ACLU Urges U.S. to Stop Collection of Traveler
Data
Washington Post (12/02/06) P. A5; Nakashima, Ellen
The ACLU, in formal comments submitted to the Department of Homeland
Security, requested that the government end its data-mining efforts that
examine every traveler entering or leaving the country. Begun as a cargo
screening program by the customs agency, the Automated Targeting System
(ATS) has been stepped up to establish "risk profiles" that will be kept on
file for 40 years, meant to single out travelers who warrant scrutiny by
customs officials. According to a Customs and Border Protection official,
information has been collected on air passengers for the last 10 years, and
ground passengers for the last two years. Electronic Frontier Foundation
senior counsel David Sobel said, "I don't see the logic of collecting
massive amounts of information on millions of innocent citizens in the name
of locating a small number of suspected terrorists. Casting that large a
net raises issues both with respects to the security benefits as well as
the privacy impact of the system." Customs spokesman Patrick Jones
answered such criticism by asking, "How do they expect us to determine
who's safe and who's at risk? We have over one million people coming into
the country everyday." The customs agency plans to eventually enter data
for all those who cross the borders, including name, date of birth,
itineraries, and credit card information into its database. The agency
explains that this wealth of information will allow it to construct models
of travelers, both threatening and non-threatening
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Internet Governance: It Ain't Broke Yet, But Might Need
Fixing
Financial Times Digital Business (12/04/06) P. 4; Cane, Alan
While many of those in attendance at the first-ever Internet Governance
Forum (IGF) in Athens were pleasantly surprised by the commitments pledged
there to tackle the relevant issues of managing an Internet whose quickly
growing user base now numbers some 1 billion, the very nature of the event
highlighted the informal structure of Internet governance. Nitin Desai, a
former U.N. under-secretary-general and chairman of the IGF advisory group,
noted this structure while commenting on the forum, saying, "It�s not a
forum with a fixed membership. It is open to anybody in the stakeholder
groups who has an interest and a basic bona fide competence in this area to
join the meeting." ICANN, which has been accused of being a puppet of the
U.S. government, has drawn more heat than any of these stakeholders. Many
in the international community seek to wrest control of the DNS away from
ICANN and give it to a U.N.-like organization that has a global presence.
"ICANN has been inadequately effective and over the years I have always
wished it did better at introducing competition at the registrar level
faster and more effectively, and I wished they did better at introducing
more interesting and competitive top level domain names," says Jonathan
Robinson, COO of U.K.-based domain names manager NetNames. "ICANN tries
not to appear U.S.-dominated but the truth is, its entire authority is
given to it by the U.S. government." The other side of the argument is
espoused by ICANN CEO Paul Twomey. "It�s a fundamental battle of ideas
between those who want a bottom-up, virally growing, innovative Internet
and those who want to impose command and control," he says. "There is no
point of control on the Internet. It is a highly redundant network of
networks specifically designed not to have any geographical boundaries.
The key aspect of its design is that innovation takes place at the edge of
the network, although there have to be points of coordination so the
computers can find each other...People should be careful. The structure of
how it works, how it has been engineered, and how it manages itself is
unique."
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Nike+iPod Sport Kit Raises Privacy Concerns
University of Washington News and Information (11/29/06) Hickey, Hannah
A device that allows runners to track their distance, speed, and amount of
calories burned after a jog can also be used as a tracking device, without
the knowledge of the person being tracked, according to researchers at the
University of Washington. The kit consists of a small chip and a receiver
that fits into an iPod Nano and collects data from the chip's movements.
