New Flavors of Web Addresses (Like .Sports) Are on the
Way
New York Times (06/27/08) P. C5; Carvajal, Doreen; Stone, Brad
ICANN has unanimously approved new rules that will allow governments,
companies, and organizations to use a name, brand, or generic word to
create a new Web address extension. Under the new rules, which ICANN says
are the biggest changes to the Internet's addressing system since its
creation, the City of New York could create the domain name .nyc, for
example. In addition, a company such as Coca-Cola could use its brand name
to create the domain name .coke. In order to create the new domain,
governments, companies, and organizations would have to submit an
application to ICANN. The application would then go through an independent
review process, at which time third parties could challenge it on the
grounds that the proposed suffix represents a possible threat to "morality
and public order." The new rules also stipulate that conflicts between two
parties that want to create the same domain name will be settled through
auctions. ICANN officials are planning to implement the changes slowly,
and plan to address many concerns and unanswered questions--including how
much the new domains will cost--during a public review process that could
last at least a year. ICANN also plans to seek public comment on the new
rules before its next major meeting in November. Activists such as People
for Internet Responsibility cofounder Lauren Weinstein worry that the
system will create new opportunities for those who try to exploit the
Internet address system. Others worry that the system will confuse Web
users and cause legal fights over applications to register trademarks.
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University of Portsmouth Researchers Work on CCTV That
Can Hear
Computer Business Review (06/25/08) Navuluri, Bhavana
University of Portsmouth researchers are working on a three-year project
to incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities into visual recognition
software that would enable CCTV cameras to turn in the direction of a
certain sound and capture it in about 300 milliseconds. "So, if in a car
park someone smashes a window, the camera would turn to look at them and
the camera operator would be alerted," says David Brown, director of the
Institute of Industrial Research. Portsmouth will not have the algorithms
capture full conversations, but they will be capable of listening for
specific words associated with violence. The idea is to develop shapes of
sounds that can be recognized by the software of the CCTV cameras. "The
software will use an artificial intelligence template for the waveform of
sound shapes and if the shape isn't an exact fit, use fuzzy logic to
determine what the sound is," Brown says.
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Institute for CyberScience to Expand Computer Power for
Research
Penn State Live (06/25/08) Messer, Andrea; Fong, Vicki
The Pennsylvania State University Institute for CyberScience (ICS) is
working to expand the computing power available to researchers. ICS
director Padma Ragahavan, who specializes in parallel scientific computing
and computational science, says ICS researchers will look at scalable
computing and the transformation of data to knowledge. ICS, along with
other Penn State institutes, will be working on high-impact, large-scale
research efforts that aim to improve life on Earth through the environment,
biological sciences, and innovation, including problems such as infectious
diseases, global energy needs, personalized therapies, and material design.
"Simply making something bigger does not necessarily work," Ragahavan
says. "The algorithms are complex, and scaling does not always work in the
parallel computing environment from multicore processors to petascale
systems." In complex networking, ICS will work on everything from theory
to systems design and processes, network searching and retrieval and
scalable computing, and network sensors and data fusion. In modeling, ICS
will work on simulations, continuous models, models of models, and
real-time systems. ICS will work with other major university units,
including the Applied Research Laboratory, the Huck Institutes of the Life
Sciences, Materials Research Institute, the Social Science Research
Institute, and the Penn State Institute of Energy and the Environment.
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Rogue Code Could Seriously Skew US Presidential Election
Results
IT Business Canada (06/25/08) Jackson, Brian
Experts at A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and
Transparent Elections (ACCURATE) say rogue programmers could disrupt U.S.
