Plan to Use Paper Ballots in November Is Reversed in
Colorado
New York Times (03/21/08) P. A14; Johnson, Kirk
Colorado lawmakers have scrapped a plan to use only paper ballots in
Colorado's November election, which was announced in January as part of a
bipartisan effort to replace the state's troubled electronic-voting
machines. Opponents of the plan say it was no longer needed because the
e-voting machines have been repaired. Supporters of the effort say that
questions remain regarding the reliability and security of e-voting and
vote-counting machines, and could become a problem again before November.
The debate over e-voting in Colorado began in December, when Colorado
secretary of state Mike Coffman announced that the voting machines used
throughout the state failed tests conducted by his office. The idea of
using paper ballots faced strong opposition immediately, particularly from
county clerks who said the logistics of doing a one-year transformation
were insurmountable. Lawmakers recently said the need for a change had
been negated by passing a system for expedited retesting and
recertification of the voting and vote-counting machinery. A spokesman for
Coffman says the new system resulted in all of the machines being
recertified in recent weeks. Still, some lawmakers say the recertification
process does not address the fundamental problems that e-voting machines
are prone to.
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SIGGRAPH's International Animation Competition Opens to
Public
Business Wire (03/17/08)
Animation teams can upload animation reels to the ACM SIGGRAPH Web site
for FJORG!, its International Animation Contest, until May 7, 2008.
Sixteen teams of 3D and 2D animators will be chosen to compete over 32
hours before a live audience to create a 15-second, character-driven
animation that adheres to specific themes, and they will be judged by an
expert panel of representatives from leading graphics, feature film,
animation, and gaming companies. FJORG! was a success a year ago, but the
organizers of the contest have decided to make some changes. Solo
animators will be able to qualify and will be organized into additional
teams for a "Pot Luck" submissions category. And a "Vikings vs. Pirates"
division has been created to give students an opportunity to compete with
professionals. "Our goal is to build on the resounding success of the
competition's first year that resulted in new friendships and prizes for
many of our participants," says Patricia Beckmann-Wells, SIGGRAPH 2008
FJORG! Chair from Walt Disney Animation Studios. FJORG!, which will take
place during the SIGGRAGH conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 11-15, could be
a tremendous benefit for participants, says DreamWorks animator W. Jacob
Gardner, who was a member of last year's winning team. "Professionally, I
know that I wouldn't be where I am today without the experience and
connections my team and I gained through the FJORG! competition," he
says.
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Outsider to Run Cyber-Security Initiative
Wall Street Journal (03/20/08) P. A8; Gorman, Siobhan
Silicon Valley businessman Rod Beckstrom was picked to oversee the
National Cyber Security Center, a new agency created by a classified
presidential order in January that is part of a covert government
initiative to protect government and private computer networks. The center
will be based at the Homeland Security Department and Beckstrom will report
directly to Secretary Michael Chertoff. Officials say the agency will look
for ways to protect government networks from terrorists and spies and then
use that approach for the private industry. Beckstrom's main task will be
coordinating government-wide cybersecurity efforts and generating momentum
for an estimated seven-year, $30 billion plan that Bush administration
members want to continue into the next presidential administration.
National Intelligence director Mike McConnell is pushing the initiative to
protect networks holding military secrets and due to increasing fears that
the U.S.'s Internet infrastructure is ripe for attack. Former White House
cybersecurity official Roger Cressey says Beckstrom will provide a fresh
approach to the problem. "Rod's greatest asset is that he's not one of the
usual suspects," Cressey says. However, others say Beckstrom's outsider
status could be problematic.
