at risk, as unfiltered
user input and "client/server communication that takes place behind the
scenes without end user interaction" can create vulnerabilities, says
security expert Michael Sutton. He adds that programmers often ignore
threats because no interaction is needed by the end user, but "attackers
can ... intercept this communication and use it to attack the server."
Phishing attacks have also been on the rise lately, and are expected to
exploit Web programs.
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Cyberinfrastructure: the Second Revolution
Chronicle of Higher Education (01/05/07) Vol. 53, No. 18, P. B5; Bement,
Arden L.
National Science Foundation director Arden Bement believes we are on the
cusp of a second IT revolution "that may well usher in a new technological
age that will dwarf, in sheer transformational scope and power, anything we
have yet experienced in the current information age." He identifies the
phenomenon of cyberinfrastructure, which encompasses the generation,
dissemination, conservation, and application of knowledge, as the driver of
this revolution. Cyberinfrastructure's core components are virtual
distributed-knowledge communities that span institutions and the world, and
Bement says the key requirements for the creation and utilization of
cyberinfrastructure will be learning and workforce development efforts.
Bement says, "The power of cyberinfrastructure to enhance education and
provide new learning opportunities is such an expansive and beneficial
feature that we must be sure to create the conditions for synergy between
research and education from the outset," which means that these strategies
must be central to the cyberinfrastructure enterprise. Bement thinks the
U.S. higher-education community can take a vanguard position in the second
IT revolution by adopting the cyberinfrastructure vision, and says it would
serve the community well with a swift movement toward e-learning. He
points out that the NSF's cyberinfrastructure initiative only scratches the
surface, and expansive collaboration among individuals across all fields
and educational institutions is necessary to the evolution of knowledge
communities. Bement goes so far as to reason that cyberinfrastructure
leadership could become the key factor in gauging the prominence in higher
education among countries, which in turns feeds into the ever-increasing
value of a nation's "intangible assets" such as patents, skilled employees,
and proficiency. He sees a connection between America's continued global
economic competitiveness, fueled by innovation, and its assumption of a
leadership position in cyberinfrastructure.
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The Hottest Skills for 2007
Computerworld (01/01/07) McAdams, Jennifer
Among the skills that will be most sought after by CIOs in 2007 are
programming/application development, project management, IT-business
analysis, security, and help desk/technical support, according to
Computerworld's latest quarterly Vital Signs survey; together these skills
form the epitome of the "Renaissance" IT professional. Establishing
priorities and taking action are abilities highly desired in employees by
major corporations this year. Dan Twing with DMA suggests that corporate
leaders will start seeking midlevel managers and other higher-ups with
technical skills in areas that include Cobit, the Six Sigma quality
assurance framework, Capability Maturity Model Integration processes, and
IT Infrastructure Library best practices. PrintForLess.com CEO Andrew
Field believes the best training ground for project managers is the real
world rather than the classroom: "Lead a project team and get something
like that on your resume," he recommends. Security, risk management, and
compliance specialists are all the rage thanks to high-profile security
breaches and regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and Dice CEO Scott Melland
maintains that an active government security clearance will put people in
good stead with employers. DHL Express IT VP Jim Niemann cites the need
for critical thinking. Sapphire's Wendy Kemp notes that there is regular
turnover in help desk/technical support positions as employees advance,
though Sapphire's William Howe maintains that there has been a lessening of
demand due to companies deciding to outsource certain support jobs; on the
other hand, Niemann mentions that some companies are keeping
help-desk/support in-house because they involve direct staffer-customer
interaction. Eisner & Lubin IT director Scott Dare expects hiring managers
will recruit people more selectively in 2007, because "there are still more
technically qualified job seekers than there are jobs."
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Increasing MOM Flexibility With Portable Rule
Bases
Internet Computing (12/06) Vol. 10, No. 6, P. 26; Curry, Edward
Edward Curry of the National University of Ireland suggests that the
flexibility of message-oriented middleware (MOM) deployments can be
extended via content-based routing (CBR), and he presents a decentralized
CBR approach that keeps deployments' scalability, maintainability, and
robustness at maximum through the use of a portable rule base. Curry
writes that in a decentralized scenario, the centralized rule base is
shared with message participants, allowing programs to deliver their
messages directly to applicable destinations and keeping maintenance to a
minimum. Deployment requires each company to express its rule base in a
portable manner and set up a mechanism for sharing the rule base among
participants. The author notes that these parameters are fulfilled by the
MOM framework Generic Self-Management for Message-Oriented Middleware
(Gismo), which he designed. In a Gismo metalevel architecture, information
is exchanged by MOM clients and providers through the Open Metalevel
Interaction Protocol (OMIP). The protocol features a destination
metamodel, which tracks the existence and configuration of destinations
within the MOM by focusing on core data such as the destination's ID, name,
type, and routing condition. The underlying MOM provider is told by Gismo
to update itself when the metamodel is revised. "By facilitating the
coordination of self-managing messaging systems, Gismo allows decentralized
CBR systems to regulate themselves, providing another piece in the puzzle
of a balanced and flexible MOM solution," Curry writes. "Future
opportunities include using Gismo to coordinate MOM self-management
techniques, thus increasing the flexibility of messaging solutions."
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