Colleges Fight Job 'Offshoring'
Tampa Tribune (04/11/07) Sasso, Michelle
Computer science and engineering departments around the country are doing
their best to fight the perception that, because of offshoring, no IT jobs
will be available to students upon graduation. A Princeton economist
conducted a study that claimed as much as 29 percent of the U.S. workforce
is potentially "offshoreable" in the next two decades. However, a recent
ACM report from ACM's Job Migration Task Force showed that only 3 percent
of U.S. IT jobs are offshored each year. "Employers come in and complain
to me that no one's applying for these jobs," said University of Southern
Florida IT department head Kaushal Chari. Schools such as USF are trying
to "outsource-proof" their students by teaching them skills that cannot be
offshored, such as management, and leaving out those skills that could
easily be offshored. Falling enrollment rates have "to do with the
perception that there will be no jobs for these students when they get out
of school," explains University of Florida Computer Information Science and
Engineering department chair Sartaj Sahni, who has witnessed enrollment
decrease by 1,000 students since 2000. There are more IT jobs available
than ever before, according the Bureau of Labor, which cites statistics
that show computing jobs make up three of the 10 fastest-growing
occupations between 2004 and 2014. "Globalization and Offshoring of
Software," is available at
http://www.acm.org/globalizationreport
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Don't Trust Voting on the 'Net, Speaker Says
Network World (04/12/07) Greene, Tim
While giving the keynote address at the Usenix symposium on networked
system design and implementation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
computer science professor Ronald Rivest said Internet voting is so
vulnerable to manipulation that it should be avoided unconditionally,
calling Internet voting "voting by mail made worse." Like voting by mail,
Internet voting creates the possibility of voter fraud, as well as possible
voter intimidation and coercion, as privacy cannot be guaranteed with
Internet voting as it can in a voting booth, according to Rivest.
Electronic voting without the use of the Internet has enough problems,
including voting machine security, millions of lines of private code, and
voting machine networks that could be vulnerable to machine tampering
through the network or denial-of-service attacks. Rivest said the source
code for voting machines, and their underlying operating systems, should be
given security checks by testing labs. Rivest said there is a significant
gap between voting-system theories and a real-world voting system that the
public will trust, saying it can take 15 to 20 years for the public to
understand how systems work. To learn more about ACM's e-voting
activities, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm
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IBM Connects Chips for Better Bandwidth
CNet (04/11/07) Kanellos, Michael
IBM could be the first company to bring through-silicon vias (TSV)
chip-linking technology to market, allowing enhanced performance and better
energy efficiency. By connecting components of different cores inside two
chips with thousands of wires that carry data back and forth, far more data
can be transferred. "Wire bonds have pretty high levels of noise, which
can limit the capability of some of the transistors," says IBM's Lisa Su.
TSV could eventually connect memory directly to its power processors, which
could improve performance by 10 percent and decrease energy consumption by
20 percent. Since chips would be stacked vertically, additional
motherboard space would be made available. Some manufacturers stack chips
vertically, but since they use buses to wire them together, there is no
benefit to bandwidth. Where bus ports are normally on the side of chips,
TSV takes advantage of the abundant space on a chip's top or bottom. Chip
interconnects and packaging have been a topic of interest recently, because
many believe that it is an area where considerable gains can be made. IBM
could be commercially producing chips with TSV by 2008, while Intel is also
working on the technology.
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Earthshaking Images
UCSD News (04/11/07) Froelich, Warren; Tooby, Paul
Visualization experts at the San Diego Supercomputer Center have been able
to make movies from earthquake simulations that provide engineers with many
unique abilities to examine the ways buildings withstand or fail during
earthquakes. A recent shake table test of a 275-ton building was
"recorded" by 600 sensors attached to the building. "By recreating the
shake table experiment in movies in a virtual environment based on the
observed data, this lets engineers explore all the way from viewing the
'big picture' of the entire building from a 360-degree viewpoint to zooming
in close to see what happened to a specific support," says SDSC scientist
Amit Chourasia. The model allows researchers to test for specific values.
