Call It Predictable: Cellphone Users Are Easy to
Find
New York Times (06/05/08) P. A23; Schwartz, John
New research that followed 100,000 cell phone users in Europe suggests
that most people follow strict patterns and can be found in one of a few
locations at any time, and that people generally do not travel far from
home. Even when people do travel long distances, they still display
similar patterns. The researchers say that being able to create general
rules and algorithms defining people's movement could lead to computer
models used for understanding emergency response, urban planning, and the
spread of disease. Northeastern University Center for Complex Network
Research director and project author Albert-Laszlo Barabasi says that
reducing individual behavior into electronic datasets creates huge
opportunities for science. The researchers tracked 100,000 cell phone
users selected at random from a population of 6 million for six months,
with a user's location being revealed whenever one of them made a phone
call. Previous efforts to track people's movements have used various
currencies and complex formulas to predict behavior, but the researchers
say cell phones work better because people tend to carry them wherever they
go.
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13th Annual Workshop for Women in Design Automation to
Welcome Students to the 45th DAC
Business Wire (06/05/08)
The Workshop for Women in Design Automation (WWINDA) has awarded 12
sponsorships that will enable graduate students to attend the 45th Design
Automation Conference (DAC) and participate in the workshop. Sponsorships
cover the cost of travel and workshop registration. WWINDA is a part of
DAC, which will be held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim,
Calif., from June 8-13, 2008. Scheduled for Monday, June 9, WWINDA focuses
on issues in the electronic design automation field that are important to
women, and provides participants with a forum for sharing ideas and
networking with fellow professionals. Mar Hershenson, vice president of
product development in the custom design business unit at Magma Design
Automation, will give the keynote address. "The topic of this year's
workshop, 'Achieving Career Balance in an Unbalanced World,' is one that is
valuable at any stage of one's career," says Peggy Aycinena, 2008 chair,
WWINDA. "We are thrilled that a growing number of companies realize the
importance of introducing graduate students in EECS to the EDA field before
graduation."
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Google Loses Big in H-1B Lottery as Congress Gets New
Visa Push
Computerworld (06/05/08) Thibodeau, Patrick
Two U.S. senators are supporting a bill that would give foreign nationals
with advanced degrees permanent residency in the United States. Meanwhile,
Google has publicly complained that 90 of its 300 H-1B applications were
rejected due to the lottery system. The Senate legislation, introduced by
Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Judd Greg (R-N.H.), would allow foreign
national graduates of U.S. universities to obtain permanent residence
status as long as they have a job offer. The new bill is a companion bill
to legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Zoe
Lofgren (D-Calif.). The two bills would exempt science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics advanced degree graduates from the annual
140,000-person limit on permanent residency, employer-based visas.
"Ensuring that the U.S. is competitive in technology means making sure that
future innovators are putting their knowledge to work here, not competing
against us abroad," Boxer says. She says the best way to do that is to
offer them residency. A Google spokesperson says that nine out of 10 of
the company's U.S.-based employees are U.S. citizens or permanent
residents, but argues that "we also need to hire exceptional candidates who
happen to have been born elsewhere" to remain an innovative company.
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A New Way to Protect Computer Networks From Internet
Worms
Ohio State University Research News (06/04/08)
Ohio State University researchers have developed a technique that can
automatically detect Internet worms within minutes of when a worm has
infiltrated a computer network. Ohio State University's Ness Shroff says
Internet worms spread very quickly, and can flood the Internet with junk
traffic or overload computer networks and cause them to shut down. For
example, in 2001, the random scanning worm Code Red infected 350,000
machines in less than 14 hours. The key to detecting worms early, the
researchers found, is to monitor the number of scans that machines on a
network send out. When a machine starts sending too many scans, a sign
that it has been infected, it should be isolated and checked for viruses.
Shroff says the difficult part of developing the technique was figuring out
how many scans were too many, as machines perform scans naturally when
users search for Web addresses and perform other tasks. The researchers
used simulations to test their method against the Code Red worm and the SQL
Slammer worm of 2003, simulating how far the virus would spread depending
on how many networks on the Internet were using the same containment
strategy. In the simulations, the researchers were able to prevent the
spread of Code Red to less than 150 hosts on the entire Internet 95 percent
of the time. To deploy this technique, network administrators would have
to install software to monitor the number of scans on their networks and to
allow for some downtime among computers during quarantine, which Shroff
says would not be a problem for most organizations.
