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May 23, 2007

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Welcome to the May 23, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.


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Proposed National Database Raises Privacy Concerns
eWeek (05/22/07) Prince, Brian

The enormous database required to handle the expansion of the Employee Eligibility Verification System (EEVS) proposed under the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 currently being discussed by Congress has raised concerns from security experts over procedures, privacy, and security. Under the controversial bipartisan legislation, employers would have to submit identifying information provided by all members of the American work force, about 150 million people according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The data of current and potential employees would be checked against database records, and anyone who failed the check would be ineligible for work. The expanded EEVS would also allow employers to compare a photo ID of a person to digital photographs stored in a database. Businesses that do not comply with the proposed regulations would be subject to civil penalties ranging from $5,000 to $75,000 for each unauthorized employee. Currently, participation in the EEVP is voluntary. Some IT analysts noted that the federal government has done a poor job of protecting personal data and minimizing database errors in the past. "The government definitely seems to have two consistent problems--one is bad data getting into the database � and the other is getting bad data out of the database," said Gartner analyst John Pescatore. The legislation does have language requiring proper security measures, including developing algorithms to detect potential identity theft and the misuse of the EEVS by employers or employees, but Pescatore said such security measures need to be in place and tested before any such database goes online. Forrester Research analyst Khalid Kark said he is not concerned about the technology, but rather with the people and the policies that will govern the use of the technology.
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Three Wishes for a Future Internet? GENI Project Will Soon Be at Your Command
National Science Foundation (05/21/07)

The National Science Foundation has selected BBN Technologies to serve as the GENI Project Office and work closely with the computer research community to build and experiment with new and different designs and capabilities that will shape the Internet in the 21st century. Deborah Crawford, acting assistant director of NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate, said improving the Internet beyond what it is today may require large-scale, systematic research initiatives focusing on the most difficult scientific and technical challenges. Chip Elliot, principal investigator and leader of BBN Technologies, said, "GENI will give scientists a clean slate on which to imagine a completely new Internet that will likely be materially different from that of today. We want to ensure that this next stage of transformation will be guided by the best possible network science, design, experimentation, and engineering." At an NSF workshop in 2005, where the idea for GENI was first presented, a team of researchers lead by Princeton University's Larry Peterson proposed that GENI would consist of a collection of physical networking components, including links, forwarders, storage, processor clusters, and wireless subnets, forming what is collectively called the GENI substrate. On top of the substrate, a software management framework allows network experiments to utilize a piece of the substrate, meaning thousands of experiments may be running at the same time. GENI will also include mechanisms that allow end users to participate in and evaluate experimental services. "GENI creates an opportunity for stunningly ambitious research," said Elliott. "NSF's support of this initiative will ensure that brilliant minds across the whole sweep of networking and distributed-system research have the opportunity to try a wide variety of innovations in a very large-scale, shared experimental environment."
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Carnegie Mellon Professor Honored for Computational Complexity Breakthrough
Carnegie Mellon News (05/21/07)

ACM will award its 2007 Godel Prize to Steven Rudich, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and Alexander A. Razborov, a computer scientist at the Russian Academy of Science. The ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory honored Rudich and Razborov for their contributions to addressing the P vs. NP problem, which involves the computational complexity behind the security of ATM cards, computer passwords, and electronic commerce. The issue is a question of whether the class of problems with solutions that can be quickly recognized (complexity class NP) is the same as the class of problems with solutions that can be quickly generated (complexity class P). Although Rudich and Razborov did not formulate a mathematical proof to answer the question, they presented research in 1994 and published a paper in 1997 that shows that natural proofs techniques will not solve the problem and that earlier results seem to have a contradictory double life. "Of all the prizes I could win, I would choose this one," Rudich says of the award, which is named after the Austrian-American mathematician who was one of the first researchers to attempt to solve the problem. ACM will award the $5,000 prize to Rudich and Razborov during the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, which is scheduled for June 11-13, 2007, in San Diego.
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'Not So Fast, Supercomputers,' Say Software Programmers
Purdue University News (05/22/07) Tally, Steve

