Group of University Researchers to Make Web Science a
Field of Study
New York Times (11/02/06) P. C6; Lohr, Steve
Internet researchers at the forefront of their field are beginning to
shift their attention from the function of a single computer on the Web, to
the function of the entire Web, as a huge, decentralized system. Research
into Internet social networks is beginning to garner a lot of attention, as
businesses and researchers can benefit more and more from understanding
such concepts. "The Web isn't about what you can do with computers," says
Tim Berners-Lee, MIT senior researcher, University of Southampton
professor, and director of the World Wide Web Consortium. "It's people
and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the
study of what happens in a computer doesn't tell you about what happens on
the Web." The Web science program aims at creating a more "intelligent"
Web, with the goal of the Semantic Web in mind. Web science research is "a
prerequisite to designing the kinds of complex, human-oriented systems that
we are after in science," according to Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a
technology strategist at IBM and visiting professor at MIT. Undergraduate
and graduate programs are being considered at the present, with support
from both MIT and the University of Southampton; workshops will soon be
held, as well as the awarding of research fellowships. "Computer science
is at a turning point, and it has to...understand the social dynamics of
issues like trust, responsibility, empathy, and privacy in this vast
networked space," says Ben Shneiderman a professor at the University of
Maryland. "The technologies and companies that understand those issues
will be far more likely to succeed in expanding their markets and enlarging
their audiences."
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Researchers Teach Computers How to Name Images by
'Thinking'
Penn State Live (11/01/06) Hopkins, Margaret; DuBois, Charles
A paper presented at the recent ACM Multimedia 2006 conference describes a
system that can automatically annotate entire collections of photographs.
The paper, "Real-Time Computerized Annotation of Pictures," and was written
by Jai Li, associate professor in the Penn State department on statistics,
and James Wang, associate professor in the Penn State College of
Information Sciences and Technology. Wang says, "By inputting tens of
thousands of images, we have trained computers to recognize certain objects
and concepts and automatically annotate these new or unseen images. More
than half the time, the computer's first tag out of the top 15 is correct."
Simply by analyzing pixel content of a given image and comparing that
against a knowledge base of the pixel content of tens of thousands of
images, the Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures Real-Time (ALIPR)
system provides 15 possible annotations or words for the image. Li and
Wang's previous creation, ALIP, used computational-intensive spatial
modeling, while ALIPR models distribution of color and texture, to
characterize images. For 98 percent of images tested, ALIPR was able to
provide at least one correct annotation in its top 15 selected words.
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Voters in Fla., Texas Complain of E-Voting
Glitches
Computerworld (11/01/06) Songini, Marc
Allegations were made in Miami-Dade County, Fla. that e-voting machines
flipped votes, meaning the candidate chosen was not the one registered by
the machine. Officials denied these claims. "I'm happy to report that
there are no glitches in any of the electronic voting machines at
Miami-Dade early voting locations," said Lester Sola, supervisor of
elections for the county. Subsequent investigation of the Election Systems
& Software machines also reported no problems. Sola explained that when a
machine is reported to be malfunctioning, it is closed until a technician
is available. He assures that no votes were lost. Neighboring Broward
County also experienced reports of vote flipping on the same company's
machines. Peter Corwin, assistant to the Broward County administrator,
said that such problems are common for a small portion of voting machines.
Several complaints have also come out of Texas concerning vote flipping,
but Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams contacted the Florida judges
who assured him that a fingernail or some other object had inadvertently
hit the wrong button. A spokeswoman for Williams points out that "this
only serves to emphasize the importance of the summary screens, where a
voter can make sure the correct ballots are cast." Avi Rubin, e-voting
critic and Maryland election judge, said, "While most of my comments about
e-voting have to do with security threats that are invisible, I am also
discouraged by the widespread technical problems that are not just
noticeable, but screaming for attention." For information about ACM's
e-voting activities, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacm
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Computer Scientists Track Prediction Markets in Run-Up to
US Elections
University of Chicago (11/01/06) Koppes, Steve
The academic and corporate worlds are starting to display a renewed
interest in prediction markets, thanks in large part to James Surowiecki's
book "The Wisdom of Crowds." Companies such as Microsoft, Google, and
Hewlett-Packard operate them internally to gain a better understanding of
the thinking of their employees, and take the information into account when
making decisions. Meanwhile, computer scientists at the University of
Chicago and Yahoo Research have teamed up to track an Irish securities
trading market, Tradesports.com, that correctly predicted all but one
senate race and every state in the electoral college during the U.S.
