Daylight Sought for Data Mining
Washington Post (01/11/07) P. D3; Nakashima, Ellen; Klein, Alec
A Senate bill introduced on Jan. 10 would require that government agencies
inform Congress about government data-mining efforts intended to "discover
predictive or anomalous patterns indicating criminal or terrorist
activity." Similar bills in recent years were not successful in the
Republican-controlled Congress, but new Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman
Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who co-sponsored the bill introduced by Sens.
Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and John E. Sununu (R-N.H.), has said that this
Congress will assume an aggressive stance in the oversight of surveillance
and data-mining programs. Leahy said, "The American people have neither
the assurance that these massive data banks will make us safer, nor the
confidence that their privacy rights will be protected." According to
Leahy, over 52 federal agencies utilize data-mining, totaling 199 programs
in all, although this number does not include NSA programs, since the
agency will not reveal such information. Claiming that 300,000 names
appear on the government's terrorist watchlist, including infants and
members of Congress, Leahy said, "We also need to understand that a mistake
in a government database could cost a person his or her job, sacrifice
their liberty, and wreak havoc on their life and reputation." Predictive
data-mining is becoming more popular, although Cato Institute director of
information policy studies Jim Harper says the technique is not effective
in finding terrorists, since there are not enough established "terrorist
patterns" to build a model around. Privacy advocacy groups agree that
data-mining has shown little evidence of its effectiveness, but the Center
for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy claims that while the
system is not perfect, properly conducted oversight can make the necessary
adjustments.
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The Ever More Diversified Face of IT
eWeek (01/11/07) Rothberg, Deborah
While the field of IT becomes more diverse, there is significant inequity
between different minority groups. An Information Technology Association
of America (ITAA) study of the American IT workforce in 2002 shows that
Asian-Americans make up 11.8 percent, African-Americans 8.2 percent,
Hispanic-Americans 6.3 percent, and Native Americans 0.6 percent. The
trend toward IT diversity began in the 1990s when a shortage of skilled
American IT workers forced companies to look overseas, and many of those
who immigrated at the time still live and work in the U.S. Universities,
such as DeVry University in Southern California, are witnessing an
ever-growing percentage of minority students. Electronic Recruiting
Exchange editor-in-chief Todd Raphael says opportunities for a more diverse
IT workforce are growing in part because demand for IT workers is strong,
particularly in Silicon Valley and the California desert and the
Washington, D.C. area. He says, "There are high percentages of minorities
working in government IT, on both the local and federal levels, and in the
nonprofit sector, including universities." Raphael says new niches opening
up, such as staffing and recruiting, allow minorities to "make a name for
themselves." Still, many in the field, including Raphael, say that women,
blacks, and Hispanics are still considerably lacking in IT. Many blame the
U.S. education system, arguing that math and science do not receive a high
enough priority, but perhaps employers can provide a better solution,
through internships and other ways of getting the attention of minority
students. Despite women graduating with math and science degrees at a
faster pace than ever, the continued lack of women in IT confuses many.
Susan Merritt, Dean of Pace University's Ivan G. Seidenberg School of
Computer Science and Information Systems, says, "There is a lot of concern
over lack of minorities in IT. The numbers--especially women--are not
representative of the population at large. Though preliminary looks at
this year's enrollments of women show some improvement, I think the problem
of a lack of diversity continues."
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House Seat Hangs by a Byte
Wired News (01/11/07) Zetter, Kim
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) has already taken his seat in Congress, but
the election that put him there is still being contested due to a possible
e-voting software failure. Buchanan won by less than 400 votes, but 18,000
ballots cast in the Sarasota County district contained no vote for his
particular race, a fact that has prompted his opponent Christine Jennings
to challenge the results. Her appeal has led to a debate over whether or
not e-voting machine source code can be legally examined. "The source code
is available, yet there is no easy and ready way to get access to it or for
someone to go in and look at the machine and challenge them," says Matt
Zimmerman, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has
allied with Jennings in her appeal of the election through a separate
lawsuit representing voters. Jennings campaign spokesman David Kochman
says, "Any review of the voting system without looking at [the source code]
isn't really getting to the full truth about what happened in the
election." A federal judge denied Jennings' request to view the code,
based upon claims by the manufacturer Election Systems & Software (ES&S)
that the code was a trade secret; the case is currently being heard by an
appeals court. Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Calif.) wrote a letter
to the appeals court implying that unless Florida makes all the evidence
available, the House will get involved. Kochman claims that evidence
exists suggesting that the specific times machines were setup correlates
with whether or not they encountered problems, meaning a look at the inner
workings of the system would uncover whether the problem was due to
calibration problems, improper software loading, or something else.
