BCS Editor in Chief Receives SIGMETRICS Achievement
Award
PublicTechnology.net (05/19/08)
Erol Gelenbe, the editor-in-chief of the British Computer Society Computer
Journal, will receive the ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award. Gelenbe holds
the Dennis Gabor Chair in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Department at Imperial College London. ACM says Gelenbe is "the single
individual who, over a span of 30 years, has made the greatest overall
contribution to the field of computer system and network performance
evaluation through original research, mentoring and doctoral training,
creation and direction of world class research groups, wide-ranging
international collaboration, and professional service." Gelenbe will be
invited to give the opening keynote at the ACM SIGMETRICS 2008 Conference
in Annapolis, Md., on June 3, 2008.
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High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers
New York Times (05/17/08) P. A1; Fackler, Mark
Japan is starting to run out of engineers and is facing a declining number
of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.
Japanese universities are calling the problem "rikei banare" or "flight
from science." The decline has prompted the launch of advertising
campaigns that make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are now
importing foreign workers or sending jobs to where the engineers are, such
as Vietnam and India. Educators, executives, and even young Japanese
people say Japanese youth are behaving like Americans and choosing
better-paying professions such as finance and medicine, or more creative
careers such as the arts, instead of following their parents into what many
see as the less-glamorous world of engineering. Although the first signs
of a declining interest in engineering in Japan were seen almost two
decades ago, only now are Japanese companies starting to feel the pressure.
The Japanese ministry of internal affairs estimates that the digital
technology industry is already half a million engineers short. The problem
is likely to worsen because Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the
world. Efforts to import engineers have been largely unsuccessful,
partially because of Japan's ingrained xenophobia, the country's language,
and a closed corporate culture. The county has started to accept more
foreign engineers, but nowhere near the number the industry needs.
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Q&A: Software's Advance Is So Steady, You Probably Don't
Even Notice It
Computerworld (05/19/08) Anthes, Gary
William Scherlis, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Institute for
Software Research, disputes the assumption that the evolution of software
is lagging in comparison to hardware. He says "the market drives us to
create new value, and so we're improving tools, languages, and processes at
the top end just as quickly as we 'routinize' and automate at the low end."
He cites software framework technologies as key to the breakthrough of
cleanly separating infrastructure provisioning from infrastructure usage.
Scherlis says the concept of service-oriented architecture involves the
construction of a series of protocols supporting the rich, flexible
frameworks model, and notes that "SOA is appealing because it gives you a
sense that you can plug and play." Meanwhile, he says developers will need
to make a great effort toward leveraging multicore chips' concurrent
processing potential, given the culture's emphasis on testing and code
inspection. He cites his work with analysis-based verification, which he
envisions as an alternative to running code repeatedly in the hopes of
spotting errors. The process involves a mathematical analysis that
delivers an overview about the full spectrum of all possible runs.
Scherlis postulates that the management of enterprise-scale architectural
innovation that frames the operation of the numerous small teams, which
function seemingly separately, is perhaps the most pressing matter looking
ahead.
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Researchers Teach 'Second Life' Avatar to Think
Associated Press (05/19/08) Hill, Michael
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are using Second Life's virtual
world to test the abilities of intelligent machines. A Second Life avatar,
Edd Hifeng is a steel-gray robot controlled by a computer at the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute's Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.
The computer is endowed with a limited ability to converse and reason.
Rensselaer lab director Selmer Bringsjord says Second Life is an excellent
place to test artificial intelligence because it is a controllable
environment. "It's a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies
right now," Bringsjord says. He says Edd is a forerunner to more
sophisticated creations that could possibly interact with people inside 3D
projections of places, which could be used for training emergency
responders, for example. Edd does not roam Second Life freely, and is
restricted to places researchers assign for tests. Edd also has limited
interaction abilities, and can only understand English that has previously
been translated into mathematical logic. University of California, Santa
Cruz professor Michael Mateas says virtual worlds can advance AI research
without forcing scientists to solve difficult problems, such as creating a
virtual human. "It's a fantastic sweet spot--not too simple, not too
complicated, high cultural value," Mateas says.