elections in 2004. The researchers, who created a Web site that offers a
map of the country with anticipated Republican states in red and Democratic
states in blue, are also studying the computation power of prediction
markets to determine how they work and predict what will occur. "My main
research is studying different models of computation, and to me information
markets are another model of computation," says Lance Fortnow, a computer
science professor at the University of Chicago. The computation issues for
an information market such as Tradesports involve the market's extremely
quick reaction to news, as people access and process information impacting
the buying and selling of securities and other financial decisions.
Prediction markets will be a topic of discussion at ACM's Conference on
Electronic Commerce, taking place June 11-15, 2007, in San Diego, Calif.
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GAO: Better Coordination of Cybersecurity R&D
Needed
Government Computer News (10/31/06) Wait, Patience
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report stating
that the federal government is doing an insufficient job of coordinating
R&D on cybersecurity matters and must improve its information sharing and
collaboration efforts concerning cybersecurity. The director of the White
House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has been called upon
to create a strict time line for compliance with the federal cybersecurity
R&D agenda, released in February 2003 by the National Strategy to Secure
Cyberspace. "Most cybersecurity technologies "offer only single-point
solutions by addressing individual vulnerabilities," the GAO report states.
"As a result, many researchers have described the use of these types of
near-term solutions as being shortsighted...Research in cybersecurity
technology can help create a broader range of choices and more robust tolls
for building secure, networked computer systems." Cybersecurity R&D
funding is divided between a number of agencies: Homeland Security, which
allocated about $17 million of its funds in fiscal 2006 to the subject;
DoD, which was provided with about $150 million in fiscal 2005 by the
federal government for cybersecurity R&D; and NSF, which requested about
$94 million for their effort in fiscal 2006.
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Tech's Threat to National Security
Business Week (11/02/06) Hamm, Steve; Kopecki, Dawn
The Department of Defense's use of software that has been outsourced has
led to concern that malicious programming could endanger national security.
In 2001, the Defense Security Council noticed a significant rise in
"suspicious attempts" by hackers abroad, and declared that foreign software
companies and applications developed overseas were potentially a bigger
threat than domestic hackers. In one of two attacks since July, a bureau
of the Commerce Department had to cut off Internet access and get rid of
virus infected computers due to an attack by Chinese hackers. "It's
clearly a legitimate and present security concern," as the use of high-tech
combat systems continues to increase, says Paul G. Kaminsky, a member of
the Defense Science Board. A DoD task force is currently in the final
stages of creating a recommendation for how to deal with the fact that the
military uses software bought from overseas developers. There is much
concern among the industry that the Pentagon will force tech suppliers to
eliminate elements of overseas production, or return to purchasing too many
custom-made products, both of which would drive prices up significantly.
"Most of the software the DoD uses has elements that are written overseas,
and that isn't a problem," says William Schneider Jr., chairman of the
Defense Science Board "The problem is in ultrasensitive defense
applications where they are mission-critical" and the highest degree of
confidence in the software is required. Vendor screening and software
testing has been stepped up by the pentagon recently, but costs are rising
for extensive testing on increasingly sophisticated weapons systems.
