RAD Lab Wins Backing From Five Major IT Firms
UC Berkeley News (05/30/06) Moore, Theresa
The University of California, Berkeley, has announced that IBM,
Hewlett-Packard, NTT, Nortel, and Oracle are partnering with the
university's Reliable, Adaptive, and Distributed (RAD) systems laboratory
(RAD Lab), with each pledging up to $170,000 in annual contributions over
the next five years. The partnership illustrates both the importance of
the RAD Lab's work on developing the next generation of Internet design
tools and the changing dynamic of long-term university research funding.
"Until recently, federal grants from the Department of Defense's Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation
covered research costs for large projects such as this," said ACM President
David Patterson, founding director of the RAD Lab. "But reductions in
government funding of information technology research led us to seek
alternative funding sources." The RAD Lab is trying to adapt new
discoveries in machine learning to manage the vast, distributed computing
systems required by data-intensive Internet companies. The lab is
developing software to automate the time-consuming tasks of creating and
maintaining these systems. "System failures and security breaches are
facts of life, so the most practical solution is to focus on fast detection
and recovery from failures, as well as on immediate detection and isolation
or containment of security breaches," Patterson said. "We hope to automate
that with statistical machine learning." Any code produced by the RAD Lab
will be freely available to the public under the Berkeley Software
Distribution License. The sponsor companies will dispatch consultants to
advise the center's activities, though none will actually work at the lab.
Patterson says the companies will benefit from observing the development
process, and will be able to guide the researchers by presenting obstacles
that could arise when the technology is put to commercial use.
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Debating the Bugs of High-Tech Voting
Washington Post (05/30/06) P. A15; Goldfarb, Zachary A.
As midterm elections near, the debate centering on the security of
e-voting systems is heating up as voting machine vendors and voting rights
activists clash over the severity of a recently discovered vulnerability.
The vulnerability, discovered in a Diebold machine several weeks ago in
Utah, would enable anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of computer
programming to manipulate the code and alter votes in just a few minutes
time, security researchers claim. California and Pennsylvania issued a
warning to all counties in those states that use the Diebold machines,
though the degree of the threat remains a point of sharp disagreement.
David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, was shocked when he found out about the threat exposed in Utah,
and echoed the "frequently expressed opinion that this is the worst
vulnerability we have ever seen." Diebold counters that the vulnerability
was a product of design, that it is there to enable the machines to easily
receive software upgrades, and that a person could only tamper with
election results if given unrestricted access to the machines. E-voting
systems came into widespread use after the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of
2002, which was passed in the wake of the disastrous 2000 presidential
election, but electronic machines do not improve the reliability of voting
process without a manual paper trail, voting rights advocates argue. While
it has never been proven that ballots have been manipulated in an actual
election, numerous votes have been delayed by flaws in the technology. The
federal Election Assistance Commission, created to assist in HAVA
implementation at the state level, claims that it is in the process of
improving the election-system certification process, though voting-rights
groups in several states have been pursuing legal action to halt the
purchase of new electronic systems. For information on ACM's e-voting
activities, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm.
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Senate Immigration Bill Raises H-1B Limit
IDG News Service (05/30/06) Gross, Grant
Tucked within the Senate immigration reform bill that has become the focal
point of a contentious national debate is a provision calling for an
expansion of the number of H-1B visas allotted annually to highly skilled
foreign workers. Passed by the Senate on Thursday, the bill would raise
the annual H-1B cap from 65,000 to 115,000, but it has come under fire from
House Republicans who claim that it takes a soft stance on illegal
immigration. Technology companies have been calling for more H-1B visas
for some time, claiming that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find
qualified U.S. workers. By passing the bill, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates
credited the Senate with having taken a "critical step forward in its
important work to ensure that our nation remains the global leader in
technology innovation." A group working on behalf of U.S. IT workers
claims that the H-1B program is fraught with abuses, and that companies pay
H-1B workers below their market value. "The program is basically broken
and can easily be manipulated," said Ron Hira of the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers. "Until it's fixed, it makes no sense
to increase the cap." Despite clearing the Senate, the bill faces stiff
opposition from Republican lawmakers and an uncertain future.
