Skilled-Worker Visa Applicants Expected to Soar
Wall Street Journal (03/31/08) P. A2; Jordan, Miriam
Applications for H-1B visas for fiscal year 2009 are expected to greatly
outnumber supply. Last year, the U.S. government received 124,000
applications for H-1B visas, nearly double the cap of 65,000. For years,
U.S. tech companies have urged Congress to increase the cap on visas for
educated foreign workers, and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently warned
lawmakers that the United States risks losing its competitive edge in
technology if it is unable to secure qualified workers. "Other nations are
benefiting from our misguided policies," Gates says. "They are revising
their immigration policies to attract highly talented students and
professionals who would otherwise study, live, and work in the United
States for at least part of their careers." The immigration shortage has
caused some companies to expand operations in other countries. Microsoft,
for example, recently opened its first software development center in
Canada. A study by the National Foundation for American Policy found that
on average every foreign national on a H-1B visa generates another five to
7.5 jobs, depending on the size of the company. Critics of H-1B visa
reform say the program takes jobs from U.S. citizens, lowers wages, and is
exploited by foreign companies.
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UW Team Researches a Future Filled With RFID Chips
Seattle Times (03/31/08) Heim, Kristi
Many experts believe that RFID tags will soon be ubiquitous, and will be
used to monitor objects and people remotely. Leaders of the University of
Washington's RFID Ecosystem project want to understand the implications of
that shift before it takes place, and are conducting one of the largest
experiments using wireless tags in a social setting. For more than a year,
a dozen researchers have carried RFID tags around the computer science
building, which is equipped with about 200 antennas that pick up any tag
near them every second. The RFID tags are less intrusive than a camera,
but more precise, and subjects frequently forget they are carrying them.
The researchers have developed applications that allow people to use data
from RFID tags to inform their social network where they are and what they
are doing, and the project's Personal Digital Diary application detects and
logs a person's activities each day and uploads them to a personal calendar
so people can see what they did that day. "What we want to understand,"
says computer science professor Gaetano Borriello, "is what makes it
useful, what makes it threatening, and how to balance the two." However,
there are some disadvantages to being tracked. Borriello says some
systems, including U.S. passports and driver's licenses, have been designed
to divulge more information than necessary, which could lead to significant
security and privacy issues.
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Pixar Animation Studios Co-Founder Chosen as a SIGGRAPH
2008 Featured Speaker
Business Wire (03/27/08)
Entertainment and film industry pioneer Ed Catmull will be a featured
speaker at ACM's SIGGRAPH 2008, the 35th International Conference and
Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Catmull, a
co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, helped build the RenderMan rendering
software system, which has been used to create animated films such as "Toy
Story" and "Finding Nemo," and has received 44 of the last 47 Visual
Effects nominations to the Academy Awards. "A great deal of what is done
today with animation and computer graphics in motion pictures would not be
possible without his inventions and contributions," says Jacquelyn Martino,
SIGGRAPH 2008 Conference Chair from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
"Given that SIGGRAPH is celebrating its 35th conference, we could think of
no one individual that could represent the evolution of the industry better
than Dr. Catmull." SIGGRAPH 2008 is scheduled for Aug. 11-15 at the Los
Angeles Convention Center.
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Now Blooming: Digital Models
Washington Post (03/29/08) P. B1; Ruane, Michael E.
Virginia Tech master's students Vidhya Dass and Elizabeth Brennan are
using artificial neural networks, evolutionary computations, the Arrhenius
equation, linear regression, and fuzzy logic to predict when Washington,
D.C.'s cherry trees will bloom. Dass and Brennan wanted to see if a
computer model could do as well or better than the National Park Service's
seasoned horticulturalist, who analyzes such factors as early flowering
elms, maples, and cornelian cherry dogwoods, as well as the weather and
other recurring clues. An accurate computer model could make it easier for
officials to plan the National Cherry Blossom Festival and for tourists to
plan visits. "We hoped to create a model that would allow the best
prediction with the minimum amount of input," Brennan says. Dass and
Brennan say they focused most of their efforts on computational
intelligence and essentially tried to mimic a human brain. The students
point out that computer modeling is widely used in to predict soybean
flowering, corn yields, and aspects of tomato and lettuce farming. They
used past peak dates and previously recorded data to see which computer
models were the most accurate. The most accurate models matched past peak
dates to within a few days, and some models were as much as three days
closer to the peak bloom date than the park service's prediction for that
year.