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New NSF Center Targets Reconfigurable Computing
HPC Wire (11/01/06) Vol. 15, No. 44,
A new national center and consortium for research in fundamental
computing, comprised of about two dozen organizations, has been developed
by NSF's Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC) and will
begin in January 2007. In a recent interview, the director of the Center
for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC), Dr. Alan George,
said that high-performance reconfigurable computing will be able to better
serve the needs of a wide array of applications. A reconfigurable approach
is capable of superior performance, power, size, cooling, cost,
versatility, scalability, and dependability, among other areas where
conventional computing is falling short of what today's critical
applications demand. George says the goals of the center are to "establish
the nation's first multidisciplinary research center in reconfigurable HPC"
in partnership with the government, industry, and academe; "directly
support the research needs of industry and government partners in a
cost-effective manner;" provide an enhance education experience for
students; and to "advance the knowledge and technologies in this emerging
field and ensure relevance of the research with rapid and efficient
technology transfer." He says reconfigurable computing has shown its
ability to bring out the "potential of underlying electronics in a system,"
and for this, has "come to the forefront." George says, "RC can also be
leveraged from other IT markets to achieve a better performance-cost
ratio." George foresees both "revolutionary and evolutionary advances," as
a result of the center's research.
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Driving Impulse Shopping With a Smart Cart
Technology Review (11/02/06) Graham-Rowe, Duncan
Supermarkets are hoping a new breed of "smart" shopping carts will be able
to increase impulse purchasing by scanning the radio frequency
identification (RFID) tag of items placed in them. Using the information
they gather from reading RFID tags, a screen on the carts will alert
customers as to what has been bought the most today in a given aisle, for
example, or what product the most customers have in their cart at that
moment. Ronaldo Menezes, an expert in retail swarm intelligence at the
Florida Institute of Technology, says impulse buying comprises 40 percent
of all purchases made in supermarkets. However, the potential for abuse
exists with such a system. Many retail enterprises use fake shoppers who
pretend to buy products in order to pique the interest of other shoppers,
says Nigel Marlow, and as far as this "smart" shopping cart technology, he
believes "There's no doubt it will be abused. They will do anything to
make a sale." Menezes points out that such abuse would be in line with
numerous other marketing tactics, and that shoppers have the choice of
ignoring the messages that pop up. Because of the size, and subsequent
slow rate of change, of the food industry, second only to government, the
process of deploying "smart" carts is expected to take five years.
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Using Mathematics and Computers to Understand the
World
Rensselaer News (11/01/06) Gorss, Jason
A $1.2 million grant from the NSF will give Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute and Howard University undergraduate students an opportunity to
pursue research that combines mathematics and computational science.
Rensselaer professors are currently designing the program that will
introduce students to important applications of mathematics in a wide
variety of fields, from ecology to medicine. "We are developing an
innovative program that will help students use mathematics and computers to
understand the world," says Mark Holmes, professor of mathematical sciences
at Rensselaer and principal investigator in the project. "Our goal is to
teach these students the power of mathematics and how to harness that power
to solve problems in science and engineering." The grant is part of NSF's
new Computational Science Training for Undergraduates in the Mathematical
Sciences (CSUMS) program, which aims to illuminate computational aspects of
the undergraduate curriculum of mathematical sciences. Applied research is
the core of the program: "We have a number of carefully chosen projects
ready for students to investigate, each involving different equations that
arise in a variety of applications from field including fluid mechanics,
biology, combustion, and nonlinear optics," according to Holmes. The hope
is that other fields which need more people skilled in math will be able to
attract some of the math students involved in the program.
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Getting a Feel for the Fabric--Virtually
IST Results (11/02/06)
Researchers developing a system that would allow users to "feel" a virtual
garment will provide an update of their work at IST 2006 during the
networking workshop "HAPTEX'06--Advanced Haptics." University of Geneva
professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, the organizer and chair of the workshop,
is the project coordinator of the HAPTEX team that is pursuing multimodal
perception of textiles in virtual environments. Though Internet users can
go online and shop for sweaters, suits, or lingerie by style, color, and
size, they still are unable to touch the garments. The HAPTEX project team
hopes to change this by next November by providing a combined haptic and
tactile interface that would enable users to "touch" a garment that they
see online. The HAPTEX team's booth at IST 2006 will feature a haptic
interface that visitors will be able to interact with to experience a
realistic simulation of touching a textile as they sit at a laptop. "They
will feel the force-feedback of the fabric when interacting with it,"
explains Magnenat-Thalmann. Although the project has developed the
methodology, a test bed, and a preliminary demonstrator, there needs to be
major changes in current technology and continued research before a product
for commercial application can be developed.