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Employers Prohibited From Filing Multiple H-1B Visa
Petitions for Same Worker
InformationWeek (03/19/08) McGee, Marianne Kolbasuk
A new interim U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) rule
prohibits employers from filing multiple H-1B petitions for the same
candidate. The rule takes effect immediately, and any employer violating
it will have their duplicate petitions thrown out, their petition
application fees forfeited, and visas withheld. A loophole in the rule
that will benefit some employers does not prevent "related employers," such
as a parent company and its subsidiary, from filing petitions on behalf of
the same worker for different positions, based on a legitimate business
need. USCIS says the rule is intended to ensure a fair and orderly
distribution of H-1B visas, and is meant to even the playing field for all
employers looking to hire foreign workers. Last year, USCIS confirmed 500
"incidents" where employers filed multiple H-1B visa petitions for a single
worker. The Programmers Guild recently sent a letter to USCIS urging the
agency to abandon its lottery method for issuing H-1B visas and instead
evaluate applications based on the skills of the visa candidates. The
guild also asked USCIS to give first preference to U.S.-based employers
seeking visas. USCIS will begin accepting H-1B visa petitions for foreign
workers for fiscal 2009 on April 1.
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Microsoft-Intel Investment in University Research
Motivated by DARPA's Lack of Support
Computing Research Association (03/19/08) Harsha, Peter
The research efforts at the University of California, Berkeley and the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which will be funded by Microsoft
and Intel, is necessary because the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency has left a substantial funding void in the academic world,
writes Peter Harsha. Under the Bush administration, DARPA has increasingly
focused on military and other classified projects, while pure research
funding for computing at universities has drastically declined, he says.
"The academic community has never really recovered from DARPA's
withdrawal," says Microsoft's Daniel A. Reed, who will help oversee the new
research labs. Shorter research horizons and DARPA's increased use of
classification have significantly reduced the amount of DARPA-supported
research at U.S. universities, Harsha writes. Between fiscal-year 2001 and
fiscal-year 2004, the amount of funding from DARPA to U.S. universities
fell by half, and he says funding is even lower today. However, Harsha
notes that DARPA has taken some measures to try to bring university
research back to DARPA projects. For example, he says DARPA's new
Information Processing Techniques Office is expected to have a technology
focus, which could lead to increase opportunities for academic researchers
to participate in DARPA-sponsored projects.
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After Threats, NJ Clerks Call for E-Voting
Investigation
IDG News Service (03/20/08) McMillan, Robert
The Constitutional Officers Association of New Jersey (COANJ),
representing the state's county clerks, has asked the state's attorney
general to investigate voting discrepancies observed in e-voting machines
used during February's presidential primary elections. "We want to know
what the problems were and how do we fix them," says COANJ President
Michael Dressler. Clerks from six New Jersey counties reported
discrepancies in the voting tallies generated by about 60 of the state's
Sequoia Voting Systems AVC Advantage e-voting machines during the election.
In most cases, the discrepancy involved a one- to two-vote difference
between the paper tape logged by the machine and the number of votes stored
in the computer's memory cartridges. Sequoia blamed the discrepancy on
poll worker error and says the problem can be fixed with a software update,
but state clerks have asked for a third-party investigation. COANJ
recently asked Princeton professor Edward Felten to examine the Sequoia
machines, but the plan was abandoned after Sequoia threatened legal action
against Felten and the county that offered to provide the systems. Sequoia
has since commissioned two independent analyses of the AVC Advantage
machines, and the results are expected to be delivered within the next few
weeks to Sequoia and to the New Jersey attorney general's office.
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Making 'Parallel Programming' Synonymous With
'Programming'
HPC Wire (03/21/08) Vol. 17, No. 12, West, John E.
Academic experts are engaged in efforts to transform mainstream
programming by forcing multiple processing units to cooperate on the
performance of a single task, which is being funded by Intel and Microsoft.