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Mashup Security
Technology Review (03/31/08) Naone, Erica
As a growing number of tools are developed to help people create their own
online mashups, experts are examining how to eliminate mashup security
risks. OpenAjax Alliance cofounder David Boloker says that as mashups
become more complex they start incorporating computer code from multiple
sources, which may include insecure code that could jeopardize a company's
or user's systems. Web browsers were not designed with mashups in mind,
Boloker says. Browsers contain a security feature called the same-origin
policy that is intended to keep malicious code hosted on one site from
obtaining information from another site. However, same-origin security
forces Web applications to either sacrifice security or functionality, says
Microsoft Research's Helen Wang. Wang says that when a Web site creator
embeds code written by a third party the same-origin policy no longer
offers any protection. She has been working on solutions that provide a
way for browsers to recognize code that comes from a third party and to
treat that code differently. One solution is to enclose third-party code
in a "sandbox" tag, which would allow the Web site to use the code but
treat it as unauthorized content, with no authority outside the sandbox.
IBM recently released a security tool called SMash that allows content from
multiple sources to be displayed on a single page, and allows them to
communicate safely. A secure communication channel monitors information
sent between tools while maintaining their separate identities and sets of
permissions.
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IBM Project Seeks Privacy Controls for Users
IDG News Service (03/28/08) Fontana, John
The European Union is funding PrimeLife, a three-year IBM research project
to develop technology that will ensure users can protect their privacy
online throughout their lifetimes. IBM's Zurich Research Lab is working
with 14 other partners from various countries, including Brown University
on PrimeLife, which is short for Privacy and Identity Management in Europe
for Life. IBM says it wants to create a toolbox that will act as an
electronic data manager that gives users an overview of what personal data
is used, when, and for what purposes. Users would be able to create
privacy settings and preferences for applications, and would receive
prompts when an application tries to obtain or use data for other purposes.
"PrimeLife will interact with the open-source community, standardization
bodies, as well as other projects so that they can pick up our technology,"
says Jan Camenisch, PrimeLife project leader and research staff member for
cryptography at IBM's Zurich Labs. Camenisch says that current standards
and protocols have very limited or nonexistent privacy settings, and the
goal of PrimeLife will be to integrate the project's privacy-enhancing
technology with existing standards and protocols such as the Security
Assertion Markup Language. The first goal of the project is to provide
scalable and configurable privacy and identity management that integrates
with emerging Internet services and applications.
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'World Wide Web of Cancer Research' Exploits Human Genome
Map
Computerworld (03/26/08) Havenstein, Heather
The National Cancer Institute says the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid
(caBIG), launched in 2003, is the largest IT project in the history of
biomedical research. Essentially a World Wide Web for cancer research,
caBIG is designed to help researchers, physicians, and patients across the
country share detailed information on diseases, which will help accelerate
the development of new drugs and treatments. So far, 42 of NCI's 63
national cancer centers are either linked to caBIG or are in the process of
installing the necessary infrastructure to be linked. Many institutions
are already developing applications that will be shared by members of the
grid. Early in the project, researchers decided to focus on improving
interoperability instead of forcing research organizations to standardize
with new IT systems and software. To achieve interoperability, the
developers used the Globus Toolkit, a set of open-source tools for building
grid systems and applications that run on top of Web services. Developers
also created a collection of tools that provide semantic descriptions of
vocabulary and data, enabling both humans and machines to interpret data
from different systems. National cancer centers in the U.K. are also
building an infrastructure that will be "caBIG-enabled."