Multicore computing promises to dramatically boost the performance of supercomputers, but some computing experts wonder whether hardware has overtaken many software developers' abilities. "In the future you won't be able to get a computer that's not multicore, and as multicore chips become ubiquitous, all programmers will have to learn new tricks," notes Purdue University research scientist Faisal Saied, who adds that a great deal of high-performance code used by industry is non-parallel. Many corporations are understandably uneasy about reengineering their code base, given the effort they have devoted to their software. Raytheon Systems engineering fellow Steve Kirsch explains that this dilemma illustrates the need for the hardware and software industries to become familiar with each other. "Their futures are tied together in a way that they haven't been in recent memory, and that will change the way both businesses will operate," he says. Kirsch points out that new computer languages may be a requirement for the parallel programming that multicore computers need. Computer scientists believe the commoditization of parallel computing will carry benefits for both consumers and high-performance computing users. Head of Purdue's Computer Science Department Susanne Hambrusch reports that programming languages researchers and industrial collaborators are crafting new programming models and tools that streamline the authoring of multicore computer programs.
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Promising Antispam Technique Gets Nod
CNet (05/23/07) McCullagh, Declan

A draft standard for the DomainKeys Identified Mail system, designed to detect and block fake email messages, on Tuesday received initial approval from the Internet Engineering Task Force. The DomainKeys system, backed by Yahoo, Cisco System, Sendmail, and PGP corporation, will provide businesses with "heightened brand protection by providing message authentication, verification, and traceability to help determine whether a message is legitimate," the companies said in a joint statement. The DomainKeys system is more promising than most other antispam and antiphishing technologies, writes Declan McCullagh, because it uses a cryptographically secure digital signature to verify that an email is from a legitimate source. When a site such as PayPal sends an email to customers about their accounts, the outgoing mail is marked with a digital signature. The signature, which is embedded in the message headers and is normally not visible, is automatically checked by mail servers and compared to PayPal's Internet domain name to verify the digital signature is valid and PayPal was where the message originated. Any message that does not contain a valid signature is probably spam or a phishing attack and while the DomainKeys standard does not specify that messages with invalid signatures should be marked as junk mail, Internet service providers are likely to as a service to their customers. DomainKeys is a revolutionary development in the war against email attacks as it cannot be countered, unlike most other email security technologies, which rely on lists of known fraudsters and spammers or scan the contents of the message, McCullagh says. The digital signatures, which use public key cryptography, are believed to be impossible to copy or forge. DomainKeys does have a few hurdles, particularly that both the sender and the recipient's email systems would need to be upgraded to use the system, and it does not do anything to filter spam from legitimate companies.
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Malaysia - Where Computing Is Cool for Girls
ScandAsia.com (Thailand) (05/23/07) Jumnongjit, Rapeepat

Computer technology is a male-dominated field in many areas around the world, but in Malaysia computing is a popular education track and is considered a suitable career for women. In Malaysia, women account for half of the student body in computer subjects, and are even the majority in some specific fields. Vivian Anette Lagesen, who has been studying how different countries view gender and computer science, says that several factors account for the high population of women in computing in Malaysia. Computing is considered a suitable career path for women because the work is indoors and not physically demanding and it is seen as compatible with what women are supposed to be in Malaysian culture. Computing jobs are also high paying, so women view them as a path to financial independence and security. Lagesen also says that many of the female students studying computing would like an academic career, which would provide them with flexible work that can fit with family responsibilities. At the university in Malaysia where Lagesen did her research, the majority of the academic staff in computing were women, including all four department directors. Lagesen says the cultural difference is that in Malaysia, computing is not seen as a masculine profession. "We have to stop reproducing an opposition between femininity and technology." Lagesen says.
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DAC Survey Results: A New Perspective on EDA?
Electronic Design (05/21/07) Kelf, Dave