The small chip, designed to be slipped into a shoe, can be detected from 60
feet away, and the researchers were able to build devices that picked up
and monitored this signal using a laptop or matchbox-sized computer with
wireless Internet capability, the latter actually being able to show
whereabouts of the chip on GoogleMaps. Decoding the unique tag on each
receiver took the team about 10 minutes, and writing the code to interpret
the information from the sensor took a few hours, but they guessed that
someone with moderate knowledge of electronics could concoct a tracking
system over a weekend, especially if the code were published online. The
team imagined, and tested as best they could without infringing on privacy
of others, scenarios such as a jealous ex-boyfriend who could hide
receivers at locations that his ex-girlfriend frequents, in order to track
her movements. Nike advertises the chip as something that can be dropped
into a shoe and forgotten about, but the researchers urge users to remember
to turn it off after a workout. Doctoral student in computer science and
lead author of the technical report, which suggests ways the product could
be made more secure, Scott Saponas, explained, "It's an example of how new
gadgetry can erode our personal privacy."
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Minsky Talks About Life, Love in the Age of Artificial
Intelligence
Boston Globe (12/04/06) Goldberg, Carey
In his new book, "The Emotion Machine," MIT computer science professor and
contributor to the founding of the field of artificial intelligence Marvin
Minsky explains why he sees emotions as simply another way for us to solve
problems, to think in different ways, rather than distortions that
complicate rational thought. For example, "being angry is a very useful
way to solve problems, for instance by intimidating an opponent or getting
rid of people who bother you," says Minsky. The book targets human
"resourcefulness" and asks, "why are people so much better at controlling
the world than animals are? The argument is: because they have far more
different ways to think than any competitor," Minsky says. Humans are able
to think on several different levels, even to "think about the way you've
been thinking--and then use that experience to change yourself," and
emotions provide us with different "self-images" that can "add to [our]
resourcefulness," according to Minsky. While the creation of a machine
that is truly able to think like a human is still far off, his immediate
goal is to call attention to the need to examine the human mind and the
tools it utilizes, and changing the perception of the function of emotions
is at the heart of this idea. Minsky claims that we must build machines
that have "common-sense human abilities" in order to maintain our quality
of life as labor shortages result from longer life spans and people having
fewer children.
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Will a 'Conscious' Machine Ever Be Built?
IDG News Service (12/01/06) Weil, Nancy
Human intelligence in machines was the focus of a debate last week at MIT
between inventor Ray Kurtzweil and Yale University professor David
Gelernter. During the debate, they addressed the question: "Are we
limited to building super-intelligent, robotic 'zombies,' or will it be
possible for us to build conscious, creative, even 'spiritual' machines?"
Kurtzweil said technological advances in software and computer power in the
next 20 years or so will enable machines to pass the Turing Test on
exhibiting intelligence through conversation with a human. "The machines
will be very clever and they'll get mad at us if we don't [recognize their
intelligence]," said Kurtzweil. Gelernter disagreed, saying developers
will be essentially programming machines to lie because computers will
never be able to feel what a human feels. For example, he noted that no
one gets wet when researchers simulate a rainstorm. Nonetheless, Kurtzweil
and Gelernter agreed that the issue is more of a philosophical matter. MIT
marked the 70th anniversary of the "On Computable Numbers" paper of Alan
Turing with the debate and a lecture.
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What's on Tap for IT Pros in 2007?
eWeek (12/01/06) Rothberg, Deborah
The release of Vista, an improving job market, changing opinions of
certifications, and H-1B visas dominate the IT outlook for 2007.
Currently, Vista is the subject of a plethora of questions, and many
experts believe its impact will not really be felt until the end of 2007.
IT experts agree that plans for robust hiring, decreasing unemployment
rates, and competition for well-qualified employees, all signal an
appealing IT job market. The retiring of baby boomers as well as the
skills shortage among younger generations will mean that highly skilled
workers will receive many attractive offers. Should the economic downturn
predicted by some occur, the IT field is not expected to be hit too hard.
The most sought-after skill sets include project management and security,
followed, in no particular order, by networking specialists, database
managers, and information architects. Financial services, pharmaceuticals
and biotech, and technology product development are becoming the prominent
market for technologists. While certifications help IT professionals
distinguish themselves, many employers are more concerned with specific
experience. Congress is being lobbied heavily for more H-1B visas, but in
the meantime a lot of R&D is being offshored as companies find themselves
without the specialized skills they grew accustomed to. Some claim that
there is still adequate talent available, but this pool is shrinking.