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Would You Like a Large Shake With That Little Mac
University of California, San Diego (03/26/08) Zverina, Jan
Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Cyberinfrastructure Center
(NEESit) researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center have developed
dedicated open source software programs that combine the tri-axis
accelerometer, or sudden motion sensor built into every recent Apple
laptop, with the iSight video camera used in newer Intel-based laptops.
The SDSC's iSeismograph project provides researchers with a cost-efficient
and compact platform for data acquisition and acceleration measurement.
"The combination of commercially available technology and open source
software creates an ideal environment for worldwide collaboration and
access at the university and post-graduate levels," says NEESit assistant
director Lelli Van Den Einde. The SDSC researchers created a link between
the existing accelerometer and video sensor found in all newer Macintosh
laptops to the NEESit Real-time Data Viewer, which provides a graphical
display of movement. The researchers also linked the project to the Open
Source Data Turbine, a National Science Foundation-funded streaming
middleware system used for sensor-based observations of environmental
events. Once recorded data is sent to the Data Turbine server's archive,
it is automatically transferred using the laptop's wireless network
interface to the NEEScentral database repository, where students and
researchers can collaborate on analyzing, processing, and sharing
information.
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The Future of Computing--Carbon Nanotubes and
Superconductors to Replace the Silicon Chip
Institute of Physics (03/28/08)
The Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics conference
at the University of London's Royal Holloway College will highlight the
need to one day replace the silicon chip with new technologies in order to
support ever-faster and more powerful computing. Among potential
replacement technologies to be discussed at the conference are carbon
nanotubes, whose conductive properties have led to their proposal as
molecular-scale circuitry wires. Leeds University researchers led by Bryan
Hickey have developed a method to expose a nanotube's structure and
electrical characteristics so that it can accurately be positioned on a
surface. "With this technique we can make carbon nanotube devices of a
complexity that is not achievable by most other means," says Leeds team
member Chris Allen. Also speaking at the conference will be Delft
University of Technology's Hans Mooij, who will talk about progress in the
use of superconductors to greatly increase computer power by tapping the
unique properties of quantum physics. He will detail work to make
practical quantum computers using an approach to induce communication
between three quantum bits (qubits), a milestone that would enormously help
achieve scalability. Meanwhile, Raymond Simmons of the National Institute
of Standards and Technology will present his own work with superconductor
loops, which can function as qubits when placed in quantum superposition
states. He will describe the first demonstration of data transmitted
between two superconducting qubits, which proves that such elements can
serve as a quantum-computing memory and a "bus" for qubits to communicate
with one another.
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NASA Builds World's Largest Display
Government Computer News (03/27/08) Jackson, Joab
NASA's Ames Research Center is expanding the first Hyperwall, the world's
largest high-resolution display, to a display made of 128 LCD monitors
arranged in an 8-by-16 matrix, which will be capable of generating 245
million pixels. Hyperwall-II will be the largest display for unclassified
material. Ames will use Hyperwall-II to visualize enormous amounts of data
generated from satellites and simulations from Columbia, its
10,240-processor supercomputer. "It can look at it while you are doing
your calculations," says Rupak Biswas, chief of advanced supercomputing at
Ames, speaking at the High Performance Computer and Communications
Conference. One gigantic image can be displayed on Hyperwall-II, or more
than one on multiple screens. The display will be powered by a 128-node
computational cluster that is capable of 74 trillion floating-point
operations per second. Hyperwall-II will also make use of 1,024 Opteron
processors from Advanced Micro Devices, and have 128 graphical display
units and 450 terabytes of storage.