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Software to Improve Efficiency of Medical Research
Arizona State University (11/02/06) Emeneker, Kelley
Computer science, information management, medical research methods, and
clinical practice have been brought together by a new computer application
that is able to analyze vast amounts of biomedical data in order to find
and extract information needed for research efforts. Over 1,000 articles
and research papers are published in the field of biomedicine everyday, so
keeping up to date with the latest finding is almost impossible, according
to Chitta Baral, a professor in ASU's Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, and an affiliate faculty member with the Department of
Biomedical Informatics. Collaborative Bio Curation, or CBioC, is able to
search not only by term but by higher-level concepts, such as "genes
related to brain cancer," unlike Google. Baral explains that CBioC will
save researchers time and effort spent looking through hundreds of
thousands of articles to find information that applies to their area of
study. CBioC runs within PubMed, the primary repository of biomedical
papers maintained by the National Library of Medicine, extracting and
displaying facts reported in a given article, and allowing users to search
for similar facts in other articles. Researchers are able to vote and
share comments on the accuracy of the facts that have been extracted.
Consensus reached among researchers allows information to be updated,
assuring the highest level of correctness possible.
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Doing it for the Kids, Man: Children's Laptop Inspires
Open Source Projects
LinuxWorld (10/27/06) Marti, Don
The past decade has seen efficient programming become a low priority as a
result of faster processes and inexpensive memory, but the effort to build
the "Children's Machine 1 (CM1)," which has minimal memory and processor
speed, is challenging developers to do as much as they can with just about
as little as possible. The One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), which the
machines are being built for, wants to create a machine that functions as a
textbook collection, as well as a writing, drawing, and music tool. The
current CM1 prototype has a 500 MHz AMD Geode processor, 128 MB of RAM,
512MB of Flash memory, no hard drive, and is underclocked to 366 MHz to
conserve power. Only open source software will be used. "Today's laptops
have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the
other third, which mostly does the same functions nine different ways,"
according to the laptop.org FAQ. The CM1 operating system will be less
than 100 MB in size, a challenge which has excited Red Hat engineers.
"Fundamentally everything we do is of benefit to everyone's desktop," says
Jim Gettys, VP of software engineering for OLPC. "We're just sensitive to
it. Five to 10 percent of the work has anything to with OLPC. Most of it
is all over the place in lots of different projects." Red Hat has even
been able to fix its community Linux distribution, Fedora, using
applications from OLPC.
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Care Urged With Language Domain Names
Associated Press (11/01/06) Gatopoulos, Derek
ICANN CEO Paul Twomey is warning that international domain names (IDNs)
using non-Latinate characters need to be developed carefully and adeptly,
as a faulty launch of IDNs could "permanently break the Internet." Right
now China has created a Chinese intranet that features a Chinese-language
version of .com. In addition, an Arab consortium is testing an Arabic
language Internet in a lab setting. Twomey believes ICANN's IDN testing
and policy discussions can reach a conclusion and "resolution by the end of
2007." Cisco Systems engineer Patrik Falstrom says that getting IDNs right
is paramount because a fractured Internet along language barriers, none of
which span the globe, would destroy the usefulness of the Internet. In a
fractured Internet, email addresses would depend on the country's Internet,
rather than be universal, notes Falstrom. In addition, duplicate domain
names and email addresses could help cyber-criminals impersonate bank
account holders and others, warns the Internet Governance Forum. Patrik
Falstrom is working on ICANN's IDN project, and says the technological
challenges are thorny. He says, "We have 6,000 languages in the world. So
should we register the name of countries--like Greece--in all 6,000?"
ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf says the right policies need to work out and test
ahead of time before IDNs can be implemented. He says, "The ability to
enter the entire domain name in a particular script, we're not there yet,"
but notes that testing scheduled for later this year will help locate any
possible troublesome side effects.
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Phone Creates Interactive Maps From Snapshots
New Scientist (10/31/06) Simonite, Tom
Researchers in the United Kingdom are developing technology that will
allow camera phone users to snap a picture of a printed map and receive an
interactive version of the same map on their handset. The Map Snapper
system would return a map with clickable icons for points of interest,
including restaurants, hotels, and temporary events such as festivals, and
featuring images, contact information, and links to Web sites. "If someone
is walking and reaches a town, they'll be able to simply point their phone
at the map and find out places they could go for lunch, or other
information not on the map," explains Paul Lewis, a researcher at
Southampton University who developed the system. Map Snapper, which is
designed to send a photo of a portion of a map to a central server, was
developed in cooperation with the Ordnance Survey, the U.K. map-making
agency. "The server uses the image to generate a unique signature for that
area of the map and then finds matches in a database of signatures for all
the [Ordnance Survey] maps," adds Jonathan Hare, who assisted Lewis in
developing Map Snapper. Lewis and Hare also plan to allow users to
generate their own content for maps using an online interface. They
acknowledge that the technology could become obsolete shortly with the
emergence of cell phones featuring GPS receivers.
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Quantum Attacks Worry Computer Scientists
Security Focus (10/31/06) Lemos, Robert
While quantum computers may one day be capable of unprecedented
calculations, they are incredibly vulnerable to failure caused by
unauthorized activity when networked together. Daniel Lidar, an associate
professor in electrical engineering, chemistry, and physics at the
University of Southern California, and Lian-Ao Wu, a research associate in
the Chemical Physics Theory Group at the University of Toronto, are working
on ways of defending quantum computer networks against something as small
as a read access to a single qubit on one machine, which would require a
network-wide reset. Their solution has been to only send messages at
prearranged, seemingly random intervals, use long average wait times
between legitimate network connections, and fill the rest of the network
time with decoy transmissions. Performance advantages could be maintained
while reducing the chance of a successful attack. "We would not want to
use this method against any threat beside malware, because it is not
efficient," says Lidar. "We are talking the network down for a long period
of time." Quantum computers must be protected against "stray cosmic rays
and things like that--if they interact with this stuff, then something
changes and the computer crashes," according to John Lowry, a principal
scientist at the Internet service provider BBN, and member of the company's
research team working on the DARPA quantum network. "The thing is that
people could do that on purpose." Lidar doesn't know what form an attack
would come in; data destruction or circumventing a calculation would be the
easiest. He says, "Quantum malware to us just looks like any malicious
instruction sent to an attacker. As long as we can keep the local nodes
free from malicious intruders and build a heavily fortified castle around
them, we can assume the ancilla qubits are malware free."
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Phishers Beware
CITRIS Newsletter (10/06) Shreve, Jenn
Researchers at CITRIS' Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology
(TRUST) have developed tools that help defend Internet users against online
identity theft. "The threats and risks and vulnerabilities change
everyday. It's moving at a very fast pace. All the tools, processes, and
policies, and procedures are reactive for the most part. And the attackers
are in a global environment, attacking from foreign countries we can't
reach out to...We're inundated," says Robert Rodriguez, former secret
service agent who directed the Secret Service West Coast Electronic Crime
Taskforce and is now working with CITRIS. Rodriguez approached John
Mitchell and Dan Boneh of Stanford University with his concerns three year
ago, and the two have now completed five Web browser extensions: one
encrypts passwords so they cannot be used by a thief; another alerts users
when they have landed on a fake site; two protect Firefox users against
malicious programs that track the sites they visit; and the last is a
resource that blocks passwords from any keylogging software embedded on an
unknowing user's computer. "One of our best outcomes for us would be to
have some of the ideas we've developed in our prototype software get
adopted and built into browsers," says Mitchell. Social and legal aspects
are also being addressed, including more effective notices to warn users of
the risk of downloading unknown software.