Experts say Jennings could have won the election by 3,000 votes based on
analysis of the 18,000 votes not counted.
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Survey: Offshoring Does Not Cost Developer Jobs
InfoWorld (01/11/07) Krill, Paul
Offshoring of software development is not taking jobs away from Americans,
rather it is allowing software companies to make up for shortages in the
U.S. IT workforce, concludes a Software & Information Industry Association
(SIIA) survey of 114 American software companies last year. SIIA executive
director David Thomas said offshoring "was used almost entirely as a form
of expansion, not as a replacement." About half of survey respondents said
that a lack of both American engineers and H-1B visa availability forced
them to contract work to offshore companies, while a third operated an
offshore subsidiary or captive. Of the companies surveyed, 68 had offshore
operations and 46 did not. Fifty-seven percent of respondents who had
offshore operations said their amount of offshoring had increased in the
past 18 months, and many planned for it to continue growing. Growth was
the most commonly cited reason for offshoring, named by 84 percent of
respondents, while increasing speed to market and productivity were the
next common reasons. Two-thirds of respondents said the work is better on
average than that of domestic staff and 25 percent calling the work
excellent or outstanding. Fears of poor quality, loss of control, loss of
intellectual property, or a negative impact on the morale of domestic staff
were cited as reasons not to use offshoring.
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Computer Security: Adapt or Die
Computerworld (01/08/07) Anthes, Gary
Intel researchers are developing adaptive and resilient computing security
technology that enables computers to communicate with each other concerning
network activity in order to find a way to stay ahead of network attackers.
Older security applications that rely on signatures are no longer a
sufficient means of protection, as they cannot be updated as fast as new
malicious content can be released. BT research engineer Robert
Ghanea-Hercock says, "For cutting-edge day-to-day protection, you�ll have
to have adaptive things that monitor what�s happening on the network in
real time." "Anomaly detectors" at local nodes are being developed by
Intel to monitor for evidence of worms, such as a sudden increase in
activity. If such an indicator is noticed, a computer will "discuss" the
probability that the network is under attack with other machines, and if
enough machines on the network agree on the attack, defensive measures
would be taken. Recent changes to malware has slowed it down, allowing it
to slip past traditional intrusion detectors that monitor for anomalous
activity. Florida Institute of Technology computer science professor
Richard Ford says high-profile, massive attacks are being replaced by more
secretive, "high value" exploits. He says, "That dramatically changes the
threat profile." The Intel prototype, called Distributed Detection and
Interference (DDI), is based on the idea that one computer noticing an
increase in connections could mean a simple fluctuation, but 50 computers
noticing even a slight increase in traffic most likely indicates an attack.
As adaptive security makes its way into the commercial world, the biggest
threat to the technology's success are false positives, which can cause
inconvenience or even lead users to ignore actual threats.
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Vision Research Yields Improved Driving Experience
EE Times (01/10/07) Walko, John
University of California, San Diego computer vision researchers have
developed algorithms for improving human activity recognition systems that
uses multiple cameras operating at different wavelengths and at different
perspectives. UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering professor of electrical
and computer engineering Mohan Trivedi says the systems "are
multi-perspective and multimodal ... The objective is to observe and
understand human movements and activities in a robust manner, and the
results have been very encouraging." One of the team's projects, supported
by Volkswagen, involves a method for observing the actions of the driver of
a car that could lead to innovative intelligent assistance capabilities.
Experiments have focused on head, arm, torso, and leg movement. One of the
biggest challenges facing this project is dealing with varying levels of
light, but by using four cameras, infrared and color, at different
perspectives, the researchers achieved robust, real time, and reliable
results. The second project the team undertook aimed to develop new ways
of reaching a correspondence between objects simultaneously viewed by a
stereo head that contains one thermal infrared eye and one color eye.