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UT Dallas Researchers to Play Key Role in $7.5 Million
Department of Defense MURI Project
University of Texas at Dallas (03/25/08) Moore, David
University of Texas at Dallas researchers are contributing to the
Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), a $7.5 million,
five-year project designed to improve communication between government
agencies by enhancing information security. "Assured information sharing
has been a problem for decades, but only after 9/11 has so much emphasis
been placed on it," says professor Bhavani Thuraisingham, director of UT
Dallas' Cyber Security Research Center. "We are developing improved
approaches for managing, sharing, and analyzing data, including geospatial
data such as maps and images." UT Dallas researchers will work with
researchers from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Purdue
University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University
of Michigan, and UT San Antonio. Thuraisingham will focus on issues
surrounding the enforcement of electronic communications policies and the
expansion of the semantic Web, while a UT Dallas interdisciplinary team
will explore the technical, economic, and behavioral aspects of
incentive-based information sharing. Computer science professor Latifur
Khan will work with Illinois researchers on developing methodologies for
extracting useful knowledge from data.
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CU Robot Close to Walking History
Ithaca Journal (NY) (03/31/08) Ashmore, Tim
Cornell University engineers have developed Ranger, a four-legged robot
that may have set a world record for the longest distance walked by a
robot. Ranger, which uses about half the electricity of an average
computer screen, was able to walk 1.2 kilometers on an indoor track before
a loose inertia sensor stopped the test. Mechanical engineering graduate
student Rohit Hippalgaonkar says the group believes energy efficiency is
extremely important. "We use a good 1,000 times less energy than [Honda's]
Asimo," Hippalgaonkar says. "We believe that our robot walks closer to a
human walking than Honda's robot does. That's part of the reason why it
takes so little energy." Cornell professor Andy Ruina, head of the
bio-robotics and locomotion lab, says studying human movement is key to
robotics research. He says because humans are designed to use less energy,
a robot that uses less energy would walk more like a human. Ruina
estimates that Ranger could walk up to five kilometers, or about 3.1 miles,
on a single battery pack.
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University Takes Visual Approach to Research and
Teaching
Tufts University (03/21/08)
Tufts University's Center for Scientific Visualization has developed
technology that enables researchers to turn complex scientific concepts
into 3D images that can be projected onto a 14-foot by 8-foot display.
Tufts says the display, funded by a $350,000 National Science Foundation
grant, will help advance research and educational programs in a variety of
disciplines, including mathematics, physics, engineering, and even drama
and dance. "Users will be able to manipulate, simulate, touch, and
literally immerse themselves in data in a way they never have been able to
before," says Amelia Tynan, co-principal investigator on the grant.
Computer science professor Robert Jacob says the human brain absorbs much
more information when it is presented visually rather than as stacks of
data. The visualization technology features a high-resolution display
system that uses rear projection to enhance the amount of detail. The
display uses a single screen with close to 9-megapixel resolution and two
projectors with overlapping fields of projection to create high-resolution
images and animations. The system can create seamless 3D images, and
haptic devices enable users to combine the sense of touch with sight when
interacting with graphical objects on the display wall.
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Computers Show How Bats Classify Plants According to
Their Echoes
ScienceDaily (03/24/08)
A team of machine learning scientists and experts on bats have developed
an algorithm that is capable of demonstrating how bats use echoes to
classify food sources. Bats emit ultrasonic pulses and are able to
determine different plants according to the various echoes they pick up in
return. Matthias Franz from the Max Planck Institute of Biological
Cybernetics, and Yossi Yovel, Peter Stilz, and Hans Ulrich-Schnitzler from
the University of Tubingen in Germany were among the researchers who used a
sonar system to emit bat-like, frequency-modulated ultrasonic pulses, and
then recorded thousands of echoes from live plants. Their algorithm used
the time-frequency information of these echoes to classify plants. The
algorithm was very accurate, and suggested why bats may be able to
understand certain echoes better than others.