elections that use electronic voting systems. ACCURATE warns that a single
rogue programmer writing code for one of the many elections that use
e-voting machines could completely distort election results. "One
programmer could make a change in the software that would affect 100,000
votes," says ACCURATE investigator David Dill. The 2002 federal Help
America Vote Act provided funding to replace traditional voting machines
with direct-recording electronic (DRE) systems, and some states have been
using e-voting systems since the 2006 Congressional elections. ACCURATE
director Avi Rubin says having the entire country vote on a single day
presents quite a problem, and while he does not think the country should
switch back to punch cards, he still cautions that the U.S. should stay
away from DRE machines. The main problem is that they cannot be audited,
Rubin says, so the machines could produce the wrong results without anyone
ever knowing. Rubin, who will serve as a poll clerk in the upcoming
presidential elections, says the anonymous paper survey used to evaluate a
training session he ran was more secure than the Diebold Accuvote machines
that will be used to register votes in Maryland in the presidential
election, because the machines could be compromised by a virus and it would
be much more difficult to alter the survey on paper. ACCURATE is working
on an open source threat modeling system called AttackDog that calculates
all the possible iterations of steps that would be needed to rig an
election system to find key points where such efforts could be thwarted.
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Mobile Linux Standards Forum Gives Up
ZDNet UK (06/26/08) Meyer, David
The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum announced that it will merge with
the Linux Mobile Foundation, which analysts say is a significant setback in
the effort to create a formal mobile Linux standard. The merger will put
the attempted standardization of mobile Linux on hold indefinitely. LiPS
and LiMo are complementary in many ways, with LiPS working to create a
formal standard for mobile Linux, and LiMo looking to create a shared
implementation of an open source mobile platform. Many members of LiPS had
already switched to LiMo, but pressure from new mobile open source groups
is pushing the industry away from formal standards as the focus shifts to
getting products to market. LiMo chief Morgan Gillis says LiPS was a
sincere effort to create coalescence on mobile Linux, but LiMo offered a
different formula that the industry has found to be more attractive. "The
outcome of work by organizations like LiMo, Android, and others may end up
creating a standard that is more formalized after the fact," says outgoing
LiPS head Bill Weinberg. "The sense of urgency in the industry has to do
with the feeling that other players are breathing down their necks. An
injection of urgency can cause a change in course and a change in plans."
Weinberg says the change of pace was an indirect result of Apple's iPhone,
which prompted other companies to accelerate their development efforts.
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Online Service Lets Blind Surf the Internet From Any
Computer, Anywhere
University of Washington News and Information (06/25/08) Hickey, Hannah
University of Washington researchers have developed WebAnywhere, an
Internet-based screen-reading program that blind and visually impaired
users can access from any computer. The free software turns screen-reading
into an Internet service that reads aloud Web text on any computer with
speakers or headphones. University of Washington professor Richard Ladner
will demonstrate the program in Dallas at the National Federation of the
Blind's annual convention. Free screen readers already exist, as do
sophisticated commercial programs, but they all must be installed on a
machine to be used. WebAnywhere is the first accessibility tool that is
hosted on the Web, and does not have to be downloaded to be used.
WebAnywhere processes the text on an external server and sends the audio
file to play in the user's Web browser. UW computer science doctoral
student Jeffrey Bigham, who developed WebAnywhere under Ladner's
supervision, says the development team plans to create updates that will
enable users to change the speed at which the text is read, and add other
popular features found in existing screen readers. "Traditional desktop
tools such as email, word processors, and spreadsheets are moving to the
Web," Bigham says. "Access technology, which currently runs only on the
desktop, needs to follow suit."
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Aussie Scientists Push Transistor Barrier
ZDNet Australia (06/25/08) Serpo, Alex
Scientists in Australia have used nano fabrication to build a wire that is
only three atoms thick. Researchers with the Center for Quantum Computing
Technologies worked with a scanning tunnel microscope as they placed single
phosphorus atoms in a wafer of silicon, says the center's Michelle Simmons.
Single atom fabrication represents a key step in the effort to build
single atom transistors. "We are interested in the fundamentals of what
can and can't be done," Simmons says. "The semiconductor industry must
figure out when Moore's Law will fail." Single atom transistors are
critical for the development of quantum computers. IBM has shown
considerable interest in the research, and believes it could lead to new
chip architectures that will impact the future of computing as well as
medicine.
