Poles Win at ACM Programming Contest
CNet (03/15/07) Lombardi, Candace
Students from Poland's Warsaw University took first place in this year's
ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Students from
China's Tsinghua University finished second, followed by Russia's St.
Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and Russia's Novosibirsk State University. MIT
was the only U.S. university to finish in the top 10 this year as well as
last year, when it finished eighth. However, the California Institute of
Technology finished in 12th place and the University of Texas at Dallas was
14th. More than 6,000 students participated in the contest, representing
1,765 universities in 82 countries. ACM President Stuart Feldman said the
contest has relevance beyond computing since "almost every major challenge
facing our world calls upon computing for a solution, from fighting disease
to protecting the environment to improving education." For more
information on the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, see
http://campus.acm.org/public/pressroom/acm_in_the_news/index.cfm
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A Broad-Based Team of Stanford Researchers Aims to
Overhaul the Internet
Stanford Report (03/14/07) Orenstein, David
Stanford researchers later this month will begin the Clean Slate Design
for the Internet project, aimed at reconfiguring the Internet for maximum
effectiveness. "How should the Internet look in 15 years?" asks electrical
engineering and computer science professor Nick McKeown. "We should be
able to answer that question by saying we created exactly what we need, not
just that we patched some more holes, made some new tweaks, or came up with
some more work-arounds." The researchers do not see the Internet as
malfunctioning and needing to be replaced, but they believe that it must be
modified to meet emerging and increasing demands. A 400-user wireless
network has been created as a prototype of how a new Internet could work.
The prototype is a more direct approach to designing a secure corporate
network than those used today, because it prohibits all communications by
default, so the administrator can open any necessary channels without
having the demanding task of creating and implementing security and privacy
rules. Another project is addressing the problems of decreasing network
availability and increasing use of wireless devices to access the Internet
by looking for ways for mobile devices to find unused pockets of spectrum.
A third project, known as Lightflow, uses high-efficiency optical switches,
rather than big routers, in the Internet's telecommunications backbone
because the switches are more responsive to the needs of routers at the
"edge" of the Internet and allow users to have the bandwidth they need. A
final project aims to enhance theoretical research models for the Internet
to provide better understandings of the network at larger scales than
simulations are capable of.
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Model Based Computing
HPC Wire (03/16/07) Vol. 16, No. 11, Feldman, Michael
RMS (recognition, mining, and synthesis) is an application software model
for terascale computing that Intel thinks will be the future killer
application. The manipulation of complex models--objects or events--is
what RMS applications are designed for. Recognition is the definition of
the model, mining is the discovery of instances of the model by going
through datasets, and synthesis is the performance of "what-if"
calculations on the model to find predictions or solutions. The
applications' interactivity resonates on several levels: First, the kinds
of applications being conceived usually must contend with real-time data
input and then produce timely output; second, the software learns via the
mining and/or synthesis operations' feedback. "The use of real-time
feedback loops can make the software much more powerful than static
applications," notes manager of Intel's Innovative Platform Architecture
Microprocessor Technology Lab Pradeep Dubey. Among the technologies whose
development is being informed by the RMS initiative is Intel's 80-core
terascale processor, a prototype of which was demonstrated at the
Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference. New software and software
technologies are needed to make terascale computing applications a reality,
and Intel is working with other organizations, including academic
institutions, to reach this goal. There is also collaboration between
Intel's Software Solutions Group and ISV community members such as
Microsoft to help them gear up for the new application paradigm.
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The E-voting Question: To Open or Not to Open?
National Journal's Technology Daily (03/15/07) Martinez, Michael
A hearing held before the House Administration Election Reform
Subcommittee on Thursday heard arguments both for and against making
e-voting systems open to review. Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) has authored a
bill that would require election officials to implement an audit system
using paper receipts and require e-voting vendors to submit their source
code for inspection. Patent laws do not clearly protect voting-machine
code, but violating the code's confidentiality should carry a penalty, says
National Association of State Election Director's voting systems board
member Brit Williams. Those in support of transparency included Electronic
Frontier Foundation attorney Matthew Zimmerman, who admitted that
transparency alone will not cure all of the nation's voting problems
immediately, but will "provide a legitimate, defensible basis for the
return of voter confidence that is sorely lacking in the current generation
of closed election technology." Opening up voting-machine source code
could lead to a whole new set of problems, so specific rules would first
have to be established, said Election Systems Acquisition and Management
Services director Hugh Gallagher, who does not believe that transparency
would lead to greater trust in the system. University of California at
Berkeley computer science professor David Wagner also testified in support
of code disclosure, but noted that the current regulatory system makes it
problematic.