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Second Annual National Institute on CyberLaw: Expanding
the Horizons
Association for Computing Machinery (06/06/08)
The Second Annual National Institute on CyberLaw: Expanding the Horizons,
co-sponsored by ACM and scheduled for June 18-20 in Washington, D.C., will
investigate developments involving the Internet and computers, particularly
in the domains of business law, criminal law, and intellectual property.
Issues to be covered at the event include identity theft, pornography and
sexual predators on the Internet, computer crime and procedure, the future
of ICANN and control of the Internet, civil copyright enforcement, ethics
for managing electronic documents and evidence, digital forensics, and
tracking, data mining, and marketing of data acquired from Internet users.
There will also be a debate on the NSA Wiretap Program and the U.S.
Constitution, with panelists that include Time Warner's David A. Kris,
Electronic Privacy Information Center director Marc Rotenberg, and Andrew
C. McCarthy, director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Center
for Law and Counterterrorism. A discussion titled "Criminal Aspects of
Identity Theft: Financial Records, Data Mining, and Online Threats" will be
presented by Donald A. Purdy, Jr. of Allenbaugh Samini, U.S. Homeland
Security Department chief privacy officer Hugo Teufel, and Christopher
Painter of the U.S. Department of Justice. The final session, titled "The
Future of Computing, the Internet, and the Law: Legal Developments in
Virtual Reality," will be moderated by program chair Andrew Grosso of
Andrew Grosso & Associates, while featured speakers will include University
of San Francisco School of Business Management professor Jonathan P. Allen,
IBM Systems & Technologies Group executive Stephen Mortinger, Sean F. Kane
of Drakeford & Kane, and FTI Consulting managing director Mark D. Rasch.
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A Digital Mind-Body Mapping Expedition
University of British Columbia (06/05/08) Vol. 54, No. 6, Waugh, Basil
University of British Columbia professor Dinesh Pai is leading a research
team that is trying to reverse engineer the brain to model mind-body
interactions, such as the sensations someone feels when they take a cold
can out of the fridge. Pai says no one has completely mapped the processes
at the level of specific neurons, muscles, and tendons. "Essentially, we
are reverse engineering the brain to produce the first working
computational model of the complex interplay between our minds and our
bodies," Pai says. The team's mapping and modeling efforts have already
produced some of the world's most realistic computer simulations of the
human body. Pai says the research is guided by a desire to discover and
model exactly what happens under our skin. Modern robots have as much in
common with human movements as helicopters do with seagulls in that they
both face similar challenges but use completely different solutions, Pai
says. The team has been cataloging body parts and functions using magnetic
resonance imaging, and tracing their interactions with the brain. This
information is used to create a working 3D computer model of these
functions. The team's findings could enable doctors to test surgical
outcomes by giving patients a MRI and creating a personalized computer
model for each patient. Pai's and PhD candidate Shinjiro Sueda's outlines
on how the team's modeling of body movements can help make digital
animations more realistic will be published at ACM's SIGGRAPH
conference.
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IBM Water Cools 3D Chips
EE Times (06/05/08) Johnson, R. Colin
IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory recently demonstrated a set of
water-cooled 3D chip stacks, which the company expects to commercialize for
its multicore servers as early as 2013. By stacking memory chips between
processor cores, IBM can multiply interconnections by 100 times while
reducing the feature size tenfold. The stack is cooled at a rate of 180
watts per layer by water that flows through 50-micron channels between the
stacked chips. "Electrical interconnects are in a wiring crisis; the
wiring does not scale the way transistors scale, because the width of wires
is shrinking but their length is not," says IBM Zurich researcher Thomas
Brunschwiler. "Our solution is to go to the third dimension to stack
multicore dice and have the interconnections go in between them vertically,
which can decrease their length by up to 1,000 times." Three-dimensional,
water-cooled chip stacks will interleave processor cores and memory chips
so the interconnects run vertically from chip to chip through copper vias
surrounded by silicon oxide. Optimizing the cooling structures for even
smaller chip dimensions is the next step, and ultimately the researchers
expect to develop a hierarchy of cooling structures.
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Microsoft Sees Parallel App Development as Future
Trend
InfoWorld (06/04/08) Krill, Paul
Microsoft anticipates that application development will increasingly
accommodate parallel systems, particularly as multicore processors become a
preferred method for building more powerful computers. Microsoft's Brian
Harry says the problem with parallel programming is data dependency.