Current algorithms are ineffective with data that has multiple objects and
multiple depths that are significant relative to their distance from the
camera, but the new algorithm the team developed is an improvement, most
importantly in close-range surveillance and pedestrian detection.
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Record-Breaking Speed for Flexible Silicon
Technology Review (01/11/07) Greene, Kate
University of Wisconsin researchers have constructed ultrathin silicon
transistors capable of speeds over 50 times faster than past
flexible-silicon devices, demonstrating that the levels of performance once
thought only possible on rigid silicon chips can be achieved with flexible
electronics. This technology could enable flexible high-end electronics
that could be used for everything from communications to computers. The
transistors created by the UW researchers are made from single-crystal
silicon, in which electrons simply move faster than previously used organic
polymers or amorphous, noncrystalline silicon. UW professor of electrical
engineering and lead researcher on the project Jack Ma says the work is
basically a continuation of previous efforts by University of Illinois
researchers, who showed that nanometer-thin films of single-crystal silicon
transistors could be built and moved to flexible substrates. Ma realized
that high electron speed alone does not mean high device speed; resistivity
of the contact connection is crucial. HRL Laboratories researcher Ed Croke
says the researchers developed a "clever way of mounting the circuit on a
flexible substrate without having to deal with high temperatures ... [by
doing] all their processing before they undercut the silicon" and attached
it to the plastic substrate. Ma's team reported transistor speeds as high
as 7.8 Ghz, and while these transistors would need to be a lot faster for
use in computers, they are fast enough for use antennas that send and
receive signals ranging from radar to Wi-Fi.
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How to Leak a Secret and Not Get Caught
New Scientist (01/12/07) Marks, Paul
Open-source software engineers and political activists are believed to be
behind a new online service that will allow anonymous users to post
documents about the unethical actions of companies and governments without
being traced. WikiLeaks will use the anonymizing protocol Tor (The Onion
Router) to allow a network of servers to use cryptography to cover the
tracks of data packets. The software the unidentified participants are
testing is similar to the open-source software that powers Wikipedia.
"Imagine a large room jammed full of people in which many of them are
passing around envelopes," cryptographer Bruce Schneier says of Tor. "How
would you know where any of them started?" The group will leave it up to
site users to scrutinize and comment on any posted information to determine
its validity. There are some doubts about the protection Tor offers,
considering it has been breached by cryptographers in the past. Tor has
been improved, but there is the risk that other breaches will occur.
WikiLeaks could be up and running for the public by February.
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Virtual Braille Opens Employment Doors for Visually
Impaired
ITworldcanada.com (01/09/07) Arellano, Nestor A.
McGill University researchers are developing an inexpensive tactile
translation system called Virtual Braille (VB) designed to enable
sight-impaired users to read what is on a computer screen. McGill Centre
for Intelligent Machines director Vincent Hayward says the model currently
being developed, Stimulator of Tactile Receptor by Skin Stretch squared
(STReSS2), is "a smaller and simpler device with fewer moving parts" than
others on the market. The prototype's interface pad contains 64 miniature
ceramic slabs called "benders" that move laterally as the device detects
words on the computer screen, translating the text into Braille. As the
benders contact a user's finger tips, they create Braille through temporary
"lateral skin deformations." Users keep their finger tip on the pad, which
they move mouse-like across a surface, unlike other computer Braille
readers that require users to move their finger across a pad to feel the
dots. The team is looking into implementing the technology into a mouse,
which would allow users to scan the entire screen, rather than limiting
them to a single line at a time, although the researchers must figure out
how to prevent the user from "getting lost" on the page. Canadian National
Institute for the Blind (CNIB) Library in Toronto manager Debbie Gillespie
says that with this mouse concept, "You could have an entire screen of
information literally at your fingertips." CNIB national director of
consumer goods and assistive technologies Jeff Fitzgibbon explains that
today's tactile translation devices run from $5,000 to above $10,000,
discouraging companies from hiring the blind. He says, "Anything that can
be done to make information more readily available will have a definite
positive effect on the society, labor and the economy."