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Announcing the Web3D 2007 Symposium April 15-18, 2007 at
University of Perugia, Umbria, Italy
PRWeb (03/14/07)
Researchers, developers, experimenters, and content creators have until
March 25, 2007, to sign up for early registration for the Web3D 2007
Symposium, and submissions to the Web3D Games workshop must be made by
March 16. ACM SIGGRAPH is sponsoring the Web3D Symposium, in cooperation
with EuroGraphics and the Web3D Consortium. This year's event is scheduled
for April 15-18, at the University of Perugia in Umbria, Italy, and Dr.
Kari Pulli, a research fellow at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, will
give the keynote address. An expert in mobile computing graphics, Pulli
gave courses on OpenGL ES and M3G at SIGGRAPH 2005 and Eurographics 2006.
With a focus on 3D and multimedia on the Web, the gathering will address
topics such as 3D virtual worlds, languages for 3D communications, tools,
rendering techniques, human-computer interaction, mobile devices, and
innovative applications. Also, interactive 3D graphics and applications on
mobile devices will be among the recent trends discussed.
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GENI Science Council Named
Computing Research Association (03/12/07)
UC Berkeley networking researcher Scott Shenker will chair the Science
Council for the Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI), and
Ellen Zegura, a Georgia Tech researcher of networking including wireless,
will serve as vice chair. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the
National Science Foundation named Shenker and Zegura to the posts, and they
also filled out the rest of the initial members of the team. CCC and NSF
selected Tom Anderson, University of Washington (distributed systems and
networking); Hari Balakrishnan, MIT (wireless networking); Joe Berthold,
CIENA (optical networking); Charlie Catlett, Argonne National Laboratory
(grid computing); Mike Dahlin, University of Texas (distributed systems);
Stephanie Forrest, University of New Mexico (biological system modeling,
security); Roscoe Giles, Boston University (educational technology); Ed
Lazowska, University of Washington (systems); Peter Lee, Carnegie Mellon
University (software); Helen Nissenbaum, NYU (social, ethical and political
dimensions of IT); Jennifer Rexford, Princeton (networking); Stefan Savage,
UCSD (networking and security); and Alfred Spector, IBM (ret.) (software).
They will represent the research community as NSF pursues its Science Plan
for GENI. The experimental facility is meant "to enable the research
community to invent and demonstrate a global communications network and
related services that will be qualitatively better than today's Internet."
At a later date, CCC plans to add specialists in building components and
providing network engineering expertise for the alternative
technologies.
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Train More Workers, Say IT Industry Leaders
IDG News Service (03/14/07) Sayer, Peter
The dearth of skilled information technology workers was a focus of
industry and government leaders during the opening ceremony of the Cebit
trade show in Hanover, Germany, on Wednesday, with German Chancellor Angela
Merkel noting that the problem was not limited to her country or the
European Union. Willi Berchtold, president of the German Association for
Information Technology, Telecommunications, and New Media, said not enough
IT specialists are being trained, and he added that the decline in the
number of IT graduates has made it more difficult to find skilled workers.
Nonetheless, IT companies can help their own cause by taking advantage of
older workers, and retaining, recruiting, and retraining them. Alcatel
Lucent CEO Patricia Russo called for a greater commitment by local
governments to science, engineering, and other technical subjects in school
systems. "A steady stream of innovative minds is vital to the future of
our industry," said Russo. She also saw some potential in looking to
populations that are underrepresented in technology. Bridging the digital
divide "will lead to the discovery of new ideas from all over the world,"
Russo said.
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Research Project Could Help Create Computers That Run on
Light
University of Bath (03/14/07)
Researchers at the University of Bath are experimenting with photomaps
technology that could allow computers to use light to transfer information.
The research team is developing a new way of creating "waveforms" that use
light photons with the same accuracy as electrons used in electronics.