Multiple, independent operations will be running on the same data, making
the data dependencies increasingly difficult to handle, Harry says. As a
step toward parallel programming, Microsoft has developed its Parallel
Extensions to the .Net Framework, which simplifies the development of
concurrent applications by providing library-based functions for the
introduction of concurrency into applications written in .Net languages,
including C# and Visual Basic.NET. The extensions are available in a
Community Technology Preview format. Microsoft's S. "Soma" Somasegar says
this is a baby step, and that programming for parallelism will need to be
extended to more programmers, not just the elite programmers. Harry says
Web-based applications have performed well with current paradigms, but
high-scale Web applications could benefit significantly from parallel
processing.
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At Google, a Search Guru's Dream Comes True
CNet (06/05/08) Shankland, Stephen
Udi Manber, Google vice president in charge of search quality, serves as
supervisor of the company's search algorithm. He says that search's
ability to retrieve items from massive volumes of data was not obvious six
or seven years ago. "The idea that people will do the search
themselves--that it'll democratize the whole thing and you don't have to go
to a professional--that's the revolution," Manber notes. He says Google is
learning that user expectations of what search can do grows over time.
Manber says the propagation of change throughout the Google search system
takes place very rapidly, and he comments that "if something new happens in
the world and you search for it ... within an hour you will see in the
direct results pages that relate to that story." When the same search is
performed in a different county, Manber says Google will tune the results
by the country in which the user is searching. Manber says Google's
strategy is universal search, but he acknowledges that "if you have cases
of searches where some things matter more and you want to allow people to
operate on those or navigate those parameters, then we'll give you more
tools to do that. But you shouldn't have to navigate to a specific site to
do that."
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Europe Prays That Cathedrals to Computing Will Help
Industry
IDG News Service (06/03/08) Sayer, Peter
European researchers and politicians are hoping that the development of a
few key high-performance computing (HPC) centers will boost science and
industry throughout Europe, but their efforts to build a petascale
supercomputer capable of a million billion calculations per second have
already fallen behind similar efforts in the United States and Japan.
European commissioner for the Information Society Viviane Reding says
supercomputers are essential to advancing the frontiers of research and are
the "cathedrals" of modern science. "HPC is a competitive factor not just
for research, but for the whole economy," says French minister for research
Valerie Pecresse. "We have to catch up in HPC." In just six months, France
has increased its HPC capacity by a factor of 25, to about 470 teraflops,
Pecresse says. She says the next goal should be to reach petaflop
computing. Through the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, 14
European countries, including the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands,
and Spain, will direct their existing HPC efforts toward the creation of
three to five petascale European supercomputer centers. Argonne National
Laboratory associate laboratory director Rick Stevens says the U.S. may
already have its first petascale computer. "It looks like Los Alamos and
IBM may have reached a petaflop with Roadrunner," Stevens says. Roadrunner
was built using 6,912 dual-core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro
Devices, and 12,960 IBM Cell eDP accelerators. Early tests indicate that
the Cell processors have reached 1.33 petaflops while the Opterons reached
49.8 teraflops, Stevens says.
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What Comes After Silicon?
Christian Science Monitor (06/05/08) P. 13; Turner, James
Scientists say that the silicon computer chip is about to hit its physical
limits, to the point where increasing transistor density to boost computing
power and speed will no longer be feasible. The latest integrated circuits
from Intel boast approximately 2 billion transistors, and Advanced Micro
Devices executive Craig Sander says that "as transistors or their
components continue to get smaller, we will reach a point where the
placement of individual atoms will affect their behavior." The proper
operation of a chip requires the proportional shrinkage of the thickness of
its silicon layers to the length and width. Recent debate has focused on
the possibility of maintaining Moore's Law--the continuous doubling of
computer power every two years--through the use of more esoteric computing
technologies, such as optical computing or quantum computing. In quantum
computing, a bit exists simultaneously as both 1 and 0. Intel fellow Mark
Bohr believes the biannual doubling of computing power can be sustained for
at least another decade, while Sander thinks Moore's Law could be kept up
thanks to upcoming innovations. "The Nanoelectronics Research Initiative,
of which AMD is a member, is sponsoring ... university research to find new
physical-switching mechanisms that don't require the movement of [an]
electronic charge," Sander says.