The companies will commit $10 million to each of a pair of research
centers over five years; one facility will reside at the University of
California at Berkeley under the leadership of David Patterson, while the
other will be overseen by Marc Snir and Wen-mei W. Hwu at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Leading academic teams will focus on
developing an effective methodology for multicore processor programming,
with research emphasizing applications, architecture, and operating systems
software along with the software support infrastructure that is necessary
for expressing parallel work. The UC center's software work concentrates
on two different layers, described by UC research team member Katherine
Yelick as the productivity and efficiency layers. The productivity layer
will employ abstractions to conceal much of the complexity of parallel
programming, while the efficiency layer will allow experts to retrieve the
details for maximum performance. Microsoft and Intel say the results of
the research will be open-sourced, so a lot of the work should be available
to the high performance technical computing community. The $20 million
dollar investment in this project seems small, writes John E. West, when
one weighs the scale of the problem against the scale of the potential
market windfall such a milestone could lead to. However, he notes that the
information technology industry "has a history of making big advancements
from small projects."
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Stanford Researchers Developing 3-D Camera With 12,616
Lenses
Stanford University (03/19/08) Stober, Dan
Stanford University researchers are developing a camera that uses
thousands of tiny lenses to create an electronic 3D "depth map" that
contains the distance from the camera to every object in the picture. The
camera is based on a multi-aperture image sensor. Pixels on the sensor
have been shrunk to a size of 0.7 micros, several times smaller than pixels
used in standard digital cameras. The pixels are grouped into arrays of
256 pixels each, and researchers are preparing to place a tiny lens on top
of each array. Keith Fife, a graduate student working on the project, says
it is like having a lot of cameras on a single chip, and if the prototype
3-megapixel chip had all of its micro lenses in place, there would be up to
12,616 "cameras." A camera capable of creating an electronic depth map
could be used for facial recognition, biological imaging, 3D printing, the
creation of 3D objects or people in virtual worlds, or 3D modeling of
buildings. The multi-aperture camera works by focusing its image about 40
microns above the image sensor arrays. As a result, every point in the
photo is captured by at least four of the chip's mini-cameras, producing
overlapping views, each from a slightly different perspective. The
technology is expected to produce a photo with every object in perfect
focus. The researchers say the technology could improve robot's spatial
vision and enable them to perform delicate tasks currently beyond their
abilities.
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Indian Researchers Propose Hybrid Approach to Embedded
Software Evaluation
EE Times (03/18/08) Krishnadas, K.C.
A research team from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur,
has proposed a new method for assessing the performance of software on
embedded processors, contending that the technique offers substantial speed
advantages over existing methods and boasts more than 95 percent accuracy.
The approach combines a one-time initial simulation run and examination of
intermediate-level application code by an evaluation engine to project the
execution time statistics on any given instruction-set-customized
processor. "Instruction-set-customized processors are evolving as a viable
solution addressing the needs of flexibility and performance in the domain
of embedded systems," the IIT researchers note. "These customized cores
try to deliver the performance close to ASICs while at the same time
retaining the flexibility of a general purpose processor." The researchers
indicate that the hybrid method can greatly aid in the prediction of
task-level execution times, as well as the automatic enhancement of
application tasks with the custom instructions (CIs) available in the
processor hardware and the generation of scheduled code. They conclude
that future research could emphasize enhancing the evaluation engine with
cache performance estimation stemming from CIs and other
micro-architectural parameters.
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Ten Times More Energy-Efficient Microchip Recharges
Itself
iTWire (03/17/08) Beer, Stan
MIT and Texas Instruments researchers have designed a chip that they say
could be up to 10 times more energy efficient than current technology. The
chip's power consumption is so low that devices with the chip may even be
able to be recharged using the owner's body heat. MIT researchers claim
that implantable medical devices such as pacemakers using the chip could be
powered indefinitely by a person's body heat or motion without the need for
a battery. MIT professor Anatha Chandrakasan says the key to improving
energy efficiency was finding ways of making the circuits on the chip work
at a lower voltage level. Most chips operate at about 1.0 volt, but the
new chip works at just 0.3 volts. The researchers were able to build a
high-efficiency DC-to-DC converter that could reduce the voltage to a lower
level on the chip, reducing the number of separate components. The chip is
still in a proof of concept stage, though Chandrakasan says that commercial
applications could be possible within five years.