They have been experimenting with attosecond technology, the ability to
send continuous series of pulses of light lasting one attosecond, or one
billion-billionth of a second. Until now, photonics has been able to use
light in the form of a sine wave, but by sending light of a single
wavelength through a photonic crystal fiber that branches out into many
strands, each with a different wavelength, the researchers can create a
spectrum of light from ultra-violet to infra-red. Such a spectrum would
allow the close control over the electric field that is the foundation for
conveying large amounts of information. "Harnessing optical waves would
represent a huge step, perhaps the definitive one, in establishing the
photonics era," said team leader Fetah Benabid. "If successful, the
research will be the basis for a revolution in computer power as dramatic
as that over the past 50 years." The technology could also provide
researchers with unprecedented looks at the inside of an atom.
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Tiny Transistors: Better Things Come in Small
Packages
TechNewsWorld (03/15/07) Noyes, Katherine
Moore's Law seems poised to hold true for several more years as new
technology is developed to make possible increasingly smaller and
more-capable devices. Intel and IBM have both displayed the ability to
build chips using 45nm process technology and high-k metals have shown the
potential to eliminate power leakage, which has been the most serious
problem for chip designers and manufacturers in recent years. As
geometries shrink, more room opens up for transistors, allowing devices to
say the same size yet become more capable; smart phones are a prime example
of this trend. "We're looking in a couple years to put 16 to 32 processors
on a single chip," says In-Stat analyst Jim McGregor. "Imagine taking a
rack of supercomputers and shrinking it down to the size of a PC." Home
media consoles and wearable computers could be future beneficiaries of the
increased computing ability brought about by shrinking transistors. "The
more transistors you have, the easier and speedier the decision is to
automate," says Gartner research director Stephan Orr. A major hurdle to
such advancing capability is power consumption. "Battery technology is not
keeping up with the rest of the technology, and that's a critical
challenge," says McGregor. Software interoperability, another hurdle, must
also be addressed using "standards and a better software environment,"
according to McGregor. "We need to start thinking more holistically about
interoperability and the fit to consumer needs." He predicts that as
consumers influence the market and more transistors can be fit into the
same space, the handheld "true convergence device" will emerge, capable of
doing anything a computer can.
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Q&A: James Gosling, the Father of Java
ITPro (03/16/07) Holland, Maggie
Sun Microsystems VP and research fellow James Gosling, who is credited as
the father of Java, says Java played an important role in two key industry
milestones, the first being the take-up of Java enterprise software and the
second being the incorporation of Java into mobile phones. "For the people
behind the science the milestone isn't the end of the project as you slog
away to get something to happen and then the thing takes on a life of its
own," he explains. Gosling traces Java's appeal to businesses with their
appreciation of having a consistent intellectual architecture where they
can consider and integrate all the diverse aspects of network development.
He says the number of tech graduates is declining due to factors such as
the dotcom meltdown and offshore outsourcing, leading students to move away
from IT because they perceive a shortage of jobs in that sector; the
reality is that the IT industry is growing, but this could stop because not
enough people with needed IT skills are available. Outreach is the key to
solving this problem, according to Gosling. He argues that young people
with an interest in computer science need encouragement from their parents
to cultivate this interest, but parents often cannot keep up with the pace
of technological change. "The issue is more about parents [needing] to
have a positive attitude towards learning [in general]," Gosling says. He
notes that many engineers in IT organizations use technology at home for
leisure activities that keep them from becoming disillusioned and
frustrated with the more rigorous technology applications they perform at
work.
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Can Computers Make Life-or Death Medical
Decisions?
New Scientist (03/13/07) Khamsi, Roxanne
NIH researchers are experimenting with a formula that could be used to
predict how patients would want to be treated in extreme medical
situations. Since many people do not establish a living will, relatives
must decide whether to keep them alive in a vegetative state. Previous
research has found that surrogates are able to accurately predict what a
person would want done in hypothetical medical scenarios 68 percent of the
time. By analyzing data from surveys conducted on the U.S. population
concerning attitudes toward medical care, the NIH researchers found that
most people would choose potentially-life-saving treatment if there is at
least a 1 percent chance of them being able to reason, remember, and
communicate, but if there is less than a 1 percent chance of this, they
would decide against the procedure. The researchers went back and looked
again at the past research, and found that when surrogates were deciding
what to do in medical situations they understood relatively well, they were
able to guess another person's wishes 78 percent of the time; but by using
the formula that a 1 percent chance of a favorable outcome is the deciding
factor, the researchers were able to make predictions with almost the exact
same accuracy. In hopes of reaching 90 percent accuracy for predicting a
patient's wishes, the researchers plan to survey people from diverse
backgrounds. The tool could take pressure off of family members faced with
such a difficult decision, but many disagree with the use of a machine to
make ethical decisions.