"We found that the recorded motion aligns very well with the movie we
created," said SDCSC Visualization Services director Steve Cutchin. "This
is important because knowing the model is accurate means it can be used to
take simulated earthquake data and predict the sensor values--you can ask,
'What if a larger seven-point earthquake hits?' and simulate how the
building will shake in response." Problems arose when the cameras and
sensor signals used to record tests were not synchronized, but by listening
to sounds made by the building and analyzing audio and sensor signals, the
researchers were able to achieve synchronization. One goal of the team is
to create visual models that closely resemble the environment they depict.
Chourasia's paper describing the project was published in a special
graphics issue of ACM Crossroads;
http://www.acm.org/crossroads/.
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Anita Borg Institute Honors Three 'Women of
Vision'
Business Wire (04/09/07)
The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) has selected
Deborah Estrin of the University of California Los Angeles, Leah H.
Jamieson of Purdue University, and Duy-Loan Le of Texas Instruments as the
winners of the 2007 Women of Vision Awards. Estrin, a professor of
computer science who has pursued research in network interconnection and
simulation, embedded networking, sensornet research, and security, has been
selected for the category of Innovation. Jamieson, Dean of Engineering,
has been a leading figure in education and social change through her
involvement in the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS)
program, and has been chosen in the Social Impact category. And Duy-Loan,
the first women elected as a senior fellow at TI, has been honored for the
category of Leadership. ABI will honor the women in a gala reception and
dinner, which is scheduled for May 3, 2007, at San Jose's Fairmont Hotel.
Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems, Google, and Hewlett-Packard are among the
sponsors of the event, which is expected to attract more than 700
people.
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Google Backs Character-Recognition Research
CNet (04/11/07) McCarthy, Caroline
An artificial-intelligence research group in Germany will receive funds
from Google to pursue an open-source project that could lead to the
development of next-generation character recognition technologies. Among
the goals of the Image Understanding and Pattern Recognition (IUPR)
research group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
(DFKI) in Kaiserslautern is an advanced handwriting recognition system that
can convert handwritten documents to computer text. Such a system would be
helpful for creating electronic libraries, analyzing historical documents,
and improving access to information for people with impaired vision. DFKI
professor Thomas Breuel is the head of the project Ocropus (the first three
letters stand for optimal character recognition), which is expected to last
three years. The software will be based on the handwriting recognition
system used in the mid 1990s by the U.S. Census Bureau, and two new layout
analysis techniques for character recognition. IUPR is looking for
open-source contributions for a desktop application, third-party tools, and
adapting the project for languages other than English.
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Majoring in Web 2.0: Emerging Tech Goes to School
Investor's Business Daily (04/12/07) P. A4; Bonasia, J.
College courses aimed at teaching business skills to computer science
students, and vice versa, are responding to the changing business
environment brought about by Web 2.0. "All types of new collaboration
become possible because the Web is the most incredible platform for
collaboration ever invented," explained IBM VP Irving Wladawsky-Berger.
Industry and academia have come together in many ways to address the U.S.
workforce shortfall of 15 million job candidates in the next decade, mostly
in information technology, finance, and sales, as predicted by IDC analyst
Cushing Anderson. "We have a growing problem around an internal skills
gap," he said. In order to succeed in both software engineering and
business, "You need to be well-rounded and learn how to work on a global
basis, to understand Web 2.0 and other new things," said venture capitalist
Ray Lane. He laments that U.S. institutions could be losing their
advantage in producing the world's best software engineers, and how at the
same time when schools are losing their emphasis on product development,
most companies have no interest in training new hires. The technology seen
as state-of-the-art in recent years will eventually become commoditized,
forcing U.S. workers to innovate. "New skills will be needed to manage
global projects and understand the broad needs of the marketplace," said
Wladawsky-Berger. He places the most importance on closing the gap between
business, technical, and social skills, and showing children that
technology "can be fun and yet do a lot of good."