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Tiny New Cable May Spur Big Advances
Reuters (01/09/07)
The latest issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters features research
on the development of a tiny coaxial cable that is able to transmit a broad
spectrum of visible light. At about 300 nanometers wide, the cable, which
is commonly used to deliver television, telephone, and Internet service, is
several hundred times thinner than a human hair. And with a wavelength of
380 to 750 nanometers, visible light moving at about 90 percent of the
speed of light has to be squeezed through the cable. An insulator
surrounds the cable's inner carbon "wire," which serves as an antenna for
light, and its outer wire is made of aluminum. The scientists behind the
advance say the miniscule cable could have huge implications for medical
applications, solar energy, and optical computing. "You can envision
making chips that can move light around--basically convey information at
the speed of light rather than using electronics," says Michael Naughton, a
research participant who is the chairman of the physics department at
Boston College. "So it's optics for the manipulation of information rather
than electronics."
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Brain Waves Guide Walking Robot
Discovery Channel (01/10/07) Staedter, Tracy
Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle are developing a
way for people to control a robot using only their thoughts. Associate
professor of computer science and engineering Rajesh Rao says, "We're using
a well-known, well-characterized response that occurs in the brain to
control a physical device in the world." This reliable response is known
as a P300, which occurs when a person sees something they have been looking
for, like a missing set of keys. The system works by flashing images in
front of a user, who wears an electrode cap that picks up brain waves, and
when the image of the object the user is focusing on shows up, the P300
signal is recognized and the robot is commanded to go to this object or
pick it up. In order for interaction between the user and the robot to
occur, 10 minutes of calibration exercise was needed for the computer to
recognize a user's unique P300. The computer then takes about five to 10
seconds to confirm the specific image as the one the user is thinking of.
The robot can only respond to a small number of thought instructions, but
does so with 94 percent accuracy. However, Columbia University associate
professor of biomedical engineering Paul Sajda believes that while P300
response recognition is a valuable area of research, as it could allow a
better understanding of other brain signals, it is not the best way to
command robots. He says, "The signals related to eye movements are 1,000
times stronger than scalp ECG, you're better off using an eye tracker,
which could be mounted on a pair of glasses."
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March of the Consumer Robots
BBC News (01/11/07) Waters, Darren
Honda's Asimo robot is the poster-child for prototype robots that could
one day be found in households worldwide. The latest version of Asimo can
walk forward and backward, up and down stairs, and even run. Asimo project
leader Stephen Keeney says Honda is committed to robot innovation plans to
eventually sell Asimo models for home or hospital use. Honda is also
considering developing a model that can assist in fighting fires. The
product of 20 years of research, the greatest technological accomplishment
is the robot's mastery of walking; as Keeney says, "Until we started
studying it we didn't know really how people walked." Other robots that
have already become popular items are unable to walk, but are designed for
use around the home or by the military; over 700 tactile robots are being
used in Iraq and Afghanistan to help soldiers avoid danger, and iRobot, the
same company that makes these military robots, has had much success with
its Roomba floor-cleaning robot. A Korean company has released a networked
robot, known as iRobi, which is marketed as a security guard, entertainment
device, and a friend to children. Its built in Wi-Fi capabilities can
deliver news, weather, recipes, and even let its owner call from a remote
location to check on their home. For Asimo to reach the point where it
could be sold to households, it must learn to react to a changing
environment, and to be "approachable," says Keeney. The robot, standing
130 cm tall, is meant to be tall enough to do thing such as open doors or
reach cabinets, but not so tall as to intimidate children. Kenney believes
that "Any robotic technology which makes people more accepting of having
robots in their home is great," but first "We need Asimo to be smart enough
to understand what we want it to do and [then] go and do it."
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Use of Virtual Reality Spreading in Business World
Associated Press (01/11/07) Hannah, James
As the price of computing equipment drops, many companies are using
immersive virtual reality technology to accomplish tasks that previously
would have required a great deal of resources, time, and money. VR
centers, such as the Vis Lab located at Ohio's Wright State University
Joshi Lab, are allowing companies to outsource VR work to test and improve
product design, conduct virtual oil drilling, and conduct many other
programs for the relatively reasonable price of $1,000 a day.
High-performance computers project images on four walls, the ceiling, and
the floor in alternating left- and right-eye images, which are combined to
create depth by the polarizing glasses worn by viewers. Iowa State Virtual
Reality Applications Center director James Oliver says immersive
visualization is "reaching a level of maturity." Farm equipment producer
Deere & Co. uses VR to test-drive products that have not been built.