A recently completed Design Automation Conference (DAC) survey compares the perception of DAC exhibitors with conference statistics. The report shows that attendance is up for each of the past three years, and the number of exhibitors has also increased, from just over 200 to almost 250 over the course of the last five DACs. Senior leaders and engineering managers from most of the top electronics companies represented 40 percent of non-exhibitor attendees, and the number of press and analyst group attendees almost doubled between 2004 and 2006. All of the exhibitors with suites report they were 85 percent to 100 percent utilized, with the majority of their time spent meeting with key customers, and many exhibitors said they expect a high return on their DAC investment. The rise in attendance at DAC bodes well for the entire electronic design community, as the conference has traditionally been a forum that is a key trend setter in the electronic design business. Revenue for the Electronic Design Automation industry has been up this year, and continues to show growth. Some problems have included multicore processor-related design issues and manufacturing problems, but investors, commentators, and stakeholders all believe that EDA is a "maturing" business. Large firm acquisitions of smaller companies are expected to become more prominent as well. With industry growth evident at DAC, experts question what it will take to create the same recognition of the industry's growth at a nationwide and worldwide scale.
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Web History Team Seeks to Preserve e-History, Seeks Canadian Help
Canadian Press (05/22/07) Bennett, Dean

Mark Weber and his team at the Web History Center in Indiana are working to preserve as many Internet artifacts as they can without collapsing inward under the sheer volume of data. Weber is trying to preserve historically important pieces of software, programs, data, correspondence, photos, videos, and screen shots. Weber and his colleagues spoke at the recent World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Alberta, Canada, looking to enlist people to help archive the best Canadian e-work throughout the years. Weber said that even for Web giants such as eBay electronic preservation can be challenging, noting that eBay had difficulty searching through its own tape backups and storage space while trying to create a homepage montage of its Web pages throughout its history. University of Alberta humanities computing professor Sean Gouglas called archiving the Internet a laudable, but daunting task. Gouglas said, "On the Internet the knowledge base grows exponentially. It's extraordinarily difficult to keep up and collect an accurate view of what has transpired." Gouglas believes that representative samples of political, educational, and corporate Web sites can serve as an example of both technical history and social history. The Web History Center recently collaborated with the California-based Computer History Museum to preserve historic artifacts from the information age.
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What's New in Science
The Daily (University of Washington) (05/23/07) Ghose, Tia

University of Washington computer science researchers have created a simulation of a future where radio frequency identification (RFID) is used in multiple aspects of everyday life. Evan Welbourne, a computer science and engineering graduate student who installed the RFID reader system, said 33 RFID readers were placed on four floors in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computing Science and Engineering and participants had RFID tags placed on their bags, computers, ID badges, and personal belongings. The researchers were able to track the movement of people and objects throughout the building and envisioned using RFID tags for tasks such as finding personal belongings or tracking when employees go to lunch. The group recently received approval from the University of Washington's Human Subjects Division to expand its experiment, and by the summer an additional 50 to 100 computer science and engineering students and professors will be able to track their own activities. Assistant professor of computer science and engineering Magda Balazinska says the experiment has already raised concerns over privacy. "It's easy to see privacy concerns by violating our own privacy," Balazinska says. "On one had it's neat, but at the same time that could really be abused." However, despite RFID's increasing use, there is little agreement on who owns the data, who can access RFID records, and how such information should be used. "There's not even a question of whether this technology will be deployed," Balazinska says. "The question is: Can we propose good privacy models by deploying it faster?"
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New Computer Model Predicts Crowd Behavior
Arizona State University (05/22/07)