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Report: Government's Cyber Security Plan Is Riddled With
New Spying Programs
Wired News (05/15/08) Singel, Ryan
The Bush administration's proposed National Cyber Security Initiative is
criticized by a budget report from the Senate Armed Services Committee for
being more about spying than about safeguarding government networks, for
its planned use of unproven, early-stage technology, its secrecy, and the
possible unlawful or inadvisable nature of its projects. "[S]ome of the
projects support foreign intelligence collection and analysis generally
rather than the cybersecurity mission particularly," the report says.
"That is not to say that the proposed projects are not worthwhile, but
rather that what will be achieved for the more than $17 billion planned by
the administration to secure the government's networks is less than what
might be expected." The initiative's alleged objective is to lower the
risk of federal government networks being attacked and breached by
extending the tools that currently shield classified networks to all
federal government networks, and also to dramatically subtract the number
of Internet connections in order to make the patrolling of the government's
e-perimeter less difficult. Many of the plan's specific elements are of a
classified nature, but in January U.S. intelligence chief Michael McConnell
expressed a desire in the New Yorker that the National Security Agency
should start monitoring the Internet. The Armed Services Committee's
analysis says the whole project is effectively shut out from healthy public
debate because the bulk of the initiative, including most of the
non-classified data about the project, is flagged as being "For Official
Use Only."
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University Research Helps USA Compete
USA Today (05/19/08) P. 6B; Jones, Del
Enacted 27 years ago, the Bayh-Dole Act allows universities to patent and
commercialize inventions that come from federally funded research, which
has lead to breakthroughs in technology and medicine. For example,
Stanford University owns the patent on Google's Internet search technology,
and last year the university earned $48 million from 428 technologies it
has licensed to companies. Texas Instruments CEO Rich Templeton says the
United States is in a great position because it has the best research
universities in the world, although he says they need more funding.
According to Templeton, the corporate R&D labs like Bell Labs do not exist
on the same scale as they did in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and research has
now moved to a university setting. Templeton says university researchers
dream of what can be done or what is possible, and they also have a
powerful ability to assemble multidisciplinary teams, bringing electrical
engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists, and medical
researchers together with ease. Government-funded university research
allows universities to conduct research into areas such as nanotechnology,
which may not have a commercial application for 10 years. Templeton says
we should not fear foreign companies looking to establish partnerships with
U.S. universities as they will only make U.S. universities stronger, which
will lead to a healthier economy.
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How Did That Chain Letter Get to My Inbox?
National Science Foundation (05/16/08) Cruikshank, Dana W.
Cornell University's Jon Kleinberg and Carleton College's David
Liben-Nowell, backed by the National Science Foundation, Google, Yahoo, and
the MacArthur Foundation, studied how chain emails are spread over the
Internet. The researchers examined two email petitions that circulated
within the past 10 years--one that supports public radio, which started in
1995, and the other in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which
started in 2002. The researchers were able to find 316 copies of the
public radio petition containing more than 13,000 signatures, and 637
copies of the Iraq petition with almost 20,000 signatures. The researchers
mapped how the messages traveled from recipient to recipient using a tree
diagram. An analysis of the diagram found that instead of traveling like a
virus, with each message producing multiple direct "descendents," 90
percent of the time only a single descendent was selected. The study also
found that the messages rarely took the most direct route between two
inboxes, even when two people were connected by a few degrees of
separation, and it was not uncommon for a recipient to receive the same
message multiple times. "The chain letters themselves often got to people
by highly circuitous routes," Kleinberg says. "You could be six steps away
from someone, and yet the chain letter could pass through up to 100
intermediaries before showing up in your inbox."
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Jaguar Upgrade Brings ORNL Closer to Petascale
Computing
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (05/15/08) Williams, Leo
Upgrades to Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer, a Cray
XT4 located at ORNL's National Center for Computational Science (NCCS),
have more than doubled its performance. The system now uses more than
31,000 processing cores to provide up to 263 trillion calculations per
second. "The U.S. Department of Energy and its Oak Ridge National
Laboratory have been making huge strides in providing more and more
simulation capabilities to advance some of the world's most important
scientific and engineering research," says Cray CEO Peter Ungaro. "This
upgrade is another big milestone in leadership computing and we, along with
many others around the world, are looking forward to learning about the
scientific breakthroughs that are borne as a result of this powerful new
computing capability." The new computing power available in Jaguar will be
able to double the systems contribution to DOE's Innovative and Novel
Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. In 2008,
the NCCS will host 30 INCITE projects from universities, private industry,
and government research laboratories, contributing more than 140 million
processor hours on Jaguar.