Deere's Ken Golden says, "These experiences help identify design problems
with products or work environments that traditionally might not have been
noticed until prototypes were built. Our vision in VR is to have only one
physical build of our products before we move into production." Mechanical
simulation is a $1.5 billion a year industry and is growing at a rate of 10
to 12 percent a year, according to Gartner. The technology has come quite
a distance since it was first gained attention in the 1980s. Gartner says
that what used to require a million-dollar supercomputer can now be done on
less than $100,00 worth of desktop machines.
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IU Computing Group Promotes Diversity in IT at State
Educators' Conference
Indiana University (01/10/07) Stuteville, Joe
The Indiana Computer Educators conference is scheduled for Jan. 26, 2007,
at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. More than 2,000
educators, technology experts, and exhibitors are expected to attend the
gathering that is designed to bring attention to new trends and technology
that may be beneficial in the classroom. One of the highlights of the
conference will be a workshop presented by Women in Computing at Indiana
University on the group's Just Be K-12 program, which offers an interactive
road show at middle- and high schools across the state. Students
participate in a poll of their views of computing and IT careers, using
remote control clickers. "They usually conjure up images of a male,
socially-challenged nerd working in isolation at a computer," says Suzanne
Menzel, senior lecturer in computer science. "We show them pictures of
real computer people at work, and that they can just be themselves and
still be computing professionals." WIC@IU will also use the workshop to
talk about how computing disciplines are changing, what teachers and
students should know about IT careers and research, and the need for
diversity in IT.
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Getting Serious About Transactional Memory
HPC Wire (01/12/07) Vol. 16, No. 12, Feldman, Michael
Higher levels of application concurrency are being encouraged by the
parallelization of computers and the proliferation of CPUs, and multi-core
processors are a major driver of this trend. Even more parallel processing
will be needed in order to accommodate multi-core teraflop processors such
as Intel's 80-core Polaris prototype and the application domains necessary
to use them as they are rolled out over the next decade. Transactional
memory (TM) is being considered by Intel researchers as a core technology
for writing terascale killer apps. Application robustness and scalability
are particularly critical for the kind of large-scale concurrency typical
of terascale applications, and TM seems to address this challenge. TM
shares with global locks a concurrency control model that facilitates
access to data shared by multiple threads, but differs in being an
optimistic model that assumes in the majority of instances just one thread
will be vying for a given data item. Fine-grained locking is an implicit
feature of TM, effecting the automatic provision of associated performance
benefits. A transaction serves as a high-level construct performing reads
and writes to data as an identical function, and Intel believes TM should
be digested in language construct and initially deployed in software. The
definition of TM's language semantics should enable the transparency of the
software/hardware implementation to the application developer. TM also
permits concurrent threads of the same data, which is beyond the
capabilities of traditional locks.
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Brain Power Focused on Future-Tech Quest
MSNBC (01/10/07) Boyle, Alan
The Grand Challenges for Engineering program funded by a $500,000 National
Science Foundation grant and overseen by the National Academy of
Engineering is challenging America's best and brightest engineers as well
as the online community to weigh in on the biggest technological challenges
facing the world in the next century. The project aims to reduce the ideas
to a list of 20 challenges that engineers will be tasked with solving.
"NSF asked us to do this," says William Wulf, president of the National
Academy of Engineering. "I think they had two things in mind: One is to
help them to better focus research funding and people on the problems that
are really important. The other is a simple desire to excite people, to
make them aware of the possibilities." Unlike past challenges sponsored by
DARPA and the private sector, this challenge aims to spread ideas and not
cash prizes. Already, suggestions have poured into academy's Web site from
the likes of co-inventor of the laser Charles Townes, who highlighted the
importance of energy efficiency for the future of man and the world in
general. Several professors have chimed in with global climate change. In
Wulf's mind, the program is needed to spur engineering education in the
United States. "We have a declining fraction of our young people going
into engineering and the hard sciences," he says. "There's at least some
evidence that that's [due to] a stereotype of what engineering is
about--that it doesn't help people very much. But boy, look at that list
of 20 engineering achievements. There's probably nothing that has improved
people's lives more than engineering. I think the same is going to be true
of the next 100 years."