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U.S. Military Plans to Put Internet Router in
Space
IDG News Service (04/12/07) Blau, John
The U.S. military plans to test an Internet router in space for military
communications and potentially nonmilitary IP traffic. The three-year
Internet Routing in Space (IRIS) project will be managed by satellite
operator Intelsat, with Cisco providing IP networking software for the
on-board router. Lloyd Wood, space initiatives manager in the Global
Defense, Space & Security division of Cisco, said the Internet routing
technology being tested will decode information received in the C-band or
Ku-band and interconnect the two, reducing delays and increasing capacity
by not having to send information back to the ground. Wood says eventually
satellites will be treated as a part of IP networks and managed the same
way as IP networking assets on the ground, and will be fully integrated
with terrestrial networks. The satellite is scheduled for launch in the
first quarter of 2009, and will be able to support network services for
voice, video, and data, with the system designed to support IP packet Layer
3 routing or multicast distribution, which can be reconfigured as
needed.
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U of T Receives $2.5 Million for Interface Design
University of Toronto (04/10/07) L'Abbe, Sonnet
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $2.5 million to the University
of Toronto, which will enable its researchers to continue a collaborative
partnership that seeks to improve the accessibility of Web services for all
users, including those with disabilities. The FLUID project plans to
develop and distribute modular, reusable, swappable interface components
for Web applications, and build the supporting software architecture that
will enable the implementation. Good graphic design will also be a focus
of the project, which the university leads. "The architecture and tools we
provide will help ensure that people building various Web applications
within a large institution use similar components and make it easier for
builders to adapt those components for individual needs of students and
educators," says Jutta Treviranus, director of the Adaptive Technology
Resource Center at the university. "The end result will be a library of
high quality, accessible, usable user-interface components that
universities internationally and any number of large organizations around
the world can use, and ultimately a better Web experience for users." More
than $8 million will be spent during this phase of the project, which
includes academic partners from the United States and the United
Kingdom.
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Robots Tackle Core of STEM Education
eSchool News (04/11/07) Murray, Corey
Some educators are employing robotics to emphasize technology and
engineering in an effort to make up for the low STEM concentration in
schools. There is a renewed emphasis on teaching STEM disciplines, and
this is feeding an interest among educators in robots as tools for helping
students learn basic STEM principles. By interacting with technology at a
young age, students have a better chance of retaining the knowledge they
are being taught and thus competing for technology-related jobs, says
physical science teacher Gail Warren of Richmond, Va.'s Mathematics &
Science Center. "If you make something exciting for a kid, [he or she]
will remember it forever," explains Valiant Technology CEO Dave Catlin.
"The robot helps give students that practical experience ... it helps build
that intuitiveness, that understanding." One robot that has been widely
embraced by schools is Valiant's Roamer, a wheeled device whose educational
applications include teaching developmentally challenged learners,
illustrating simple math concepts, narrative analysis, and teamwork
training. Some experts believe robotics can be used to cultivate abstract
thinking in students; Michael Doyle of New York's Cattaraugus Allegany
Board of Cooperative Educational Services reports that educators in
southwestern New York are using Roamer robots to teach such concepts as
geometry, navigational plotting, and fundamental engineering and
programming. He says the lessons imparted by Roamer training sessions
demonstrate math's unpredictability in the real world and the need to
account for numerous variables, such as how the floor's surface affects the
devices' movement.
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'European MIT' Dismissed Again
ScienceNOW (04/10/07) Enserink, Martin
Europe may be better served in establishing a number of top-tier
technology institutes rather than a virtual institute, according to a new
study commissioned by the European Parliament. The European Commission in
2005 proposed the idea of creating a European version of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, but European Union member states last year said
the European Institute of Technology (EIT) should not be located in one
country. A 2.4 billion-euro virtual institute was offered as an
alternative in late 2006, but the report says the approach is "not
feasible." Moreover, funding remains a concern, considering the lukewarm
interest displayed by the corporate world. According to the report,
technology transfer is best suited for environments in which researchers
work closely with one another. In addition to serving as a venue for
turning science into marketable products, EIT would offer high-level
research opportunities, as well as training for graduate students across
the continent. The report says the EU should pursue a number of smaller
EITs that focus on a specific field, and that each should be located in a
single place, and could even be based at or connected to a top European
university.