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900K Pounds Helps Queen's Lead the Way in Next Generation
Computing
Queen's University Belfast (05/13/08)
The U.K. e-Science Core Program has awarded the Belfast e-Science Center
(BeSC) at Queen's University a grant to continue developing next-generation
computing technology that could replace the World Wide Web. BeSC is using
grid technology to develop its new software and the computing technology
will have an enormous processing capability. The software will allow the
computing technology to act as a single database, even though data will be
stored on different machines around the world. "We have been fortunate to
have been involved in this national e-Science initiative from the very
beginning and shape its nature," says BeSC director Ron Perrott. "It has
been really exciting, rewarding and stimulating to be involved,
particularly since e-Science has now permeated all areas of research and
has been taken up by the European Union and other leaders in
technology."
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Key Advance Made in Quest to Develop Computers That Use
Quantum Photonics
Stanford University (05/14/08) Orenstein, David
Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa
Barbara have demonstrated a logic gate that can enable the interaction
between two particles of light, technology that could advance the creation
of quantum computers. The key development is a solid-state device that can
create interactions between two light particles, or photons. "We have
demonstrated a system composed of a single quantum dot in a cavity that can
be used to realize such a gate, and we demonstrated that two photons can be
made to interact with each other via this system," says Stanford doctoral
student Ilya Fushman. Stanford professor and project leader Jelena
Vuckovic says previous demonstrations of interactions between photons
required systems that used complicated atom-trapping techniques that are
not as practical as their semiconductor-chip implementation, which is made
with materials and manufacturing techniques that are already used by chip
makers. The researchers say they are still working to create a full logic
gate, and other challenges include eliminating manufacturing imperfections
and consistently placing the quantum dots where they need to be in the
crystals. "We are hopeful that these engineering challenges can be
overcome to open the path to chip-based high-fidelity quantum logic with
photons," Vuckovic says.
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Tim Berners-Lee and Media Standards Trust Win News
Challenge Grant
Journalism.co.uk (05/15/08) Luft, Oliver
Sir Tim Berners-Lee has received a Knight News Challenge grant for a
project that will help news organizations discern fair and accurate news
among online information. Berners-Lee's Web Science Research Initiative
and the Media Standards Trust in the United Kingdom have been awarded a
$350,000 grant for their Transparent Journalism project, which calls for
creating a system that will allow content creators to add information about
sources and context to their reports via additional metadata. The extra
data would be used by search engines to return articles from established
news agencies. A decentralized, open source project, Transparent
Journalism plans to launch a Web site later this year. "What we are trying
to capture is really just basic information about news articles, who they
are written by, which news organizations they are written on behalf of,
when they were last edited and published, and we want to allow news
organizations to do that in the simplest possible way," says Media
Standards Trust's Martin Moore. "Where at all possible we want to make it
extremely quick or build-in the ability to do that within an application or
content management system."
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In Aching Economy, IT Job Market Still Healthy
TechTarget (05/14/08) Church, Zach
Job growth in the IT market has stayed strong despite the slowing economy,
and although salary growth has slowed in the past year, industry employment
surveys show that IT is still a good career choice. Dice Holdings' Tom
Silver notes that unemployment in IT is about 3 percent while unemployment
in the national job market is about 5 percent. Silver says that although
salaries for new IT employees dropped more than 2 percent in 2007, down to
an average of about $41,500, IT salaries as a whole improved about 1.7
percent over the past five years. Meanwhile, a quarterly survey by Robert
Half Technology found that 14 percent of IT departments plan to expand
their departments this quarter, while only 2 percent plan to reduce their
staff. Robert Half's Chris Ferguson says there are still a number of
markets with a demand for or shortages of highly skilled IT professionals.
Skills that are most in demand include network administration, Windows
administration, desktop support, and database management, according to the
Robert Half survey.
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Carnegie Mellon Engineering Researchers Automate Analysis
of Protein Patterns in Tissues
Carnegie Mellon News (05/12/08) Swaney, Chriss
Carnegie Mellon University biomedical engineering PhD student Justin
Newberg and professor Robert Murphy have developed software that will help
bioscience researchers characterize protein patterns in human tissues.