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Robot Snakes Slither Forward
CNet (06/24/08) Lombardi, Candace
Norwegian research company the SINTEF Group is developing an aluminum
robot designed to crawl through pipes, both horizontal and vertical, using
a snake-like squirming motion. "When the robot enters a vertical pipe, it
lifts its head in the pipe and meets the pipe wall," SINTEF says. "It can
then either move sideways with its abdomen against the pipe and twist
itself upwards, or it can topple backwards, attach itself to the pipe wall,
in the same way as we would put our feet against a shaft wall to hold on,
and then roll upwards." The unfinished prototype, when completed, will
contain about 11 modules connected by joints, reaching a total of about 1.5
meters in length. The researchers are using a Lego Mindstorms robot with
an attached camera that navigates a pre-programmed pipe system, and are
working on a visual system that will allow the robot to detect pipe turns
so it can navigate itself as needed through any system of pipes. SINTEF's
robot is similar to the ACM-R5, an amphibious robot developed at the
Hirose-Fukushima Robotics Lab at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in
Japan. Carnegie Mellon University roboticists are also working on a
snake-like robot.
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Artificial Brain Predicts Death-Row Executions
New Scientist (06/25/08) Marks, Paul
Loyola University researchers have developed a computer system that can
predict which death row prisoners will have their sentences carried out.
The researchers found that the people most likely to be executed are
inmates who have had the least amount of education, and not those who
committed the most heinous crimes. The researchers studied the 3,228
inmates on death row in 2006, and were initially unable to detect any
similarities in the 53 inmates that were executed. To discover what
factors might be linked to executions the researchers created an artificial
neural network and entered the profiles of 1,000 death row inmates between
1973 and 2000, half of which had been executed. Each inmate's profile
contained 18 factors, and profiles for 300 more inmates from the same
period were then submitted to the artificial neural network for analysis.
The system was able to correctly predict the outcome of more than 90
percent of those 300 inmates. To find out what factors had the greatest
impact on the likelihood of execution, the researchers retrained the neural
network multiple times, each time withholding information on one of the
factors. Gender was a significant factor, with women rarely being
executed, while race, which has been suspected as being a key factor, was
not found to be as important as previously thought. The most significant
factor, by far, was education level, specifically the number of years the
inmate spent in high school.
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Network Designed to Help Health Care Professionals
ICT Results (06/19/08)
The European Union-funded Doc@Hand project has developed a computer system
designed to give health care professionals access to a broader range of
medical information. Doc@Hand is designed to automatically provide
information to health care professionals rather than expecting those
professionals to seek out all relevant information. The data can be
delivered to a computer or mobile device. Such speedy access to
information should lead to faster and better diagnosis and decision-making.
The Doc@Hand project was part of an effort to fight colon cancer by a
network of hospitals and other health organizations through improved
screening and early referral of potential cases by primary care doctors to
cancer specialists at the Hospital Clinic de Barcelona. Drawing from the
user's profile and previous search history, the system aims to improve the
quality of information returned. The system also has a powerful XML-based
search engine and a subsystem that includes a linguistic parser and a
system of ontologies designed to provide better search results. For
example, a search for one word will deliver multiple words from the same
class that can be regarded as semantically equivalent, creating richer
search results. Doc@Hand was first tested using clinical notes and
comparing the results to the information health professionals said they
would expect. The system was able to provide about 92 percent of the
expected information.
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New Green Supercomputer Powers Up at Purdue
Campus Technology (06/20/08) Schaffhauser, Dian
Researchers at Purdue University are using a new supercomputer that
requires one-fortieth the power of traditional supercomputers and costs
less. The supercomputer is expected to lower energy costs by 75 percent to
80 percent and also reduce the cooling costs. The machine's processors
require 600 milliwatts of power each, the equivalent of what a cell phone
or small flashlight draws. The unique architecture of the supercomputer
enables it to consume less power and have a non-traditional processor, but
the design also means it is better for researching some science than
others. Rudolf Eigenmann, interim director of Purdue's Computing Research
Institute, says the supercomputer will be good for research in chemistry,
genetics, and nano-electronics. "We've put this computer to use from the
first day, but we will also be looking for more areas in which we can use
lower-power computing," Eigenmann says.
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Where the Wild Things Are: Computer Science Professor's
Breakthrough Maps the Cool Quest
Columbia University (06/20/08) Poratta, David
Columbia University professor Tony Jebara has developed Citysense, a
tracking software service that can highlight the hottest clubs and hangouts
in real time, similar to how a Doppler system highlights inclement weather.