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Web Inventor Receives 'Engineering's Nobel Prize'
Electronics and Computer Science (01/09/07) Lewis, Joyce
Tim Berners-Lee will receive the 2007 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the U.S.
engineering profession's highest honor. The National Academies' National
Academy of Engineering is honoring Berners-Lee with the prestigious
engineering award "for developing the World Wide Web." Berners-Lee is
credited with contributing innovations such as the uniform resource
identifier (URI), HyperText Markup Language (HTML), one-way and universal
hyperlinks, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and for having the
foresight to use public domain software that is scalable and to have an
open architecture for the Web. The prize includes a $500,000 award. He
will be honored at a gala dinner in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20, 2007.
Berners-Lee unveiled the Web on the Internet two years after proposing the
concept in 1989 while at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
He continued to refine the Web's design despite widespread skepticism until
1993. He is currently a computer science professor at the University of
Southampton in the United Kingdom, a senior researcher and holder of the
3Com Founders Chair at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the founder
and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
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Of Cyber Wars and Turf Wars
National Journal (01/06/07) Vol. 39, No. 1, P. 38; Swindell, Bill
As the 110th Congress begins its first session, federal data-security
standards are once again in danger of falling victim to infighting.
Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has
requested the formation of a multi-committee task force to craft a single
data-security standards bill, in hopes of avoiding the jurisdictional
struggle between the Financial Services Committee (FSC) and the Energy and
Commerce Committee (ECC) that befell the 109th Congress's attempt to lay
down data-security standards. "I want us to start cooperating together,
because I do think it is important to get a data-privacy bill, and I think
it's one we can do on a bipartisan basis if we deal with the jurisdictional
issue," said Frank. However, ECC Chairman Rep. John Dingell (D.-Mich) has
already stated his plans to take back jurisdiction over insurance,
securities, and accounting issues that the House transferred to the FSC in
2001. U.S. Public Interest Research Group consumer program director Edmund
Mierzwinski believes that states, which have the ability to improve on the
laws of other states, are better suited to set such data-security
standards. He feels that business lobbyists are setting their sights on
the federal level in hopes of implementing the lowest possible standard for
the security of personal financial data. Many congressmen think that the
multi-committee group that Frank envisions, the FSC, ECC, and Ways and
Means committee, would work well together, with Dingell as the only
question mark, but given the wide-ranging concerns of those involved, the
legislation they draft may include a variety of privacy and data-security
measures. Many are optimistic that the time is right for progress to be
made on the privacy front, although there is some disagreement over whether
or not privacy and data security are a single issue or if they should be
addressed separately. Frank is also considering offering incentives to
companies that encrypt their information so a breach would not be
disastrous.
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Quantum Games: States of Play
Nature (01/10/07) Patel, Navroz
Spanning the chasm between theory and practice in game theory and quantum
information processing is partly the goal of an HP Labs research team
working on quantum protocols that could allow game-like situations such as
auctions and other transactions to reach an optimal outcome. Scenarios
being analyzed include the public-goods problem, which stems from the
tension between the greater group benefits yielded from selfless choices by
members, and the personal gain facilitated by selfish behavior; this is a
variation on the prisoners' dilemma, a quantum version of which was studied
by the HP researchers. That version projected that the players will
cooperate in half of the games played, and that free-riding will be less
likely with increasing numbers of players. Whereas defection is the
optimal tactic for rational players in the classical version of the
prisoners' dilemma, the quantum version uses quantum mechanics to establish
an intrinsic connection between the players, which frequently yields a
probabilistic outcome in which the players cannot be certain that they will
receive the same payoff every time; in this scenario, the best strategy for
rational players is one that combines moves based on random selection or
speculation. The researchers conducted an experiment designed to prove the
possibility of people playing primitive quantum public-goods games, setting
up both classical and quantum games in which students were each given $100
and randomly paired up and presented with the choice of either keeping the
money or contributing it to a collective fund. The quantum version of the
game was configured to simulate quantum entanglement between quantum bits
(qubits) assigned to each player in order to ascertain the decision of
whether or not to contribute, and the result was that the students
cooperated about half the time in the quantum games and only one-third of
the time in the classical games. The researchers think it is feasible to
develop quantum protocols that mimic more complicated entanglement within
bigger groups of players using a small number of qubits within five to 10
years.
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