School of Computing Researchers Develop a New Method for
Building Multilingual Ontologies
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (09/18/08)
Researchers from the Validation and Business Applications Group at the
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid's School of Computing have developed a
new way of building multilingual ontologies that can be applied to the
Semantic Web. The researchers say their method revolutionizes current
ontology building systems. The method is based on building ontologies that
can represent information irrespective of language, making the ontologies
applicable to multilingual systems. After analyzing the natural language,
the method looks for linguistic patterns, or grammatical structures, that
match the exact ontological structures. The linguistic patterns are
capable of building language-independent structures. The method's most
innovative aspect is the construction of multilingual ontologies using
universal words as the concept name. Universal words come from the United
National University's Universal Networking Language (UNL) project, which
was established to break down linguistic barriers on the Internet. The
researchers say the characteristics of UNL closely match the features of an
ontology. A major advantage of using the UNL system is that the universal
words are independent of the language and are not ambiguous, which makes
the translation of the ontology to any language extremely precise.
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High Turnout, New Procedures May Mean an Election Day
Mess
Washington Post (09/18/08) P. A1; Flaherty, Mary Pat
Election officials across the United States are concerned that a surge of
new voters will place extra stress on an election system that is in the
midst of a tumultuous transformation, with many jurisdictions introducing
new machines and rules to avoid the catastrophe that crippled the 2000
election and the lingering controversy of the 2004 election. Even over the
past few months, cities and counties have overhauled their voting
equipment. Nine million voters, including those in battleground states
such as Ohio, Florida, and Colorado, will use equipment that has changed
since March. These widespread changes, intended to reassure the public,
have increased the potential for trouble during the elections. "You change
systems and throw in lots of new voters, and you can plan to be up the
proverbial creek," says Election Data Services' Kimball Brace. Since
Congress passed the Help America Vote Act six years ago, $3 billion has
been spent to improve voting systems, largely on new equipment. However,
with touch-screen machines becoming extremely unpopular, more than half of
U.S. voters will use paper ballots tallied by optical scanners, producing a
paper trail that can be reexamined should questions arise. Meanwhile, more
than of the states will be using new statewide databases required by the
2002 law to improve the accuracy of voter rolls. Both campaigns have
already hired lawyers to challenge any irregularities, from registrations
to polling place problems to vote tallies. "The voting process is going to
be tested in a way it has not been in recent history," says Common Cause's
Tova Wang.
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NSF Picks Purdue to Lead Effort to Attract Women to STEM
Disciplines, Agriculture
Purdue University News (09/17/08) Hughes, Clyde
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Purdue University a
$3.92 million grant to launch a national model program to increase the
number and diversity of women faculty members in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The grant will support research and
programming for institutional transformation and create the Purdue Center
for Faculty Success. The center will provide targeted research, programs,
and university-level coordination to attract more women and to help women
succeed. Lessons learned at the center will be shared with other
institutions across the United States. Purdue president France A Cordova
says the effort will provide role models and encourage more young women to
enter STEM fields. "We expect the Purdue ADVANCE Institutional
Transformation project to become a national model for increasing the
participation and advancement of women in academic STEM careers," says NSF
ADVANCE program director Jessie DeAro. "The ADVANCE program was
particularly impressed with the proposed efforts to focus on increasing the
participation of underrepresented minority women." Purdue University
College of Science associate dean Christie L. Sahley says the center's goal
is to increase women faculty members by improving the diversity of faculty
candidates, enhancing the role of Purdue's ethnic cultural centers in
faculty support, and adopting best practices.
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Other Countries' IT Industries Catching Up to U.S.
IDG News Service (09/16/08) Gross, Grant
A shortage of skilled tech workers has made the U.S. IT industry less
competitive, but the United States still has the best environment for
information and communications technologies in the world, according to a
Business Software Alliance study. The United States' score fell slightly
from 77.4 in 2007 to 74.6 in 2008 in the study, which is based on a
100-point scale and reflects an assessment of the overall business
environment, IT infrastructure, human capital, legal environment, research
and development environment, and support for IT industry development. "A
deterioration in U.S. performance is possible should tougher immigration
controls have a negative impact on the pool of IT talent and the skills
base," the study says. "And as the U.S. and west European economies endure
a downturn, the impacts of a heavier regulatory touch and slower growth of
technology spending cannot be discounted." Taiwan was second in the study
of 66 countries, and was followed by the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark,
and Canada.
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A Spiritual Computing Hub?
Bangkok Post (09/17/08)
University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory senior
advisor Craig Warren Smith believes that Thailand could become a global
center for the development of spiritual computing technology, which focuses
on improving the end user experience by making it more meaningful.