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Researchers Secure the Browser
eWeek (03/24/08) Vol. 25, No. 10, P. 16; Naraine, Ryan
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are
constructing Opus Palladianum (OP), a new Web browser designed to prevent
hacker attacks by partitioning the browser into smaller subsystems and
using simple and explicit communication between subsystems. "[The Web] has
become a platform for hosting all kinds of important data and businesses,
but unfortunately, [existing] browsers haven't evolved to deal with this
change and that's why we have a big malware problem," says University of
Illinois professor Samuel King, who conceived of OP. King says three
unique security features will be employed to demonstrate the browser
architecture design's utility. Those components include flexible security
policies that accommodate the use of external plug-ins without making
third-party developers responsible for security; formal techniques to show
that the address bar displayed within the browser user interface always
displays the proper address for the current Web page; and a browser-level
information-flow tracking system that allows browser-based attacks to be
dissected postmortem. OP is currently comprised of five main
subsystems--the Web page subsystem, a network component, a storage
component, a user-interface component, and a browser kernel--which all run
within separate OS-level processes, King says. Communication between each
subsystem and between processes, and interactions with the underlying
operating system, are handled by the browser kernel. "The browser kernel
implements message passing using OS-level pipes, and it maintains a mapping
between subsystems and pipes," King says. He says the long-term goal is to
devise a cross-platform Webkit version that will be distributed to the
open-source community.
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Back to Basics: Algorithms
Computerworld (03/24/08) Vol. 42, No. 13, P. 30; Anthes, Gary
Superior algorithms are distinguished by speed, reliability, easy
understanding and modifiability, efficient resource usage, and above all,
elegance. As computers penetrated the business sector in the 1960s, the
computing world was hit by the double blow of bugs--computer errors
stemming from programmer errors--and sorting, which was required of
virtually every major application. These challenges brought new
recognition to the importance of algorithms among IT people, who realized
that simple algorithms could be easily coded, debugged, and modified. But
in many cases simple algorithms did not boast the most efficiency, so
programmers devised algorithmic methods for evaluating the efficiency and
overall superiority of algorithms. Bubblesort was an easily understandable
but inefficient algorithm that read through the file to be sorted and
looked successively at pairs of adjacent records to see if they needed to
be swapped to be put in correct order, the idea being that in-sequence
records would "bubble up" to the top until eventually the entire file was
in sequence. A much more elegant improvement over Bubblesort was the
Quicksort algorithm, which can take far less time to sort a file by
selecting any element or "pivot" from the list, comparing every other
element to the pivot in order to put things in correct order, and then
repeating this process on successfully smaller groups until the entire list
is in sequence.
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From Palmtops to Brain Cells
Economist Technology Quarterly (03/08) Vol. 386, No. 8570, P. 31
Palm Pilot creator and Numenta founder Jeff Hawkins aspires to make
computers work in a manner that more closely resembles the human brain
through his theory of hierarchical temporary memory, which posits that the
brain processes information using hierarchically organized
pattern-recognition "nodes." Frequently-observed patterns are identified
and learned over time by nodes at each hierarchical level, and when an
established pattern triggers a node, it sends a signal to the next level up
in the hierarchy. As multiple signals ascend the hierarchy, nodes at
higher levels learn to recognize and anticipate more sophisticated
patterns, and predictions are passed down the hierarchy so that disparities
between predicted and observed patterns can be identified. The Numenta
Platform for Intelligent Computing is an expression of Hawkins' model in
software, and Hawkins hopes the free toolkit will be applied toward the
development of software that functions more like the human brain. Such
software could find use in a diverse array of fields that includes
robotics, video games, data analysis, and computer vision. New York
University computer scientist Yann LeCun says enthusiasm for the creation
of intelligent machines has waned among the machine-learning community over
the past decade, and Hawkins' work is rekindling interest in the concept
among younger researchers. Although he admires Hawkins' intuition,
University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton thinks Hawkins is
underestimating the inherent difficulty of creating algorithms capable of
mimicking intelligence.
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