Finally, 2007 should witness IT professionals becoming eager to be more
involved with businesses as a whole.
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'Revenge of the Nerds,' Part V: Can Computer Models Help
Select Better Movie Scripts?
Knowledge@Wharton (11/29/06)
Wharton marketing professor John Eliashberg believes that Hollywood
executives could benefit from statistical analysis and computer models
designed to judge a film's chances for financial success. Over 15,000
screenplays are submitted to the Writer's Guild of America each year, and
choosing which will make profitable movies is not an easy process:
"Despite the huge amount of money at stake, this process known as
'green-lighting,' is largely guesswork based on expert's experience and
intuitions," say Eliashberg and his co-authors of the report titled "From
Storyline to Box Office: A New Approach to Green-Lighting Movie Scripts."
Their model was devised by examining 200 script summaries and dividing them
into those that performed better than the median return on investment
(ROI), -27.1 percent, and those that did not; 81 movies were then fed into
the program, which tried to identify them as above or below median ROI.
The results were that the model correctly predicted the films' success or
failure (above or below median) two-thirds of the time. When the
researchers pulled out the 30 that were rated the highest by the model,
they figured out that studios could have seen a 5.1 percent ROI by making
only these films, which does not seem impressive until compared with a
random selection of 30 films from the batch of 281, -18.6 percent ROI, or a
system designed to mimic the typical studio selection criteria, -24.4
percent. The researchers fought off claims that they're system would lead
to overly-formulaic releases, claiming that there "is room for creativity
within the structural regularities."
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NSF Awards Adelphi Associate Professor Stephen Bloch
Nearly $500,000
Adelphi University (11/22/2006)
Adelphi University mathematics and computer science professor and ACM
member Stephen Bloch will head an effort to train more than 150 college
faculty members on a new way to teach introductory computer programming.
"TeachScheme, ReachJava!" focuses heavily on problem-solving skills. Dr.
Bloch developed the technique with colleagues from Northeastern University,
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, University of Utah, and California
Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He will also lead the
effort to study the impact of the method on students as program
participants introduce the technique in their classrooms. "Our curriculum
starts students with a consistent and simple language," Bloch explains.
"Students develop good programming habits and a solid understanding of
concepts like 'variable,' 'data type,' and 'function' and then learn to
apply the same skills and concepts in other, more complex languages."
Bloch received a four-year, $499,688 grant from the National Science
Foundation to host the week-long workshops during the summer.
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What Comes After Web 2.0?
Technology Review (12/01/06) Roush, Wade
While the innovations that have recently been popping up on the Web are
referred to by some as Web 3.0, this benchmark still remains rather far in
the future. The effort to integrate human intelligence into the Web in the
form of metadata, and links between data nodes has taken on two forms: The
Semantic Web vision of adding metadata to all information on the Web, and
the application of human intelligence to jobs that computers cannot figure
out. While being worked on currently, the enormous effort required to
achieve a Semantic Web, as well as the lack of concurrence as to the form
that this metadata should take, show how far away it still is. Friend of a
Friend (FOAF) files allow users to create a searchable personal description
of themselves in RDF format, so they can be found and matched with
compatible users. Another technique of moving toward a Semantic Web is
known as "Piggy Bank," which takes pieces of data from crowded sites and
allows them to be utilizes in different ways, such as taking an address and
finding it on a map. The second type of post-Web 2.0 projects underway are
exemplified by Google's Image Labeler, which creates a game out of giving
labels to images to help people searching for them; the type of task a
computer could not do alone. All of these projects are making progress,
but they have not produced as any realistically practical tools, for the
time being.