Arizona State University assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences Paul M. Torrens is developing a computer model that will realistically simulate the reaction and behaviors of people in a crowd. The computer model could be used by city planners, shopping center developers, and public safety and health officials to simulate situations that would be impossible to create in a live experiment, such as the evacuation of a city or large building. Torrens' goal is to create a simulation program that accounts for the panicked and desperate state that people would feel under such situations. The current behavior modeling programs have not proven to have the veracity this model could have, according to Torrens. In Torrens' model, each simulated person will behave independently and have different characteristics, such as age, sex, size, health, and body language. The program will also account for crowd and environmental features such as group panic and safety levels. Torrens said the model will be used for realistic experiments exploring "what if" and unforeseen scenarios that could affect cities. Additionally, the model can be used to explore sustainability in downtown settings, such as how can a city promote walking instead of driving and how pedestrian flow can fit better with city traffic. The spread of a pathogen through a city could also be simulated. The completed prototype model collects data from each element in the simulation every 60th of a second. Torrens' research is funded by a $400,000, five-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
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Better Internet Security Means Technological Breakthroughs
Kansas City infoZine (05/21/07) Charbonnet, Aariel

At the American Association for the Advancement of Science's briefing on cyber security and the protection of U.S. infrastructure, University of Illinois computer science professor Carl Gunter said more efficient Internet security could improve the quality of living while reducing its cost. Gunter said if more efficient Internet security techniques could be developed, assisted living programs, emergency response efforts, and the cost of household electricity, among other fields, could be improved. Gunter described a scenario where a patient's medical information could be instantly transferred to hospitals and other health care providers from their homes. Such a system, which hinges on better Internet security, could take frequent, efficient readings of an individual's vital signs, which would be particularly helpful to sleep apnea and diabetes patients. In a similar scenario, Gunter described how improved Internet security would allow for networked electrical meters, or "smart meters," that automatically measure and report a household's electricity consumption, and because electricity is more expensive at certain times of the day, the smart meter would notify consumers of peak usage time, allowing people to "shop for power." Emergency response networks would also benefit from improved Internet security, Gunter said, noting that the only communication system to withstand Hurricane Katrina was a surveillance camera network. However, Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute senior staff member Howard Lipson cautioned that "the Internet wasn't design to resist highly untrustworthy users. You can't be surprised when we apply all these high-level functions to the Internet, and there are security problems."
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ARIN: It's Time to Migrate to IPv6
Ars Technica (05/21/07) Van Beijnum, Iljitsch

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) Board of Trustees has passed a resolution aimed at preventing people from submitting fraudulent information when attempting to register addresses in the IPv4 address space. ARIN, which oversees the distribution of IP addresses in North America, should "take any and all measures necessary to assure veracity of applications to ARIN for IPv4 numbering resources" and "encourage migration to IPv6 numbering resources where possible," the board's resolution states. An ARIN representative predicts that the submission of fraudulent information will increase as the amount of available IPv4 space decreases; the representative also predicts that IPv4 addresses could begin running out as soon as 2010. Statistics from ARIN show that 68 percent of the IPv4 address space has been allocated, 19 percent remains available, and 13 percent is unavailable. ARIN and other groups have been touting the supposed benefits of IPv6, but the fact remains that IPv4 provides access to more content and more users.
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Academic Group Releases Plan to Share Power Over Internet Root Zone Keys
Syracuse University (05/18/07) Costello, Margaret

Syracuse University scholars have published a plan to decentralize authority over the Internet domain name system (DNS) as it shifts to a new, more secure technology known as DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). The proposal by the Internet Governance Project (IGP), a consortium of academic experts based at Syracuse's iSchool, who produce research and policy analysis on worldwide Internet governance, would decentralize control over the process of digitally signing the root zone file using public key encryption, preventing any one organization from controlling the "master keys" to the Internet. Concern over such a scenario arose after news of a U.S. Department of Homeland Security report on DNSSEC raised fears that the United States might make a power play to control the master keys. Under the IGP proposal, multiple, nongovernmental organizations would control signing the root zone file. IGP's Brenden Kuerbis said the proposal "increases the resilience of the system, eliminates the threat of political interference in Internet administration, and diffuses liability among the entities involved." The proposed DNSSEC Internet standard improves Internet security by authenticating query and response transactions made between domain name resolvers and nameservers.
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'Laura' Makes Digital Health Coaching Personal
Boston Globe (05/21/07) Elton, Catherine