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Outward Bound for Robots
Technology Review (05/31/06) Graham-Rowe, Duncan
Scientists have tested navigation software based on the hippocampus of the
human brain in a self-driven robotic car. The system allows the robot to
take "cognitive fingerprints" of its environment so that it can explore new
places while building a living memory. In testing, the robotic vehicle,
complete with a laser range finder and omnidirectional camera, successfully
navigated more than one and a half kilometers in an urban environment
before it got lost. The system has also been put to the kidnapping test,
where an indoor robot is "blindfolded," taken to an unfamiliar location,
and left to then find its way home. The kidnapping test raises the problem
of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), an area of increasing
importance as robots begin to take on more autonomous functionality. The
difficulty arises when trying to create a map that will help a robot
navigate an area that it is still exploring, which requires the robot to
map foreign terrain while simultaneously updating its own position. "To
localize the robot, a map is necessary, and to update a map, the position
of the mobile robot is needed," said Adriana Tapus, a roboticist at the
University of Southern California who designed the system. The sensor
measurements also carry a degree of inherent uncertainty, which can throw
off the accuracy of the maps. Tapus' technique mimics the way that people
navigate by culling together raw data from the robot's sensors, such as
corners and colors, and combining them into a basic description, or
fingerprint, about the location. Tapus maintains that it is the
combination of the features that makes the fingerprints unique, which she
believes is the same technique used by humans to remember landmarks.
Scientists have identified the distinct firing patterns of the cells in a
mammal's hippocampus that are responsible the animal's memory of locations,
recreating the technique with probabilistic algorithms.
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MSU Professor to Try New Teaching Method in
Germany
Montana State University (05/31/06) Ellig, Tracy
Montana State University computer science professor John Paxton plans to
use problems from programming competitions to teach students about data
structures and algorithms. Paxton, who has served as an MSU advisor for
the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for 16 years, will try the
new teaching method on students at the University of Leipzig in Germany,
where he is spending the 2006-2007 academic year after receiving a
Fulbright Scholar Award. Students are typically shown which data
structures and algorithms will solve a particular problem, but they do not
gain a greater appreciation for the complexity of the solutions. "The
traditional way of teaching this topic takes the excitement and challenge
out of the material," says Paxton. He has seen firsthand how exciting the
subject matter can be for students involved in programming competitions
such as the annual ACM event, in which teams of three students have five
hours to solve eight problems on a single computer. "They come back very
motivated to learn more computer science because the competition points out
what knowledge they're missing," says Paxton. The response of Leipzig
students to competition problems will determine how much of the course he
will incorporate into his teaching methods upon his return to MSU.
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Incidents Prompt New Scrutiny of Airplane Software
Glitches
Wall Street Journal (05/30/06) P. A1; Michaels, Daniel; Pasztor, Andy
As commercial airplanes grow more dependent on increasingly complex
computer code, software glitches are emerging as a primary safety concern.
The systems in the latest jetliner contain more than 5 million lines of
computer code, compared to fewer than 1 million in older models, making it
increasingly difficult to locate the flaw when something goes wrong. While
the software used in planes is tested far more rigorously than everyday
office applications, the errors that inevitably arise can have much more
serious consequences, and officials have begun reviewing flight data from
earlier accidents to determine what role, if any, faulty software played.
"It's our next big area of work," said Peggy Gillian of the FAA, adding
that only recently officials and experts "came to the realization that we
haven't looked at this area" closely enough. While no airplane crash has
yet been attributed to malfunctioning software, several recent incidents
where software glitches have disrupted flights have called attention to the
problem. "A total loss of flight control could be worse than a fire on
board," said Robin McCall, a retired pilot for Delta Air Lines. McCall
says that automation programs can make it difficult for pilots to revert to
manual controls to overcome a problem. Experts agree, however, that air
travel has become much safer since the introduction of automated systems.
Today's autopilot systems handle much more of the plane's functions than
when they were first designed, including adjusting the cabin's air
pressure, optimizing fuel efficiency, and warning of the threat of
collision or mechanical breakdown. Forthcoming models, such as Boeing's
787 Dreamliner, will bring new levels of automation, replacing autonomous
hardware and software with redundant central computers. A group of U.S.
airlines, pilots' unions, jet manufacturers, and software vendors recently
launched a data-gathering initiative to analyze previous computer-related
accidents.
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Intelligent Beings in Space!