Spiritual computing is only just emerging, and is being reflected in quests
by software designers to maximize the user experience, Smith says. Next
year Smith will be lecturing at Chulalongkorn University's Philosophy
Department's Centre of Ethics of Science and Technology. Smith also plans
to organize an international conference on spiritual computing. He wants
to establish Thailand as "a fundamental place for innovation in technology
design." He says that global innovation around the human computer
interface, based on Asian spiritual traditions, can start in Thailand, and
that the relationship between open source, open technology and Thailand's
open society should help enable this global innovation. Thailand's rich
Buddhist culture and strong IT design skills mean Thailand could unite
spiritual traditions from a variety of countries to build an ecosystem for
meaningful technologies, Smith says.
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Cyber Attack Data Sharing Is Lacking, Congress
Told
Washington Post (09/19/08) P. D2; Nakashima, Ellen
U.S. intelligence agencies are unable to share information on foreign
cyberattacks against companies due to a fear of jeopardizing
intelligence-gathering sources and methods, testified Paul B. Kurtz at the
first open hearing on cybersecurity held by the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence. Kurtz and other cybersecurity experts discussed
the Bush administration's Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative,
which focuses on cybersecurity espionage against government systems but,
according to the experts, does not adequately address the private sector.
The panelists, members of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies commission on cybersecurity, say there is no coordinated strategy
or mechanism for sharing intelligence about intrusions with companies, nor
is there a systematic way for companies to share information with the
government. Although certain information must be kept classified, the
government needs to be better at sharing unclassified information on
cyberattacks, says Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), who chairs the
intelligence committee. Office of the Director of National Intelligence's
Ross Feinstein says the intelligence community works very closely with law
enforcement on cyberattacks to share knowledge that might assist with
investigations, and with the Department of Homeland Security to assist with
infrastructure protection efforts. Kurtz also says the United States is
heavily investing in technologies that are being stolen at little to no
cost by the country's adversaries.
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ACM Accepting Nominations for Awards Honoring Excellence
in Computing and Information Technology
AScribe Newswire (09/17/08)
Computing and information technology professionals have until September 30
to nominate colleagues and peers for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
and the SIAM/ACM Award in Computational Science and Engineering, as part of
the 2008 ACM Awards Program. The deadline for making nominations for the
10 other awards in the program is November 30. The awards include the
prestigious A. M. Turing Award, which comes with a $250,000 cash reward,
and the recently announced ACM-Infosys Foundation Award, which has a cash
reward of $150,000. Nominations are to be submitted to the chairs of the
individual awards committees, which will have teams of leading technology
professionals and educators conduct the rigorous review process. ACM will
announce the winners in early 2009, and will schedule a gala benefit in the
spring to honor their contributions to computing and information
technology.
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Google Can Sort Digital Photos on Face Value
USA Today (09/16/08) Graham, Jefferson
Making software more capable of image recognition has been a longtime goal
of German-born computer scientist Harmut Neven, whose facial-recognition
software firm was purchased by Google in 2006 with the goal of bringing his
technology to digital photography. Neven has spent two years working with
Google's Picasa photo editing and management software team. The new
version of Picasa is now available online, and although Google engineers
say it is not perfect, the software is being heralded for its accuracy and
is considered a major step forward. After uploading photos to a Picasa Web
album, users can click on the "add name tag" feature. Photos from the
album are divided into groups based on the faces in the picture. The user
then adds names to the faces. The idea is that after each face has been
identified and tagged, that information could be used to search for photos
of certain people and groups of people. IDC analyst Chris Chute says
photo-recognition technology will become popular with consumers because it
will help them manage their growing libraries of digital photos. Some
privacy experts are concerned that Google's new feature provides too much
information, but Google's Mike Horowitz says the tagging feature is
optional, and turning it off erases all the data on the pictures. Neven
says his goal is to automate even more of the tasks involved with managing
digital images, such as enabling the software to recognize familiar faces
and automatically tag them with the appropriate names. "We want to make it
increasingly automatic and seamless," Neven says.
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Aesop Goes High-Tech
AlphaGalileo (09/15/08)
Researchers in Cyprus say information and communications technology (ICT)
has the potential to revolutionize the classroom experience of the youngest
students. Writing in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of
Technology Enhanced Learning, Nikleia Eteokleous of the Frederick
University of Cyprus and Despo Ktoridou and Dolapsakis Demetris of the
University of Nicosia discuss how educators could use animated versions of
short stories such as Aesop's Fables to enhance the learning experience.