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Taking Computer Chat to a Whole New Level
ICT Results (05/30/08)
The European Union-funded Talk and Look, Tools for Ambient Linguistic
Knowledge (TALK) project aims to enable verbal human-computer interaction
in everyday language through the development of adaptive spoken dialog
systems capable of learning from user interactions, says project
coordinator Oliver Lemon. The project involves the application of
machine-learning techniques in Information State Update (ISU) systems
devised by TALK's predecessor projects. In this approach, information is
recorded in the course of human-computer-dialogue and saved in the system's
"information state." Lemon says the method "allows a level of flexibility,
adaptivity, robustness, and naturalness of interaction which is superior to
the previous techniques, which rely on simple finite state machine
representations which essentially model conversations as enormous graphs."
The TALK technologies are additionally applicable to different languages,
operating systems, and graphical interfaces, making it more time- and
cost-effective to develop other applications that employ the technology.
ISU and machine-learning technologies have yielded SAMMIE, an in-car dialog
system that lets users control a MP3 player through speech, and TownInfo, a
service that offers tourists a talking guide of the site they are visiting.
Another significant achievement is MIMUS, a smart-home system for
wheelchair users that uses spoken dialog.
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Making the Impossible Possible
Cardiff University News (06/03/08)
The United Kingdom's Cardiff University now has an advanced supercomputer
that will allow researchers to run projects that were previously considered
too difficult or time consuming. Projects include working with the new
Positron Emission Tomography scanner to detect cancers at a smaller size
than previously possible, developing more accurate radiotherapy plans for
cancer, mapping the structure and function of the brain, simulating earth
mantle and tectonic plate movements to better understand earthquakes and
volcano eruptions, recreating the formation of stars and planets, and
working with engineers to model hydrodynamic processes that can be used for
tidal and wave power. The high-performance computer, which will be run by
Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff (ARCCA), will also be used to study
the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In addition to being one of the
most powerful computers at a British university, it will also be one of the
greenest. The computer houses 10 energy-efficient water-cooled racks.
"The new high-performance computer will allow a wide variety of studies
previously dismissed as impossible or impractical," says ARCCA director
Martyn Guest. "We look forward to talking to academics from all fields
about how ARCCA can help them achieve their research objectives."
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HP Aims to Shrink IT's Carbon Footprint
CNet (06/03/08) Wenzel, Elsa
Hewlett-Packard's Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab has launched the
Sustainable Data Center project with the goal of reducing power use in data
centers by 75 percent. The five-year initiative is part of a larger effort
to support the development of more sustainable technology and consumer
products. HP also has plans to replace copper wiring in servers with
laser-based communication as part of the lab's Photonic Interconnect
project. "We want to dematerialize the data center," says Sustainable IT
Ecosystem Lab director Chandrakant Patel. "Imagine circuit boards in close
proximity that communicate with light." By 2009, Patel plans to establish
a Web-based sustainability hub that would help create models of the carbon
footprint of consumer products, and include every aspect of manufacturing
and disposal.
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Motion-Capture System Adds Costume to the Drama
New Scientist (05/29/08) Robson, David
Special effects using the 3D movements of real actors were once only
available to big-budget filmmakers, but digital motion capture could soon
be available to low-budget productions because of new software that records
movement without using markers. Motion capture is usually done using
highly visible markers on a tight, dark suit worn by the actor to help the
camera track their movements. However, the vision-processing software used
to track these markers sometimes loses track of the markers and errors must
be corrected by hand. Researchers from Stanford University and the
Max-Planck Institute Informatik say they have developed software accurate
enough to capture the full movements of a person without markers. The
method starts with the creation of a 3D digital clone of the actor using a
laser scanner. Eight cameras then capture the actor's movements from
different angles as he or she acts out a scene. The recording of the
person's movement is then analyzed to animate the 3D clone. The
vision-processing software finds the outline of the actor in each frame,
using the eight different images to capture his or her movement. The
software compares the relative positions of features on the eight original
images to calculate other details such as creases in the actor's cloths.
The final 3D animation of the actor can then be inserted into the movie
setting. The new method is not confused by loose clothing, allowing the
actors to wear costumes during the recording. Capturing the movement of
real cloths, instead of simulating cloths with the computer, could make the
animations appear more realistic, as well as possibly improve the actor's
performance. The technique used to capture the movements of clothing could
one day be used to capture facial expressions, according to 4D View
Solutions motion capture expert Richard Broadbridge.