New York Times (05/30/06) P. D1; Chang, Kenneth
The increasing distance and duration of space exploration missions has led
scientists to develop new and faster methods of interplanetary
communication. Scientists are using artificial intelligence techniques to
automate spacecraft, looking to devices such as iRobot's robotic vacuum
cleaner Roomba for inspiration. Intelligent software already manages the
schedule of Earth Observing-1 (EO-1), a satellite that monitors the Earth
for events such as volcanic eruptions, scanning for changes that could
indicate a natural disaster. "Almost immediately, within a matter of
hours, the spacecraft is reprogramming itself to image these targets," said
NASA's Steve Chien, "and we can get a very rapid response imagery of
breaking science events." The computer can readjust the satellite's
schedule, postponing other observations based on the data it collects and
the data supplied by sensors and other satellites. The planning software
pruned EO-1's budget by one-quarter when it was introduced in 2003, and it
could see future use in new planetary explorations, such as the next
mission to Jupiter and its moons. NASA's two Mars rovers both contain
stereo cameras that enable them to navigate around rocks and other
obstacles, and they will soon receive an upgrade to speed the process of
relaying instructions from mission control. Another software improvement
will enable the rovers to take a preliminary look at their data and only
send back the images that are useful. Tests have shown that the software
correctly identifies the clouds that the rovers are studying 93 percent of
the time, which will dispense with the time-consuming transfer of
meaningless data. The software still has a long way to go, however. "None
of the AI systems are as smart as a 2-year-old," said NASA's Cynthia
Cheung. New applications will incorporate machine learning, where a
computer's intelligence builds based on its collected experiences.
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Keeping Computers in Check
CNet (05/26/06) Terdiman, Daniel
If left to develop unchecked, computers could become so dependent on
algorithms that they could overlook basic issues of livability as they
execute tasks such as determining the maximum number of buildings in a
neighborhood, warns Sheldon Brown, the head of the University of California
at San Diego's Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, where he
develops and oversees research on the power of algorithm-based content.
"Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should," Brown said.
"When we build tools, we have to think deeper and broader about what the
tool is doing." Brown has developed a preliminary version of a software
application called "Scalable City" to help researchers explore the extent
to which computational power can aid and even automate urban planning and
video game development. Using "L-curves," the multimedia Scalable City can
digitally fill the image of a barren landscape with rows of new houses
flanking elegantly curved roads. Brown warns that while the neighborhood
looks ideal from an aerial view, on the street at the micro level, the
computer cannot know how livable the environment will actually be for
humans. The tendency of the algorithm-based Scalable City to design
neighborhoods too crowded with buildings for human inhabitants illustrates
Brown's fear that looking at computer power from the macro perspective
ignores the logical errors that are only visible on the micro scale.
Scalable City could also lead to practical applications in video game
design within a couple years, such as new tools for enabling multiple
players to control and engage in the games. Brown notes that humans in
many ways already constitute a living data set. "Our lives in general are
now really a part of algorithmic processes," he said, adding that the
"major part of our lives are for producing algorithmic data and then
interacting with it. We've become I/O, input/output."
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The Next Wave of the Web
Nature (05/26/06) Butler, Declan
In a recent interview, Nigel Shadbolt, chair of the panel 'The Next Wave
of the Web' at the recent WWW2006 conference, discussed the current and
future states of the Web. The dominant theme at the conference was the
emergence of wireless broadband for mobile devices, which will bring the
concept of ubiquitous computing closer to reality than ever. The emergence
of pervasive mobile computing will bring the Web to millions of people
around the world who cannot afford computers or live in areas with no
network infrastructure. The conference also focused on Web 2.0 in the
context of solving problems through the broad participation of many users.
Shadbolt noted computer users' growing willingness to share data on the
Web, pointing to the mash-up phenomenon as evidence of the potential of the
open-data movement. Microsoft's Tony Hey gave a presentation on e-science,
or the trend of scientists using massive, distributed datasets to conduct
research. Shadbolt, whose background is in artificial intelligence,
believes that the Web will be the environment where the discipline will
finally realize its potential, noting that the Bayesian statistical methods
that enable machines to make decisions already pervade the Web, such as the
open-source Bayesian spam blocker, SpamBayes. Shadbolt is also optimistic
that the Semantic Web could finally begin living up to its expectations.