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Better Graphene Transistors
Technology Review (03/17/08) Graham-Rowe, Duncan
IBM researchers have developed a way to significantly improve the
performance of transistors made with graphene. The researchers found that
they can reduce the electrical noise of a transistor by stacking two layers
of graphene on top of each other. The discovery could lead to
graphene-based chips that run faster, are more compact, and are more energy
efficient than modern silicon chips, says IBM scientist Yu-Ming Lin.
Graphene has several properties that make it attractive for electronics,
particularly for transistors that produce radio-frequency signals.
However, graphene-based transistors have been hindered by noise, making the
signals they produce less effective for communications. IBM's recent
discovery could help make graphene transistors practical. Lin says
graphene is a prime candidate to replace silicon because it can carry a
much higher current, and because electrons move faster in graphene than in
silicon. The enhanced electron mobility, typically between 50 to 500 times
faster than silicon, makes it possible to process more information with
less power, enabling extremely fast switching speeds.
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Meet the European Driver
ICT Results (03/19/08)
Europe's largest-ever road safety research program, known as PReVENT,
seeks to identify European drivers and ways to boost their safety in order
to meet the challenge of designing effective road safety systems, according
to project coordinator Matthias Schulze. Drivers' reactions to the
human-machine interface (HMI) in their vehicles vary across the continent,
with PReVENT manager Dr. Maxime Flament noting that "these systems are
useless, or worse, even dangerous, if they confuse or irritate the driver."
An important research area is measuring the effects of potential
technologies, with the goal being to prevent costly mistakes as well as
identify cost-effective technologies with maximum possible impact. PReVENT
is comprised of more than 12 initiatives concentrating on specific road
safety issues, and the goal of one sub-project, PReVAL, was the development
of a pre-production evaluation platform for Advance Driver Assistance
Systems (ADAS) involving analysis of driver behavior and preferences, study
of HMI impact, and assessment of potential real-world repercussions.
Flament says one of PReVAL's key findings is the importance of eliminating
false alarms, and PReVAL is tasked with helping create an independent,
international standard for ADAS. PReVAL has offered a prototype new
technology validation system and has tested the projects within the PReVENT
work program.
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NIST Team Proves Bridge From Conventional to Molecular
Electronics Possible
NIST Tech Beat (03/18/08) Newman, Michael E.
National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers recently
demonstrated that a single layer of organic molecules can be assembled on
the same type of substrate used in conventional microchips, providing an
"evolutionary link" between today's microelectronics and future devices
made primarily from complex organic molecules. The ability to use a
silicon crystal substrate that is compatible with the industry-standard
CMOS manufacturing technology lays the groundwork for hybrid CMOS-molecular
device circuitry. The NIST team first demonstrated that a high-quality
monolayer of organic molecules could be built on the silicon orientation
commonly used in CMOS fabrication. Then the researchers built a working
molecular electronic device, a resistor, using the same techniques. The
team fabricated two molecular devices, each with a different length of
carbon chain populating the monolayer. Both devices successfully resisted
electrical flow, with the longer chain having a greater resistance as
expected. The next step is to fabricate a CMOS-molecular hybrid circuit to
show that molecular electronic components can work in harmony with
microelectronics technologies.
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Q&A: Google's Alan Noble on the Future Web
ZDNet Australia (03/11/08) Serpo, Alex
Google Australia engineering and site director Alan Noble says there are a
couple of "pretty amazing" trends developing, including a move toward
gadgets, mini-applications, and widgets. He says applications are being
improved by gadgets by democratizing them and making it possible for
developers to disaggregate applications in a completely new way. He says
another major trend is a shift toward cloud computing, which he believes
will have profound implications. He says Google has "taken a whole range
of applications that users traditionally thought of as client-side
applications and moved them online ... It basically means you have access
to your applications anytime, anywhere." Noble says there are still a lot
more applications that need to be moved to the cloud, but the trend towards
cloud computing is clear. As for the future of Web content and rich
content Web searchers, Noble admits that video and image searching
techniques are rudimentary, but the technology is improving. Noble cites
research at the University of Queensland in Australia that has been able to
classify videos and detect similarities with other videos. He says the
Internet is becoming richer and being able to search through rich content
will be crucial.