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New Technology Enables Mouse-Free Web Surfing
Stanford Daily (03/14/07) Mesher, Kelsey
A Stanford University computer science doctoral student has designed a
system that enables users to interact with software using only their eyes.
Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design uses eye-tracking technology: Infrared
lights implanted in the computer that shine into the user's eyes and a
camera picks up the reflection, which lets the computer know where the user
is looking. Eye-tracking has been used in the past to help the disabled
use computers and to tell Web and software designers what users look at on
the screen and for how long. The system's creator, Manu Kumar, has
developed approximately 10 unique applications for the technology. One
application is a password-entry system in which the user simply looks at
the correct letters on a keyboard that appears on the screen. "It�s really
easy to see what [users] are typing, but hard to tell where they are
looking," Kumar said. "[By using the eye-tracking software,] people can�t
do shoulder surfing." Tests have shown that the eye-tracking software is
easy to learn and to use.
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IT Sector Must Attract Young Talent
IT Week (03/12/07) Bennett, Madeline
The information technology industry in the United Kingdom must do more to
encourage the tech-savvy young people of today to put their skills to good
use by pursuing jobs in the sector, writes Madeline Bennett. Although
their knowledge of office applications, familiarity with MySpace and
YouTube, and experience with gaming gives them more IT user skills than
previous generations, potential employers would be more impressed if young
people under 25 years of age knew how to debug source code or manage IT
infrastructure. Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency shows
that the number of computer science graduates nearly doubled in 2005 from
2000, but figures from Graduate Prospects reveal that only 42 percent of IT
graduates in 2005 work in the IT sector. The results of the Institution of
Engineering and Technology (IET) 2006 innovation awards--only 4 percent of
entries were from the IT industry--help shed some light on why IT graduates
are not pursuing jobs in the industry. What is more, prize money was
lacking. There are roles for IET, E-Skills UK, and the British Computer
Society each to play in improving interest in the IT sector, Bennett
says.
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How Touching
Economist Technology Quarterly (03/07)
Although touch screens offer greater versatility for electronic devices,
some people are concerned that these devices are too tricky to use without
the assurance of actually pressing a button. The answer to this problem
would be touch screens that are able to simulate the feel of pressing a
button using haptics technology. Researchers working with haptics have
developed a new method of simulating touch sensations by using "skin
stretch" technology. The sense of touch has been found to rely far more on
the way that skin is stretched than the amount of pressure applied to it.
Just as the human eye can be "tricked" into seeing a range of colors on a
TV when there is actually only red, green, and blue dots, the sense of
touch can be tricked into feeling textures and shapes that are not actually
there. A project conducted by Mexican and Italian researchers showed the
ability to make a flat surface feel as if it were sharp. The researchers
connected a thimble to a motorized arm and sent short bursts of very
precise resistance through it, to stretch the skin of a fingertip laterally
as it passes over the thimble. Eventually, haptics researchers hope to be
able to simulate any material, but they must first find a way to simulate
the miniscule ridges in the skin of the fingertips that interact with a
surface, possibly using micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology,
but this technique has not been attempted yet. One innovation that has
been developed is a sliding button for mobile devices that has haptic
feedback capability. A user could "feel" icons or names as they scroll
over them. The researcher responsible for this technology believes that
people can learn to recognize symbols through touch alone.