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Roundtable Discusses IT and Students in Canada
Eyeopener (04/11/07) Munaretto, Noelle
A survey conducted by Youthography and commissioned by Microsoft Canada
examined the influence of technology and the computer skills of Canadian
students between Grade 11 and their second year of college, as well as
college students around the world ages 17 to 20. The results, presented by
Microsoft Canada at an industry roundtable, found that only 42 percent of
students surveyed said their school encourages them to develop
technological and computer skills. Margaret Evered, a consultant and
member of the Canadian Information Processing Society, said she believes
the lack of enthusiasm from students interested in IT is because technology
courses are not mandatory in most Canadian high schools, and that young
students are unaware of the variety of jobs in IT. The Information and
Communications Technology Council, a nonprofit group focused on developing
the Canadian ICT industry, anticipates a labor shortage of 89,000 IT
workers by the year 2011, despite higher student enrollment in
post-secondary technology programs in 2006. Evered described the IT
industry as a revolving door, with recent graduates being hired only for
temporary positions, lowering the incentives for students to continue their
studies in IT programs.
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Green Grid Plans First Technical Summit
eWeek (04/10/07) Preimesberger, Chris
The Green Grid, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to advancing energy
efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems, announced
plans to hold a technical summit in Denver on April 18-19, the consortium's
first event. The technical summit will be used to define detailed
technical objectives and program plans for 2007, according to Bruce Shaw, a
member of Green Grid's board of directors. The technical objectives will
address the definition and measurement of data center efficiency, guidance
for data center owners and mangers deciding data center architecture and
planning, and guidance for data center owners and managers striving to
improve energy efficiency during day-to-day operations. The Green Grid
will also work to promote new ways to measure power consumption. Shaw
says, "Participation from the industry's leading data center efficiency
experts will ensure our continued progress in helping the industry achieve
greater data center energy efficiency." The Environmental Protection
Agency recently asked the server industry to investigate data center power
and cooling issues and provide a five-year usage projection to Congress by
June 16. An EPA official said the Green Grid likely will participate in
that effort.
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Towards Semantic Group Formation
University of Southampton (ECS) (04/07/07) Ounnas, Asma; Davis, Hugh C.;
Millard, David E.
Collaboration between students in groups forms the core of many learning
and teaching methodologies, although organizing such groups can be arduous,
especially when the list of participants is not known ahead of time.
University of Southampton researchers Asma Ounnas, Hugh C. Davis, and David
E. Millard present a learner group formation strategy founded upon
complying with the constraints of the person forming the groups by
reasoning over potentially fragmentary semantic data about possible
participants. The authors choose to concentrate on the model of
instructor-based group formation, whose effectiveness requires the
provision of a level of self-organization within the groups. Ounnas, et al
use the concept of Semantic Web ontologies to model a wide field of
parameters that can be considered for diverse group formations, given the
ontology's ability to build a dependable learner profile. The instructors
choose the parameters upon which the formation will be based, while
formation itself involves the enactment of a series of rules representing
different formation algorithms; facilitating the assignment of students to
effective groups is accomplished by reasoning on the supplied data using
the rules to make practical assumptions. The ontology component of the
authors' system extends the friend of a friend ontology to provide semantic
data about the learner for the generation of all group types, while the
interface will allow users to choose the parameters they value for the
formation they are launching. The third element of the system is the group
generator, which provides the means to produce effective groups via
rules-based reasoning on learner-supplied data.
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Carrot or Stick?