ICT tools would allow teachers to hide and scatter scenes, and have
children find missing characters, change scenes altogether, and create
other interactive activities, such as puzzles. "Research has shown so far
that used appropriately, technology can improve children's thinking ability
and help them learn to work in groups," the researchers say. Young
students display more enthusiasm, understanding, and skills when ICT is
used in such a way, they report. "Our findings reveal the importance of
integrating computer technology in early childhood classrooms, given
teachers' and pupils' positive reactions and experiences as well as the
educational benefits and gains for the students," the researchers say.
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A Face-Finding Search Engine
Technology Review (09/17/08) Greene, Kate
New facial-recognition software from Carnegie Mellon University
researchers could make it easier to identify a person's face in a
low-resolution video. The researchers say the software also could be
integrated into next-generation video search engines. Carnegie Mellon
researcher Pablo Hennings-Yeomans says that to get a face-recognition
system to identify a person, it must first be trained on a database of
faces. For each face, the system uses a feature-extraction algorithm to
discern patterns in the arrangement of pixels. As the software is trained,
it learns to associate some of those patterns with physical traits, such as
eye orientation or chin prominence. However, Hennings-Yeomans says the
problem is that existing face-recognition systems can only identify faces
in pictures with the same resolution as the pictures the system was trained
on. Hennings-Yeomans and colleagues developed an approach that improves
face-recognition systems that use super-resolution algorithms, or adding
pixels to make the picture match the pictures used in training. The
researchers designed software that combines aspects of a super-resolution
algorithm and the feature-extraction algorithm of a face-recognition
system. To find a match for the image, the system first uses the
intermediary algorithm, which extracts features that are readable by the
face-recognition system to avoid distortions that are characteristic of
super-resolution algorithms.
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In Digital Age, Federal Files Blip Into Oblivion
New York Times (09/13/08) P. A1; Pear, Robert
Federal employees struggling to cope with the explosion of electronic
records are neglecting to regularly save the documents they produce in
digital form, and many federal records are slipping through the cracks as a
result. Exacerbating the situation is uncertainty over what documents are
deemed worthy of preservation, and historians, archivists, librarians,
congressional investigators, and watchdog organizations are especially
concerned about how these problems will impact attempts to trace the
decision-making process and assign accountability to federal officials.
"My biggest worry is that even with the best and brightest minds working on
this problem, the risks are so great that we may lose significant portions
of our history," says Richard Pearce-Moses, former president of the Society
of American Archivists. The federal government's digital bookkeeping
challenge becomes more complicated every month as employees generate
billions of email messages, and the decentralization of record keeping and
the reduction of federal clerical employees is adding to the difficulty.
Experts fear that digitally preserved items may not be readily accessible
in the future because the equipment and software needed to read them will
become relics. "At the most basic level, many agency employees do not even
understand what a federal record is, much less how it must be preserved,"
laments Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility
and Ethics. Companies that failed to provide electronic records sought in
litigation have been slapped with severe penalties, and similar penalties
can be imposed on the federal government for such failures.
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Robot Knows When It Hits a Person
Assembly Magazine (09/11/08)
Roboticist Sami Haddadin is part of a German Aerospace Center Space Agency
(DLR) research team aimed at transforming industrial robots into smart
machines capable of working alongside humans. DLR is testing the first
industrial robot capable of sensing when it hits someone. Haddadin says
that accidents happen and we have to accept the fact that when people start
working more closely with robots, collisions will occur. To design a safer
industrial robot, DLR researchers tested smashing robotic arms, weighing up
to 2.5 tons, into a crash test dummy at different speeds. To give robots
the ability to detect an impact, Haddadin mimics human's ability to feel
blows, which sense the shock of an impact through specialized stretch
receptors in muscles and joints. In each of the robot's six joints are
embedded torque sensors that change their electrical resistance when under
tension in a particular direction. The sensors give constant feedback on
the direction and magnitude of the forces felt by the arm, which are used
to determine if the robot encounters abnormal forces. Once the robot
detects an impact, it stops and supports its own weight to ensure that
inertia or gravity does not cause further harm to the person. The robot
also can be pushed out of the way using minimal force.
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EU's P2P Project Makes Everyone a Broadcaster
EE Times (09/12/08) Yoshida, Junko
The P2P-Next group, a consortium of European broadcasters, academia, and
technology companies, plan to redefine peer-to-peer (P2P) technology by
creating a next generation P2P content delivery platform that connects
millions of TV sets. By bringing P2P technology to TVs, the proposed P2P
platform will enable consumers to broadcast live streams, either their own
content or a TV channel, to millions of users on the Internet. Consortium
members include the BBC, the European Broadcasting Union, the Broadcast
Technology Institute in Munich, Technical University of Delft, and several
technology companies. The P2P-Next group recently demonstrated what it
calls the world's first live P2P streaming of professional content to
low-cost set-top boxes using an open source P2P video delivery platform.