Northeastern University computer science professor Timothy Bickmore has created a virtual health coach called "Laura" that can help patients remember to take pills on time or encourage them to get out for a walk. Bickmore hopes that as the population of baby boomers continues to age, virtual coaches such as Laura will be able to bridge the gap between the growing number of patients and the insufficient number of health care professionals. Other online health care experiments include tailored voice messages delivered to a person's phone coupled with Internet sites and chat groups to help people exercise or quit smoking. A portable pill box called Med-eMonitor chimes when it is time to take a pill, can sense if the patient took the pill out of the box, has a screen that can ask patients questions, and can connect to a phone line to send data to trained health coaches who can then send messages to patients or contact their doctor. Such high-tech health care programs are particularly useful for today's complex medical regimens, which frequently require patients to take a half-dozen pills or more per day. Bickmore says that in some cases research has shown that patients actually prefer dealing with a computer than an actual health care professional, as they feel less intimidated asking questions and less guilty about using a computer's time. He says people are also more honest with computer when disclosing "socially undesirable behaviors" such as drug and alcohol use. Nevertheless, Bickmore says the most essential aspect of health care is human-to-human interaction, and although technologies such as Laura are not a replacement, they can help deal with the limitations in the current health care system.
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If I Only Had a Brain
The Age (05/22/07) Spinks, Peter

Research suggests that people's relationships with robots are closer the more the robots physically resemble humans, and roboticists are working on androids whose potential functions could include assistive elder care and replacements for servile robotic aides. Current androids have limited dexterity and movement, no autonomy, and are unable to communicate intelligently with people. But they are becoming more and more humanlike in appearance thanks to remarkable innovations in artificial skin, musculature, and motion. Roboticists speculate that future androids will incorporate neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms running on an array of fast, miniature processors that engage in parallel processing and simultaneous communication over super-fast networks, with brain and body functions most likely coordinated and synchronized by one or more master processors. It was reported in the December 2006 edition of Cognitive Processing that French scientists had proposed to create software that generates a level of artificial consciousness, but one French computer scientist, professor Catherine Pelachaud of the University of Paris, strongly doubts that robots can attain the uniquely human qualities of consciousness and feeling. "I do not believe they will have them one day," she says. "Moreover, I am not sure this would be a good idea." Some researchers are investigating the incorporation of mood-detection software and an elementary level of social and emotional intelligence in robots so that they can match a person's emotional state, which could be a key step in the quest for true artificial intelligence.
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DHS Seeks Research on Nine Cybersecurity Areas
Federal Computer Week (05/21/07) Lipowicz, Alice

Industry, government labs, and academia have until June 27, 2007, to submit white papers to the Homeland Security Department on how to improve the protection of data against emerging threats and intrusion strategies. The initiative is part of the Cyber Security Research Development Center program of DHS, which is interested in areas such as botnet and malware protection, composable and scalable systems, cybermetrics, data visualization, routing security, process control security, real-time assessment, data anonymization, and insider threat detection and management. The final date for accepting final proposals is Sept 17. The Science and Technology Directorate also plans to award up to $4.5 million for research involving technologies that offer solutions in the nine categories. "A critical area of focus for DHS is the development and deployment of technologies to protect the nation's cyberinfrastructure, including the Internet and other critical infrastructures that depend on computer systems for their mission," says the 43-page agency announcement published by the directorate.
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Scholars Develop Protocol for 'LBS,' New Wireless Internet Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (05/08/07) Mitchell, Melissa