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Firsthand Lessons in Globalization
EE Times (10/30/06)No. 1447, P. 1; Goering, Richard
The goal of San Jose State University dean of engineering Belle Wei's
Global Technology Initiative is to help U.S. engineering students obtain
the ability to be globally competitive by having them tour Asian research
institutions, corporations, and universities over the summer. By comparing
notes with their peers in China, students get a clearer picture of how hard
Chinese students work and how competitive they are. This acts as a wake-up
call for American students, who give more consideration to their
competitive abilities, according to Wei. "Because there's a very diverse
culture here, American engineers, if given some training in sensitivity
toward other cultures, will be in a very good position to integrate a
global technical team," she explains. Wei thinks the most likely EE jobs
to be outsourced overseas are functional engineering tasks that can be well
defined and require little interaction, while less likely to be offshored
are tasks positioned closer to technology's cutting edge. She cites the
need to produce more domestic engineering graduates in order to continue
supporting knowledge-based innovation, especially as other countries make
economic gains; to draw more students into the engineering field, San Jose
State University works with high schools to increase their students'
exposure to the discipline. Wei believes a background in multidisciplinary
engineering can give U.S. students a clear advantage in the global arena.
She notes that her university is also trying to attract and retain sorely
underrepresented groups, such as women and Hispanics, in engineering.
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A Dragon in R&D
BusinessWeek (11/06/06)No. 4008, P. 44; Einhorn, Bruce
Chinese President Hu Jintao threw down the gauntlet with his recognition
that China needs to become a hub of innovation through government funding
and research and development investments by both foreign and domestic
companies, and multinationals and local businesses are following through on
his mandate. In terms of patent applications, China is the fifth largest
producer globally, with 130,000 applications in 2004, according to recently
released figures by the World Intellectual Property Organization. "It's
inevitable that [the mainland] will become an innovation center," says
General Atlantic Partners managing director Vince Feng. "Whenever
manufacturing is located in a country, innovation always follows."
Lenovo's innovation team in Beijing is working to roll out intelligent new
computer products, while Beijing is helping to fuel the development of
Vimicro and other local semiconductor design businesses. Telecom tech
provider Huawei Technologies, meanwhile, is assembling an R&D team with
facilities in China, Sweden, India, and the United States. Health
challenges unique to China, such as the threat of avian flu, are also
sparking innovative R&D. Multinationals are giving Chinese universities a
much-needed boost by opening research institutes nearby, while training
programs sponsored by Western companies are helping make Chinese knowledge
workers capable of more creative thinking.
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Database Challenges in Enterprise Information
Sharing
IEEE Distributed Systems Online (10/06) Vol. 7, No. 10, Vargas, Luis
Luis Vargas of the University of Cambridge writes that the integration of
messaging functionality into the database system shows promise as a
cross-enterprise information sharing methodology, but the independent
evolution of messaging and database technology demonstrates the need to
couple separate concepts and functionality as a required step in the
implementation of database-messaging systems. "Our goal, then, is to
support functional, reliable, and scalable mechanisms for detecting,
propagating, and consuming of information of interest from the database,"
Vargas attests. "To reach this goal, we should consider the many relevant
contributions from distributed systems as well as research done within the
database community." By deploying queue-based messaging features directly
at the database systems, the transmission, receipt, and processing of
messages to and from queues within the database can be facilitated. Vargas
cites two fundamental approaches to integration: The creation of a message
queuing system as a database application and the incorporation of message
queuing into the database infrastructure. The first strategy yields
limited functionality and scalability, while the second requires database
system augmentation via integrated messaging support, queue-based index
maintenance, enhanced active support, or a combination of the above.
Though active technology supplies information sharing with the means to
spot interesting situations at the database, trigger implementations must
be extended to satisfy a new set of requirements, including flexible
coupling modes, scalable trigger evaluation, and composite event
detection.
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