Citysense uses machine learning to process data gathered from thousands of
cell phones, GPS-equipped cabs, and other devices that indicate where
people are gathering. Citysense calculates how many people are at each
location and enables users to look on their cell phones to see which places
are drawing the biggest crowds. The technology can also be used to see if
traffic is backed up or flowing. Citysense does have privacy implications.
Although information is gathered anonymously, it could be used by
marketers and consumer researchers looking to enhance their sales pitches
and learn where people shop or hang out. Citysense is currently available
for San Francisco and will soon be available in Chicago, followed by five
additional cities. Citysense was co-developed by MIT's Alex Pentland, and
is an extension of Sense Network's Macrosense system, which is a more
complex data-gathering and processing application. "There is no single
equation describing human activity, but by computing statistics from
millions of locations and flow between them, it becomes possible to find
clusters, trends, explanations, and predictive patterns," Jebara says.
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A Display That Tracks Your Movements
Technology Review (06/20/08) Greene, Kate
Samsung and Reactrix Systems are developing interactive advertising
displays that enable users to wave their hands to play games, navigate
menus, and use maps. Reactrix chief scientist Matt Bell says the Wii,
iPhone, and Microsoft's Surface have made people more open and ready to
interact using their hands and gestures. The idea behind Reactrix's system
is to use a camera to detect a person's body and then use computer vision
algorithms to understand the images. In Reactrix's current models made in
collaboration with Samsung, the company uses a stereoscopic camera with two
lenses; next to the camera an infrared light projects an invisible pattern
onto the people in front of the screen. Each lens captures a slightly
different view of a person's movement, and based on the differences in the
images, the system can determine the person's distance and movement down to
a fraction of an inch. Bell says the software is designed to disambiguate
people and objects and figure out scenarios such as when people are holding
hands or standing shoulder to shoulder.
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Efficiency Experts Seek to Save Precious Minutes in
Deploying Ambulances
Cornell News (06/16/08) Ju, Anne
Cornell University researchers are working to fine tune a computer program
that promises to improve the efficiency of ambulatory operations. The
amount of time it takes emergency medical technicians to reach a
destination is critical, and the computerized approach being studied
attempts to reduce response times by determining the best way to scatter
ambulances across a municipality in order to constantly maintain optimal
coverage. The three researchers--an expert in simulation optimization, an
authority in the field of dynamic programming, and a student of applied
mathematics--are working such data as call patterns, geographical layout,
and real-time locations of ambulances into the computer program. The goal
is to determine where ambulance bases should be located and where the
ambulances should be directed after finishing a call. What the team is
finding, based on its research, is that instead of returning an ambulance
to its base after a call, it may be more efficient to dispatch it to an
area that is lacking coverage--even if no calls have been received from
that zone at the time. "If everyone is constantly going back to the base
assigned, they're ignoring what's going on in real time in the system,"
says researcher Shane Henderson, the team's simulation optimization expert,
who previously has worked on emergency medical system planning.
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Technology: It's Where the Jobs Are
BusinessWeek (06/24/08) Hesseldahi, Arik
Jobs in the technology industry are growing at a steady rate, particularly
in big cities, reveals a new AeA survey. The Cybercities 2008 survey found
that 51 cities added high-technology jobs in 2006, the most recent year for
which data is available. While slowing economic conditions have slowed the
growth rate since the 2006 data was collected, AeA researcher Matthew
Kazmierczak says the tech industry is still strong and has not yet shown a
negative growth rate. Seattle showed the most growth with a net 7,800 new
jobs added during the survey period. New York and the Washington D.C.
metro areas were next, each adding more than 6,000 jobs. Riverside-San
Bernardino, Calif., saw the fastest growth by percentage, with
tech-employment figures jumping 12 percent. Silicon Valley had the highest
concentration of technology workers, 286 technology workers for every 1,000
workers, as well as the highest paid tech workers, with the average tech
worker earning $144,000 a year, nearly double the $80,000 national average
for tech jobs. The survey also found that technology wages are 87 percent
higher, on average, than the rest of the private sector, and tech wages are
growing faster. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Labor predicts that more
than 850,000 IT jobs will be added during the 10-year period ending in
2016, a 24 percent increase. After factoring in retiring tech workers,
there could be a total of 1.6 million available tech jobs in the near
future, meaning one in every 19 jobs created over the next decade will be
in technology.