Even simple descriptions about the meaning of data, such as RDF, could
greatly improve the functionality of the Semantic Web, Shadbolt says,
noting that a basic RDF tag can describe key data classes and
relationships. Shadbolt believes that the next major developments will be
in displays, with flexible screens and laser projection fast becoming
commercially viable.
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Intelligent Machines
UC Irvine New University (05/30/06) Kim, Jocelyn
By storing human cognition for all eternity, intelligent technology could
bring an end to human mortality, according to Marvin Minsky, a professor of
electrical engineering and computer science at MIT who recently gave a
speech on the future of intelligent machines. Intelligent machines could
also safeguard human mortality by conducting dangerous missions, though
Minsky notes that most robots in production today are designed for trivial
tasks. "All over the world, people are building the same robots. People
should be working on something more useful," he said. "Could we make a
clever machine other than those that play soccer?" Minsky believes that
researchers should concentrate on analogy-based problem solving, rather
than neuron networks, genetic algorithms, and other applications that he
dismisses as "fads." He attributes machines' inability to understand
language to the lack of sufficient programming. "The reason why computers
don't understand words is no one has made a semantic dictionary," Minsky
said. "Common words have a dozen meanings. You need to have
representations of different things and links between similar
definitions."
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Image Binarisation
Nation (Thailand) (05/26/06) Sutharoj, Pongpen
The best computer science project at the Intel International Science and
Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF 2006) went to Natt Piyapramote, a 17-year-old
student from Thailand. Piyapramote won for his automated image
binarisation software, which will allow users to bypass the use of an
optical character recognition (OCR) scanner in converting document images
from conventional digital cameras to a black-and-white image file. "Just
put the image file into a computer and have the software proceed," says
Piyapramote. "The outcome is automatic with no manual involvement."
Piyapramote's statistical-based Adaptive Binarisation for Document Imaging
project, which has also won an award from ACM, has an acceptable 14 percent
error rate, and although it is just 5 percent off the best in the world in
terms of efficiency, it offers faster processing and is more automated. He
plans to lower the error rate to 5 percent, and put the software on the Web
free of charge for those who want to simplify the conversion of document
image files into text files in order to edit information. The Young
Scientist Competition participant also won an award from the American
Association for Artificial Intelligence for the best project with an
artificial intelligence component.
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Codes on Sites 'Captcha' Anger of Web Users
Wall Street Journal (05/31/06) P. B1; Kesmodel, David
Web sites such as Yahoo.com protect themselves from mischief-making
programs by having users who wish to gain access solve puzzles known as
"captchas," which often take the form of a visually distorted code that
must be correctly typed. Keeping pace with new spamming techniques and
strategies has prompted some Web sites to make these codes trickier to
solve, irritating more and more Web users. "We know there's no perfect
panacea, but we think this is a great tool to prevent malicious activity,"
says Google engineering director David Jeske. However, the World Wide Web
Consortium published a paper in November 2005 warning that captchas "fail
to properly recognize users with disabilities as human" and can be thwarted
by clever programmers, as part of its argument for programmers to develop
alternative captchas. The group noted, for example, that spam companies
sometimes use people rather than automated programs or "bots" to decipher
the captchas. Director of the consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative
Judy Brewer says visual captchas are especially difficult for disabled
people because they "don't tell humans and computers apart; instead, they
tell able-bodied humans and computers, along with disabled humans, apart."
Alternatives some Web sites are exploring or deploying include audio
captchas or quizzes that involve simple problem-solving. In development by
Lehigh University computer science professor Henry Baird are "scattertype"
captchas that fragment each letter in the code, while some sites are
simplifying their captchas so humans can solve them easier.
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IBM Looks to Appalachian Colleges for Future IT
Professionals
Computerworld (05/26/06) Weiss, Todd
As part of its educational partnership with the Appalachian College
Association (ACA), IBM, through its two-year-old Academic Initiative
program, will provide the association's 35 two- and four-year liberal arts
colleges and universities with $5 million in software, technical services,
and discounts on software in an effort to boost the number of students
studying information technology. IBM held a workshop last week at Bryan
College in Dayton, Tenn., that enabled professors from ACA schools to train
on the company's donated technology so that they can better prepare their
students for careers in IT. By next fall, about 350 to 500 students from
ACA colleges and universities in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee,
Virginia, and West Virginia are expected to enroll in classes that will be
taught by professors who have attended the IT workshops and have been
trained on various technologies. "IBM is concerned about where its next IT
workers are going to come from," says Martin Ramsey, chief instructional
technologist for the nonprofit ACA consortium. IBM also believes the
region has the potential to develop some high-tech startups. "A lot of the
next Googles could come out of central Appalachia," says Mark Hanny, vice
president of the Academic Initiative.