Newberg says the automated protein pattern recognition tool is important
for identifying biomarkers that could be useful in cancer diagnosis and
therapy. The distribution of proteins in a cell or a group of cells can be
used to identify the state of surrounding tissue, and the software toolbox
can be used to develop novel approaches for screening tissue. Newberg
notes that researchers are increasingly collecting large numbers of images
because of the availability of automated microscopes. Such images provide
an opportunity to improve the understanding of biological processes, but
they also create a need for an automated bioimage analysis tool. In a
research article in the Journal of Proteome Research, Newberg and Murphy
describe how they applied their tools to accurately analyze images of eight
major subcellular location patterns. They say their work proves that
automated analysis of the whole Human Protein Atlas is feasible, and the
two plan to continue to study and characterize all of the proteins in the
atlas.
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IBM's Answer to the Food Crisis
BusinessWeek (05/14/08) Hamm, Steve
Researchers at the University of Washington and IBM's World Community Grid
will access a cluster of nearly 1 million PCs distributed around the world
in an effort to develop more nutritious, robust strains of rice quickly by
completing complex genetic calculations in only one or two years,
calculations that might have taken 200 years if running on the University
of Washington's computers. "We can make things happen much faster. We
should be able to get new strains to farmers within five years," says
University of Washington professor Ram Samudrala. Samudrala is head of the
Nutritious Rice for the World research project, which aims to gather
genetic information on rice and use mathematical algorithms and 3D modeling
to discover exactly how the proteins within the rice interact with each
other. Computer modeling is being done through the World Community Grid,
launched by IBM in 2004 as part of its corporate social responsibility
program. The Grid is essentially a dispersed supercomputer that relies on
individuals to donate their spare computing power when they are not using
their PCs. The Grid is so powerful that it is ranked as the No. 3
supercomputer in the world. There are currently seven projects using the
Grid, including research into AIDS, cancer, muscular dystrophy, and climate
change in Africa.
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Wireless World Is Almost With Us
Guardian Unlimited (UK) (05/07/08) Johnson, Bobbie
Everyone will eventually be living in a wire-free world of sensors and
high-tech cars, predicts British media regulator Ofcom in a new report.
The report, "Tomorrow's Wireless World," highlights several areas in health
and transportation where wireless technology could have a significant
impact. The report suggests, for example, that body-area networks which
monitor vital changes in the body and send a stream of information back to
hospitals or doctors could transform the health care industry. In
transportation, Ofcom predicts there will be widespread deployment of
in-flight broadband services, as well as the use of new wireless
technologies on trains, buses, and cars, including an intelligent transport
system that will allow cars to communicate with each other to improve
safety. "This technology is currently being developed by many of the major
car manufacturers around the world and could be fitted to vehicles by
2015," the report says. The report also predicts that RFID technology and
use will become increasingly complex. Many of the technologies in the
report have already been deployed. Engineers at IBM have developed a
system that uses the human body as a conduit for data, and General Motors
is working with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a
fully-automated car.
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The Promise of Prediction Markets
Science (05/16/08) Vol. 320, No. 5878, P. 877; Arrow, Kenneth J.;
Forsythe, Robert; Gorham, Michael
Evidence suggests that prediction markets can be utilized to help generate
projections of event outcomes with a lower rate of error than conventional
forecasting techniques as well as enhance decision making. "Prediction
markets reflect a fundamental principle underlying the value of
market-based pricing: Because information is often widely dispersed among
economic actors, it is highly desirable to find a mechanism to collect and
aggregate that information," the authors write. "Free markets usually
manage this process well because almost anyone can participate, and the
potential for profit (and loss) creates strong incentives to search for
better information." However, state and federal Internet gambling
restrictions have limited the establishment of robust and liquid prediction
markets in the United States, and it is the authors' opinion that the
establishment of a legal safe harbor for specified types of small-stakes
markets would encourage innovation in both their design and use. The
authors suggest a two-step process to enable the use of prediction markets
while still satisfying lawmakers' and regulators' concerns. The first step
is the creation of safe-harbor rules for selected small-stakes markets by
the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Entities the authors rate as
eligible for safe-harbor treatment include nonprofit research institutions,
government agencies that wish to carry out research similar to that of
nongovernmental research outfits, and private businesses and nonprofits
that are not chiefly involved in research. The second step would consist
of congressional support for the CFTC's efforts to develop prediction
markets, and congressional underwriting of any costs the commission incurs
in promoting innovation.
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