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Green Is Good
InformationWeek (03/12/07)No. 1129, P. 38; McGee, Marianne Kolbasuk
Companies in every industry are getting into the "green" movement more out
of a desire to save money rather than the planet by slashing operating
costs, but the scale of energy consumption is so immense that policymakers
are considering additional regulation, and a cadre of government and
industry leaders is attempting to establish a clear green computer standard
that IT execs may have to comply with. Companies and government agencies'
desire to embed green criteria in IT requests for proposals inspired an
IEEE council to create the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool
(EPEAT), and the president signed an executive order in late January
requiring 95 percent of all electronic products purchased by federal
agencies to adhere to EPEAT standards, so long as a standard exists for
that product. EPEAT standards currently encompass just PCs and monitors,
but it is probable that they will be extended to servers, routers,
printers, and perhaps cell phones. Data centers are a major issue in terms
of both energy consumption and the attention they are drawing from policy
makers, and starting this summer the EPA must inform Congress how much
energy data centers are guzzling on a national scale, and make
recommendations for cutting consumption; the president's mandate that EPEAT
inform government purchases will build momentum for the standards. EPEAT's
energy-consumption criteria use the EPA's Energy Star requirements for PCs
as a foundation, while its "sensitive material" criteria require companies'
adherence to the EU's Restriction of Hazardous Substances standards for
cutting dangerous chemicals and elements out of products. Tapping a
cheaper source of energy for data centers, such as hydroelectric power, is
a solution some companies are pursuing, but most companies are focusing on
efficiency-boosting measures, which can be found in innovations such as
multicore processors, server virtualization, grid computing, blade servers,
and better cooling technology. Other green initiatives underway include a
push to facilitate telecommuting through IT, which could lower greenhouse
gas emissions.
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Exabytes for Defense
Military Information Technology (03/08/07) Vol. 11, No. 2, Gerber, Cheryl
High-performance systems that exceed the capabilities of today's fastest
supercomputers are being developed by Department of Defense research labs
and their industry collaborators. The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is
working on the Large Data Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration (LD
JCTD) with SGI and its third-party providers, with a focus on the ability
to recover, store, and exchange huge amounts of information among global
users. The demonstration will involve remote access, manipulation, and
viewing of massive federal and commercial data sets and a mingling of
technologies and operational concepts. The Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program has
entered its third phase of development, and DARPA partners IBM and Cray
will supply highly scalable systems that will convert petabytes to exabytes
of data and vastly improve application development productivity. Accuracy,
speed, and ease of use are the core areas of concentration in HPCS Phase
III, and among the DoD applications the systems will support are
computational materials science for the discovery of new, superior
substances, operational weather and ocean prediction, aircraft/seacraft
engineering, weapons design, and intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance processes that call for multiple sensor outputs. Cray's
contributions to the project include the Chapel high productivity language,
an enhanced performance analysis tool, and new software debuggers, while
IBM is supplying Power 7 servers with development tools for productivity
and performance usability augmentation, the Advanced Interactive eXecutive
operating system, the General Parallel File System, a high-performance
computing HPC software stack, and interconnect and storage subsystems.
Exciting growth in the HPC market is one of the central goals of the DARPA
program, while both the DARPA and NRL efforts aim to employ current
technology to realize the maximum viability of large data systems.
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A Digital Life
Scientific American (03/07) Vol. 296, No. 3, P. 58; Bell, Gordon;
Gemmell, Jim
Microsoft Research's MyLifeBits project focuses on the development of
systems that may enable people to record all aspects of their daily lives
and store these recordings in a personal digital archive for use as memory
aids, historical chronicles, and information for preventative medical
treatment, among other things, write Microsoft Research scientists Gordon
Bell and Jim Gemmell. Digital recording can become easier through
advancements in sensor and data storage, including the stunning growth of
digital storage capacity, the production of cheap sensors, and the
emergence of processors that can efficiently retrieve, examine, and
visualize immense volumes of data. Using software to practically apply the
collected information is the foundational concept of MyLifeBits, whose goal
is the creation of a database that would allow users to not only carry out
full-text searches of PCs, but also to rapidly retrieve memories through
the use of metadata attributes. Bell, one of the driving forces behind the
project, is also a willing test case, using the innovations the project has
yielded to construct a personal digital archive of his life. One such
technology is the SenseCam, a camera that automatically shoots pictures
when sensors detect changes in light levels or people in close proximity.
The archives' security must be ensured if digital memory technology is to
succeed, while another challenge lies in guaranteeing that digital memory
files will remain accessible despite format obsolescence. An even more
ambitious goal is the creation of software that can turn computers into
personal assistants capable of anticipating their users' needs by
harnessing the information in the digital repository. The application of
artificial intelligence to digital memories has possibilities in fulfilling
this objective, and Bell and Gemmell's research team is exploring the
concept.
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