University of Illinois professor of urban and regional planning T. John Kim, along with University of Illinois postdoctoral fellow Sung-Gheel Jang, have developed the protocol for international standard for geographic information systems (GIS), which Kim says is the "backbone" of location- based services (LBS). He says LBS will become as common as cell phones and likely will change the way we do business, interact with each other, and navigate through our daily lives. Kim says LBS has been introduced on cell phones in Korea and Japan and is now becoming available in the United States through a combination of the Internet and GIS, information, positioning, and Intelligent Transportation System technologies. "LBS combine hardware devices, wireless communication networks, geographic information and software applications that provide location-related guidance for customers," Kim says. "It differs from mobile position determination systems such as global positioning systems in that location-based services provide much broader, application-oriented location services." LBS goes beyond providing directions and works more like a hotel concierge, providing information on the nearest stores and attractions. LBS technology can also be adapted for a variety of functions, including sending locations of people requiring emergency assistance and providing information about traffic congestion. Kim says the LBS protocol has been adopted and published by the International Organization for Standardization and endorsed by 29 nations so far.
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Carbon Nanonets Spark New Electronics
Scientific American (05/07) Vol. 296, No. 5, P. 76; Gruner, George

Cheap and flexible electronic products such as "electronic paper," wearable devices, printable solar cells, and flexible touch screens and displays could be realized with random networks of carbon nanotubes, which supply guaranteed electrical conduction by ensuring alternative pathways for electrons. Devices based on these "nanonets" can be produced through simple manufacturing techniques, and their durability makes them suitable for portable devices subject to heavy daily use and misuse. Nanonets also eliminate the high cost and reliability problems inherent in the fabrication of products that employ single carbon nanotubes. In addition, their high degree of transparency is a plus in applications where light transmission is a requirement. The first application of carbon nanonets is expected to be active-matrix displays, and the power source for the portable devices that use such displays could also be provided with the help of nanonets that function as electrodes as well as high-surface-area elements for capturing and storing electric charge. Assembling thin films of nanonets is no simple matter, and much effort was devoted to this challenge until researchers led by UCLA physics professor George Gruner and University of Florida chemist Andrew Rinzler hit upon a method to produce such films at room temperature. Carbon nanonet films imbued with semiconducting properties can serve as a foundation for field-effect transistors, while nanonet devices can be transformed into chemical sensors by adding "recognition molecules" that react with a target chemical or biological molecule.
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Medal of Honor: Thomas Kailath
IEEE Spectrum (05/07) Vol. 44, No. 5, P. 44; Perry, Tekla S.

Stanford University professor Thomas Kailath earned IEEE's 2007 Medal of Honor for his work with algorithms that facilitated great advances in digital communications and semiconductor processing. He has focused for 40 years on algorithms that detect signals distorted by physical obstructions, use antenna arrays to separate wireless signals via directional determination, and offset the distortion of optical systems employed in semiconductor processing. During his student days at MIT, Kailath worked on a master's thesis to develop a model for the continuously shifting channels of the Rake communications system and then identify channels by feeding in "test" signals, and his research in this area later had a major bearing on the development of cell phone systems. At Stanford, Kailath and a graduate student organized a theory for using a separate feedback channel to supply information concerning noise in a communications channel and adjust the incoming signals to negotiate the noise. One of Kailath's challenges was to ascertain the best heating and cooling process for semiconductors, and he achieved this by mathematically modeling a cylinder of silicon and applying multiple, independent, and non-uniform heat sources to prevent warping. Another accomplishment was the provision of an efficient means to compensate for the distortion of optical systems that focus the beam used to etch microchip circuits through commensurate distortion of a mask. Among the startup companies Kailath had a hand in founding was Integrated Systems, Numerical Technologies, Excess Bandwidth, and Clear Shape Technologies. These companies concentrated in such areas as mathematical modeling methods to predict flaws in chips, symmetric DSL technology, control systems and signal processing, and commercial compensation of lens distortion in semiconductor processing.
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