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New Computers Change Shape, Respond to Touch, Says
Prof
Queen's University (06/02/08)
Queen's University professor Roel Vertegaal is developing prototypes of
new "non-planar" devices in the school's Human Media Laboratory. Vertegaal
says these new "organic user interface" computers will take on forms and
functions no computer could manage today, such as soda cans with browsers
that display RSS feeds and movie trailers, or computers that respond to
direct touch and can change shape to better accommodate data. A section on
organic user interfaces, co-edited by Vertegaal and Ivan Poupyrev of the
Sony Interaction Laboratory in Tokyo, is featured in the June issue of
Communications of the ACM. Vertegaal says several recent developments in
computer technology have enabled researchers to reach beyond the rigid,
traditional designs of current interfaces. The first development is
advancements in touch input technologies that enable users to control
devices through two-handed, multi-finger touch interfaces. The second
development is the creation of flexible displays made from pliable circuit
boards with organic LEDs. The third development is the Kinetic Organic
Interface, which enables the design of computers that adjust their shape
according to some computational outcome, or through interactions with
users. Some of the projects at the Human Media Lab include a completely
foldable paper computer and an interactive Coke can with a cylindrical
display that plays videos on its surface and responds to touch.
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China's Cyber-Militia
National Journal (05/31/08) Vol. 40, No. 29, P. 16; Harris, Shane
China-based computer hackers, including those working on behalf of the
Chinese government and military, have deeply intruded into U.S. federal and
corporate information systems, stolen strategic information from American
executives prior to business negotiations in China, and accessed U.S.
electric power plants, possibly causing major outages, according to U.S.
government officials and computer security experts. Among those sounding
such warnings is former Cyber Security Industry Alliance President Tim
Bennett, who says these incidents emphasize the poor security of critical
U.S. electronic infrastructure, as well as government and company
officials' lack of acknowledgment of such vulnerabilities. Another
information-security expert says that hackers in China have been
aggressively mapping the technology infrastructure of American companies,
leading to concerns that such mapping is a prelude to information theft,
network corruption, and other malevolent activities. "The Chinese operate
both through government agencies, as we do, but they also operate through
sponsoring other organizations that are engaging in this kind of
international hacking, whether or not under specific direction," says
federal counterintelligence official Joel Brenner. "It's a kind of
cyber-militia." At a recent hearing, Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) criticized
the private sector's "halfhearted approach" to enhancing security, while
Cybrinth CEO Stephen Spoonamore says U.S. officials should be more
forthcoming about system breaches if the security of U.S. electronic
infrastructure and the sensitive information and operations embedded in
that infrastructure is to be fortified. Military analysts say China's
aggressive pursuit of offensive cyber-capabilities is one tool in a series
of "asymmetric" warfare tactics to counter U.S. military might, which
neither China's nuclear arsenal nor armed forces can match. The U.S.
military is preparing for the day when China or any other nation or hacker
group launches a full-bore cyberattack against the country's critical
infrastructure through programs such as the Air Force's Cyberspace
Command.
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Energy-Efficient Ethernet
IEEE Spectrum (05/08) Vol. 45, No. 5, P. 13; Patel-Predd, Prachi
Although Ethernet-based local-area networks can offer connections speeds
of up to 1 gigabit per second, many users do not need that much bandwidth
most of the time. Studies show that, on average, people use their Ethernet
links to full capacity less than 5 percent of the time, but the circuitry
on the network-interface controller always runs at full speed, wasting
power. University of South Florida, Tampa professor Ken Christensen says
there is no need to have a 1-gigabite link when there is no traffic on the
link. Christensen and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher
Bruce Nordman have developed the Adaptive Link Rate scheme to save some of
the wasted Ethernet power. Their solution is to adapt the Ethernet link's
speed to match a device's needs. For example, the machine would only have
a 100 Mbps link for simple tasks such as checking email, but would switch
to a 1 Gbps link when performing more demanding tasks such as downloading a
large file. At low data speeds the network controller chip's circuits
would work at a slower clock rate, and some could even be turned off to
reduce power consumption. Christensen and Nordman estimate that if such a
method was deployed in homes, offices, and data centers running at 1 Gbps,
switching to 100 Mbps whenever possible could save over $300 million in
energy costs. However, the researchers note that switching Ethernet speeds
is time-consuming; it can take up to two seconds. To make the technique
practical, the rate switch would have to happen in less than a millisecond,
meaning the researchers need to find a much faster protocol for the two
ends of an Ethernet link.
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