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The Next Big Bang: Man Meets Machine
CNet (05/29/06)
The fusion of digital technology and human form could become a reality as
scientists continue to make discoveries in biotechnology and
nanotechnology. Scientists are also looking to the biological world to
replace some mechanical parts of a computer with proteins, DNA, viruses,
and bacteria. The symbiotic confluence of different these strains of
scientific endeavor is known as "BANG," short for bits, atoms, neurons, and
genes. "All these things are converging because biology, nanotech, and
organic chemistry are running together," said Mark Bunger of Lux Research.
When 24-year-old Matthew Nagle was stabbed in the neck in July 2001, the
blow severed his spinal cord and he was instantly paralyzed from the neck
down. Nagle volunteered for an experimental treatment that implanted a
chip into the part of his brain that controls motor functions, detecting
the electrical activity when the neurons fire that indicates "movement
intention." The software reads the intention and translates it into
instructions that manipulate a cursor on a screen. Scientists are also
picking up on the technology to combat Lou Gehrig's Disease, or ALS, a
disease much more complicated and diffuse than a spinal injury.
Researchers are also turning to biology to improve the human-computer
interface, particularly as silicon chips and other existing technologies
reach their physical limitations. To that end, scientists have been
exploring the basic building blocks of life--DNA, enzymes, proteins--as the
basis for a repository of biological components that could help create
synthetic organisms. As the volume of digital content rapidly
proliferates, scientists are also exploring new storage technologies that
resemble DNA. The military is also investigating biotechnologies to give
paralysis sufferers greater autonomy and to enable able-bodied soldiers to
operate equipment remotely.
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Why the Democratic Ethic of the World Wide Web May be
About to End
New York Times (05/28/06) P. 9; Cohen, Adam
The effort by Internet service providers to impose a new system of fees on
the Web poses a threat to Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a
platform on which everyone in the world could communicate on an equal
basis, writes Adam Cohen. The new system of fees could create a tiered
Internet that would enable service providers to shut out Web sites whose
politics they do not agree with. Even if ISPs did not discriminate on the
basis of content, access fees would automatically marginalize smaller,
poorer sites. For example, Internet users can now watch video from content
providers such as BBC World as well as video blogs and Web sites such as
YouTube.com, where people can upload videos of their own creation.
However, under tiered pricing, Internet users may be able to get videos
only from major corporate channels. Berners-Lee, who has begun speaking
out in favor of net neutrality, predicts that the fees could also hamper
future innovations, such as a Web site that will allow Internet users to
take videos of an event with their cell phones and piece them together to
create a three-dimensional image of what happened. He also argues that
service providers may be hurting themselves by pushing for tiered pricing,
because customers who are used to the Web as it is now may not pay for
access to a Web that is restricted to wealthy corporate content
providers.
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Interactive Display System Knows Users by Touch
New Scientist (05/25/06) Sandhana, Lakshmi
Researchers at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) have
employed touch-sensitive technology in the development of an interactive
computer display that is able to differentiate between multiple
simultaneous users and keep track of them. "Most touch screens only permit
one touch at a time," says Paul Dietz, a researcher at MERL in
Massachusetts. "A much smaller number allow multiple, simultaneous
touches, but none of these can tell you who is touching where." The
DiamondTouch (DT) system is designed to assign a distinct electrical signal
to individuals as they touch the surface of the screen, and send the
signals through their bodies to the receiver located in their seat. The
connected computer knows exactly where people have touched the screen, and
distinguishes each user's touch all at once. The identity technology
enables DT to track the input of each user and even limit access to certain
functions. MERL researchers view the DT system as having potential
applications as an addition to controls at power stations, the cockpit of
an airplane, or the dashboards of cars and trucks. Clifton Forlines adds
DT could also be used in gaming to create smarter multiplayer games.