The Internet infrastructure currently is ill-suited for transmitting live
events to millions of people simultaneously, as too many requests for
simultaneous streams of data can easily cripple a network. Some technology
firms have been emphasizing multicasting as a solution. Multicasting
allows the data stream to be distributed to numerous local servers, which
subsequently re-broadcast the content to local users. However, ISPs are
reluctant to make the significant investment in IP routers and adding more
servers to the edges of their networks. Pioneer's Mark Stuart says
redistributing the data stream between peers, without using a central
service, by connecting millions of TV sets, offers a scalable and robust
solution at almost zero cost.
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Melbourne Team Aims to Find Green Tinge in
Cyberspace
Australian (09/10/08) Zukerman, Wendy
University of Melbourne professor Rodney Tucker is researching ways to
make information technology more energy efficient. "Our growing love
affair with the Internet is increasing greenhouse emissions more than
people realize," Tucker says. He says IT could consume 10 percent of world
energy use in the next 10 to 20 years. "Everything from the computer
itself to the data centers use energy," he notes. For example, Google data
centers use more energy than it takes to power 10,000 Australian homes.
Tucker says the engineering challenges associated with managing the power
consumption of the Internet is of increasing concern. "The part of the
Internet that consumes most of the energy is the modem in the home," he
says. "The home modem is usually switched on all the time." The
University of Melbourne is conducting research to make modems more
intelligent, so when the Internet is not being used the modem automatically
goes to a power-save mode. Still, Tucker acknowledges that the Internet
also has the power to save energy. He says that in the not too distant
future people will have Internet-connected TVs that can download movies,
saving a trip to the theater or the rental store, and high-definition
videoconferences, making travel less necessary.
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Wearing Tech: Where Fashion Meets Technology
CIO (09/09/08) Wilson, Ashley Laurel
Researchers and clothing designers are investigating various modes of
wearable technology or "wearables," which are becoming increasingly chic.
"Expression is arguably the most important function of clothing today--and
arguably one of the key reasons we wear clothes at all, historically
speaking--and it seems natural that technology will eventually influence
the ways in which we express ourselves and communicate through clothing,"
says professor Lucy Dunne with the University of Minnesota's School of
Design. Textile designer Kerri Wallace says the tipping point that caused
interest in wearables to explode occurred because of an excitement over the
possibility of intelligence migrating away from "hard" products and toward
something "soft," "flexible," and "invisible." Some people argue that the
convergence of textiles and technology is the defining characteristic of
wearables, but wearables are not restricted to fabrics with electronics
woven into them. Among the barriers hindering mainstream acceptance of
wearables is their cost, while Moondial founder Sabine Seymour says the
success of wearables beyond niche markets requires designs in which the
technological elements are seamlessly and unobtrusively incorporated into
the garments. "Long-term acceptance of wearable technology depends a lot
more on what it has to offer users than on the prevailing fashion trends,"
Dunne says. "Trends come and go--wearables ideally would gain acceptance
more like other gadgets than like a fashion trend."
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Talk of Future: Speech Translators Near Reality
Nikkei Weekly (09/08/08) Vol. 46, No. 2353, P. 17
The technology for automated speech translation, which blends speech
recognition software with a database of linguistic resources made
accessible by an Internet-enabled cell phone, may soon be available. The
Japanese government's Council for Science and Technology Policy projects
that Japanese travelers who are unfamiliar with English or Mandarin will be
able to visit countries such as the United States and China without hitting
a language barrier within five years, while within 10 years they will be
able to converse in even more languages, thanks to advances in automated
speech translation. The National Institute of Information and
Communications Technology (NICT) has teamed with a number of private
companies to build a practical automated speech translator by 2015, while
NEC is testing a proprietary speech-recognition technology designed to
compare audio input with a database of word cluster patterns to keep up
with conversations. "If we combined that kind of speech recognition with a
translation system, we would have an automated speech translator, providing
something akin to simultaneous interpretation at meetings and lectures,"
says NEC's Akitoshi Okumura. In August, NICT tested automated speech
translator technologies that enable two-way Japanese-Chinese translation.
The translation is performed on an online server so that the handheld's
word database can be updated anytime. Through the use of the Internet,
sentences taken from actual conversations can be uploaded to the database,
and this month NICT will launch a forum to convene academic and
private-sector researchers to develop an automated speech translator
capable of supporting the concurrent translation of multiple languages.
This group will permit researchers from various organizations and companies
to share sample sentences and the technologies they have created.
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