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Cowardly 'Phobot' Steals Show at Amsterdam Robot
Conference
Associated Press (03/17/08)
A team of students from the University of Amsterdam won the top prize at
the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Amsterdam on
March 15. The public voted "Phobot," which mimicked human phobia, as its
favorite robot at the competition of seven teams from technical
universities from around the world. During the demonstration, a menacing
larger robot inspired fear in Phobot, which retreated and then spun in
circles to display a sense of panic. To overcome this fear, the team
exposed Phobot to small robots and then to larger ones. "This robot is
there as a sort of buddy to help a child having any kind of actual fear,
doing it step by step," says team member Ork de Rooij. A team from
Carnegie Mellon University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology took second place and the jury's prize for developing "Pot Bot,"
which was designed to monitor potted plants and determine when they need
more water or sunlight. The contestants used Lego robotics and software
from National Instruments to build their robots.
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HP Labs Braces for Impact
EE Times (03/14/08)No. 1518, P. 1; Merritt, Rick
The reorganization of Hewlett-Packard Labs into 23 labs concentrating on
high-impact projects, the implementation of a review structure to tie HP's
business units to the research division, and the establishment of new
programs to link HP Labs to universities and the venture capital community
has earned HP Labs director Prith Banerjee considerable industry praise and
countered perceptions that HP is too insular, but this is only the
beginning as HP struggles to become an innovation leader in an increasingly
narrow space. So that HP could become more competitive, Banerjee urged his
labs to push major projects that combine basic research and advanced
development, and the first wave of proposals will be reviewed by a panel
that includes lab researchers, HP business unit managers, and
technologists. "The proposal process is a new thing, and we will have to
make bigger bets," says Rob Schreiber of HP's Exascale Computing Lab. "If
you don't make bigger bets, big things don't happen." Aiding the
commercialization of the lab's work will be a new technology transfer
office, while some of the group work will be publicly shared through a new
Web site. Banerjee intends to boost the amount of fundamental research
done at the lab from less than 10 percent of the facility's work to 33
percent. At the March 6 event where the HP Labs restructuring was
announced, HP's Shane Robison implied that tomorrow's innovations will be
oriented around software and services. Numerous lab projects HP promoted
were software advancements, but hardware remains an important research
area.
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Software That Makes Software Better
Economist Technology Quarterly (03/08) Vol. 386, No. 8570, P. 19
Programmers are increasingly utilizing anti-bug tools at various points in
the software development process, and these tools can improve programmer
cooperation, analyze the software or its source code for defects, or help
project managers quantify code quality, programmer productivity, and the
cost-effectiveness of correcting specific bugs to assign priority to fixes.
Programmers generally collaborate in an integrated development environment
that keeps tabs on different pieces of code and configures them when
necessary into a complete program, but many firms' coders and testers are
geographically scattered, necessitating the enhancement of programmer tools
to effect communication, design change requests, problem reportage, and
other applications to enable collaborative development. Though software
quality can be improved by high-level improvements in project management
and the distribution and testing of new versions of a particular software
component, low-level tools that examine the code itself for bugs and other
potential problems are equally valuable. These tools can be categorized as
dynamic-analysis tools that scrutinize software in operation to deduce
failure points or static-analysis tools that study code while it is not
running to spot fundamental errors. Strategies for encouraging programmers
to adopt such tools include offering code testing as an online service or
integrating testing tools more closely with existing programming tools. So
that coders can determine which bugs ought to be tackled and which can be
ignored, initiatives to develop code quality and programmer productivity
metrics are underway; one such effort is a project by the U.S. National
Institute of Standards and Technology to create a system for quantifying
how much code will be improved through the adoption of specific tools and
programming languages.
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