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Computing Sustainability
Economist (06/19/08) Vol. 387, No. 8585, P. 78
The Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI) is a group of technology
firms that has joined the Climate Group, a nonprofit environmental club, in
an effort to examine how information and communications technologies (ICT)
affect climate change. A recent Climate Group report found that the ICT
industry actually creates about as much emissions as the aviation industry.
In 2007, the world's electronic equipment created 830 million tons of
carbon dioxide, about 2 percent of total emissions from all human activity.
Even as technology becomes more energy efficient, emissions from
technology are expected to grow to 1.4 billion tons by 2020, and while PCs,
mobile phones, and networks will account for 56 percent of these emissions,
emissions from data centers will grow the fastest. However, the Climate
Group found that the environmental benefits that result from this
technology offset the emissions. The study calculates that ICT could help
to reduce emissions in other industries by 7.8 billion tons by 2020, five
times ICT's own footprint. Technology such as videoconferencing and
teleworking reduces emissions caused by travel, and using computers to
improve logistics could save 1.5 billion tons. Using data networking
inside a smart electrical grid to better manage demand and reduce
unnecessary energy consumption could save 2 billion tons, and
computer-enabled smart buildings that automatically control and shut off
lighting and heating and cooling systems could save 1.7 billion tons. The
researchers say that new technical standards are needed to enable
appliances and devices to communicate with electrical systems and regulate
how much power is delivered.
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Why Women Quit Technology Careers
Computerworld (06/16/08) Vol. 42, No. 25, P. 34; Melymuka, Kathleen
If half the men in science, engineering, and technology roles quit
midcareer the trend would be considered a national crisis, yet more than
half of the women in science and engineering leave the field midcareer.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy,
recently discussed the research that went into the Athena Factor, a
research project examining the career trajectories of women in technology.
The research found that there are more women in lower areas of science and
technology than most people realize, and Hewlett says that women are
excelling in science, engineering, and technology despite the fact that
schools are not very good at encouraging them. She says that between the
ages of 25 and 30, 41 percent of professionals with credentials in science
and technology are female. However, later in their careers, 52 percent of
the women drop out, with the attrition rates among women jumping between
the ages of 35 and 40. Many of the companies involved in the Athena Factor
project are experimenting with programs aimed at reversing this trend.
Cisco Systems has launched the Executive Talent Insertion Program for the
lateral recruiting of senior women and multicultural talent. Intel has
created a women's engineering forum that will showcase women's research,
fight isolation, create solidarity and mentoring, and support creativity.
General Electric has initiated a program called Restart in its Bangalore
global research center that will reach out to women who left earlier in
their careers to facilitate their return.
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Sight for the Blind and Speech for the Deaf
Chronicle of Higher Education (06/27/08) Vol. 54, No. 42, P. A13;
Rampell, Catherine
Carnegie Mellon University professor Priya Narasimhan and her students are
developing technologies designed to turn cell phones into tools that can
give hearing- and vision-impaired people more independence. Cell phones
are appealing for their convenience and affordability, and they can be
purchased already equipped with text-to-speech software that many
handicapped people already use. Narasimhan has thus far advised one
student project to adapt cell phones for use by the deaf, and three for
their use by the blind. One of the adaptations for the blind employs a
program that enables users to retrieve scheduled bus routes on their smart
phones from the transit system's Web site, and to have the schedules read
aloud by the handset. In the second project for the visually impaired, a
tiny bar-code reader is connected to the cell phone, which retrieves
product names from a free online Universal Product Code database as an aid
for people shopping for groceries or other products. The third cell phone
project seeks to help blind people more easily identify currency by taking
pictures of their bills with a cell phone camera, and having software match
the bills to a database and then name the denomination. The project
devised to help deaf users involves the employment of text-to-speech
software on cell phones, and the use of a gesture-recognition glove that
can convert the wearer's hand movements into spoken words, thus easing
communication with hearing users who do not know American Sign Language.
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