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Eclipse Sets Off a Big Bang
SD Times (05/15/06)No. 150, P. 28; Burd, Barry
In late June the Eclipse Foundation will roll out major updates to 10 of
its most prominent projects in the Callisto Simultaneous Release, whose
goal is to guarantee that the projects can interoperate without interfering
with each other, writes Barry Burd, a professor in the mathematics and
computer science department at Drew University. Each project will remain a
separate open-source initiative, according to an official Web site. "The
Callisto effort will be more or less invisible to the user community,
because the things that are going to happen as a result of Callisto are
that the projects are going to get cleaner," says the Eclipse Foundation's
Bjorn Freeman-Benson. Callisto seeks to make users' lives easier by
requiring all project developers to offer enabling and disabling for their
project's features, and by using the new Coordinated Update sites to obtain
Eclipse plug-in downloads with little fuss. Callisto projects include the
Eclipse Project update Eclipse 3.2, which features scalability,
extensibility, enterprise readiness, ease of use, Java 6 compiler
compliance, and a Java Code Clean Up wizard. Other initiatives focus on
improving the user level experience, such as the Business Intelligence and
Reporting Tools (BIRT) project to deliver the ability to generate business
reports in Web and PDF formats. All Callisto projects will employ the Java
version of IBM's International Components for Unicode libraries, or ICU4J.
The next Eclipse update after Callisto may have a greater concentration on
unifying the various projects, and the Callisto model's long-term hope is
to instill another layer of respectability within open-source software.
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Teaching Reliability
IEEE Distributed Systems Online (05/06) Vol. 7, No. 5,Regehr, John
John Regehr of the University of Utah's School of Computing believes
embedded systems education should prioritize software reliability. He
assigns most of the blame for unreliable software not to students, but to
the single-approach, "cowboy programming" strategy that students become
used to doing because it works so well for small, well-defined projects in
first- and second-year programming courses. Regehr lists partial and
entertaining solutions that could solve the problem by enhancing embedded
programming assignments. One solution is a code review immediately
following the assignment's completion, augmented with class queries about
design and implementation. Another suggestion of Regehr's is for students
to present correctness arguments, which creates an incentive for the
students to account for them during the design and implementation phase.
"I devote a considerable fraction of my embedded software course to
describing the available embedded software architectures, each of which
comes with a very specific set of tradeoffs," notes Regehr. "The lesson I
try to impart is that the choice of software architecture should be
deliberate, rather than evolving out of a sequence of greedy choices."
Regehr also stresses an emphasis on testing and interoperation, and reports
that the sting of failure can be a valuable reminder of students' need to
practice cautious development that emphasizes thinking ahead, assertions,
testing, tools, and incremental deployment.
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A Review of National Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) and a Proposed National Electronic Initiative Framework
(NEIF)
First Monday (05/06)No. 11,Peslak, Alan R.
The digital divide--the chasm between those to whom information and
communications technologies (ICT) are easily available and those to whom
they are not--is an undeniable fact and its continued existence reflects
the lack of a national electronic initiative framework (NEIF) to improve
access and utilization of ICT, writes Penn State University assistant
professor of information sciences and technology Alan Peslak. He proposes
such a framework as a tool that national and non-governmental organizations
can use to bridge the digital divide. Peslak suggests that all national
electronic initiatives be based on general doctrines built upon the five
general rights of man espoused in the political philosophies of John Locke
and Thomas Jefferson: Provision of equality, protection of life,
acquisition and retention of liberty, pursuit of happiness, and protection
of property. Electronic initiatives must then address specific directives
that correspond with the five doctrines, namely universal access to ICT,
societal enhancement, better electronic government, economic improvement,
and legal and regulatory control. These directives can be applied to
general domains, such as information access, communications access, and
infrastructure for universal access; education, health, environment,
agriculture, international issues, the incorporation of ICT into everyday
life, information content, and law and order for societal enhancement;
procurement, efficiency, access to government data, citizen-government
communications, and government services for improved e-government; research
and development and competitiveness for economic betterment; and
intellectual property, security, cyber-crime, and privacy for legal and
regulatory control. The final level in the NEIF consists of deliverables,
the products and services furnished by the electronic initiative. Peslak
concludes that the current state of the nation will by necessity reflect on
the specific deliverables each domain addresses.
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