Washington Technology (04/09/07) Vol. 22, No. 6, P. 28; Lipowicz, Alice
The Department of Homeland Security's plan to include cybersecurity in all
of the 17 infrastructure sectors, each with their own protection plan, is
seen as an integrated approach and a step in the right direction, but IT
executives say there are still many unanswered questions surrounding how
the government will strengthen cybersecurity. Discussion is ongoing
regarding the role government should play in sharing information and
warnings about vulnerabilities and cyber attacks, as well as ways to
protect identities on the Internet and if there should be a federal
incentive to the private sector to boost information security. In the
Senate, for example, legislation to implement the recommendations of the
9/11 Commission calls for the creation of a voluntary information security
certification program that would include the private sector. "Congress has
been looking at both carrot-and-stick approaches," says Entrust senior vice
president Ed Bello. "I think if you dangle a carrot, you will be more
likely to succeed." AT&T's Ed Amoroso suggests that companies such as AT&T
could play a stronger role in cybersecurity. Amoroso recently demonstrated
how AT&T can detect sharp spikes and flooding of the Internet from various
viruses and worms, and by identifying such events quickly prevent the
proliferation of the attacks. The idea is still in its early stages, but
is gaining support, as organizations such as AT&T, Verizon Communications,
and Symantec could all participate in providing greater situational
awareness to the DHS, according to Liz Gasster with the Cyber Security
Industry Alliance. "The government needs situational awareness," Gasster
said. "And the government should be prepared to pay for it." Greg Garcia,
assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications, has been
working to develop better relations between the private sector and DHS and
recently invited private-sector representatives to work side-by-side with
the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. "It's so basic, but when you
put desks side by side, the relationships develop," Gasster says.
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The Agile End Game
Dr. Dobb's Journal (04/05/07) Ambler, Scott
Release-related activities that take place at the conclusion of an agile
software development project should be uppermost in the developer's mind,
advises Scott Ambler. Reasons why an agile project may enter its end phase
include because it makes sense to do so, because stakeholders have ceased
funding and are demanding a release, or because the release is scheduled
due to contractual or regulatory obligations. Ambler makes a point to
remind developers that the release iteration does not constitute a testing
phase, although some testing during this iteration is necessary to satisfy
stakeholders' expectations that the system is truly deployment-ready. Such
testing includes independent verification of the last construction
iteration's output, and pilot/beta and acceptance testing involving people
outside the team. Complex systems may require more release procedures than
simple systems, and among the tasks that may need to be performed are
acceptance reviews with stakeholders, finalization of relevant
documentation, the creation and shipment of physical collateral for
distribution to end users and operations and support (O&S) personnel, the
training of end users and O&S staff, the replacement of existing software
with new versions, and the replacement and/or installation of physical
assets. Some systems will need to go through multiple iterations before
their release, owing to their complexity. This often happens because a
large number of users must be trained with a limited number of training
resources; because it is determined that a "big bang release" of the system
entails too much risk; because there are different release dates for
different parts of the world on account of the pending system translation;
or because there are different groups of stakeholders that each focus on
unique business cycles.
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Vanishing Visas
National Journal (04/07/07) Vol. 39, No. 14, P. 46; Maggs, John
The H-1B visa program allows foreign workers into the United States to
fill important positions, particularly in high-skill fields such as
computer programming and engineering. U.S. high-tech companies claim there
is a desperate need for such workers, citing a shortage of home-grown
talent; yet unions and other critics contend that H-1B workers depress
salaries for domestic workers, fuel unemployment for specialist
professions, and have little economic impact. Compounding the problem is
America's controversial immigration policy. A Federal Reserve economist
carried out an analysis of H-1Bs working in the IT field, and determined
that there was "little support for claims that the program has a negative
impact on wages," although a slight elevation of unemployment remained in
the realm of possibility. Tech companies clamoring for an increase of the
H-1B visa cap argue that they are lagging behind foreign rivals, yet their
profits do not appear to be taking a serious hit, while the unemployment
rate for U.S. electrical and electronic engineers has fallen considerably
since the days of the tech bubble implosion. An increase in salary growth
rates is also being observed. The House has proposed a bill to double the
quota of H-1B visas, while a Senate bill would require American companies
to ensure that H-1B workers earn higher wages.
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