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Decade Old Data Formats an Obstacle to Information
Sharing
Computerworld Australia (12/01/06) Bushell-Embling, Dylan
XML Language (XLink) could be the answer to the need for a standard that
would allow for the sharing of data across systems and formats used in the
scientific community, according to Andrew Woolf of the Central Laboratory
of the Research Councils (CCLRC) in the United Kingdom. During the Solid
Earth and Environment Grid Conference at the CSIRO Discovery Center in
Canberra, Woolf spoke about the CCLRC's participation in the National
Environmental Research Council (NERC) Data Grid project, noting that XLink
"enable[s] a powerful scalable mechanism" for accessing the large amounts
of data that the grid compiles from a wide range of sources, including
older legacy systems. XLink, which focuses more on the elements behind the
relationships in resources placed in existing XML documents, connects
cross-format metadata with remote or local links to produce a simple script
that can be used to read from various file formats with the right access
tools. And using XLink with Geography Markup Language (GML) would allow
researchers to aggregate constructs across multiple files. "We've got 40
terabytes of data at the BADC [British Atmospheric Data Center] and we can
make that conceptually interoperable with kilobytes of GML," said Woolf.
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Iowa State Researchers Developing Software to Improve
Colon Exams
Iowa State University News Service (11/30/06)
Computer researchers have developed technology that would allow doctors to
analyze video of their efforts to check for colon cancer, which should
ultimately improve the examinations. The colonoscopy technology consists
of a suite of software tools, dubbed EndoMetric, that automatically
assesses the quality of a colonoscopy procedure and offers a view of the
breakdown of the used measurements. There is also a software system,
EndoPACS, that records video of an examination and uploads it to a central
server for further analysis. As a result of the technology, doctors would
be able to know how much time they spent looking at a colon, or whether
exam images were too blurry to be of any use. EndoPACS and EndoMetric are
the work of Iowa State computer science professors Johnny Wong and Wallapak
Tavanapong, University of North Texas computer science and engineering
professor JungHwan Oh, and Mayo Clinic College of Medicine professor Piet
C. de Groen. They are still waiting to receive a patent for the
technology, which could be used for other procedures in which endoscopes
are used. "Our number one goal is to see how we can use computer
technology to assist physicians in providing better health care," says
Wong.
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Work Together to Avert Shortages of IT Graduates, Urges
BCS President
Computer Weekly (12/05/06) Hadfield, Will
British Computer Society President Nigel Shadbolt has called for a
wide-ranging drive to prevent a potential shortfall of computer science
graduates in Britain. He said, "The effort will need to include all
stakeholders: The Department of Education and Skills, the school sector,
the relevant government agencies, the professional bodies, and employers."
The fact that an inadequate number of computer science graduates are being
produced every year must be confronted and remedied, said Shadbolt, who
pointed out that the market for IT professionals in countries such as India
are "growing so fast that they are having difficulty filling their own
vacancies." According to a study by the Council for Professors and Heads
of Computing, only 12,804 students out of 31,450 that started toward a
computer science degree ended up with an IT job in Britain, and the number
of graduates in upcoming years is expected to be even lower. Shadbolt said
that universities must take twice as many undergraduates as are required by
employers.
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It's No Contest: Preeminent Researchers Using National
LambdaRail Dominate SC06 Bandwidth Challenge
AScribe Newswire (11/29/06)
National LambdaRail (NLR) was used by the winning team and two honorable
mention award winners at the supercomputing bandwidth challenge at SC06.
The National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at
Chicago's "Transporting Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data using SECTOR" was
named the winner for achieving 8 Gbps of sustained data transfer on a 10
Gbps line, with a peak rate of 9.18 Gbps. Center director Robert Grossman
says, "Winning...shows that with the proper software and network protocols,
a working scientist can now easily transport terabyte-size e-science data
sets from disk to disk over wide-area 10GE networks, such as provided by
the National LambdaRail's PacketNet." Indiana University's team was
awarded the "Spirit of Competition Award," and the school's Data Capacitor
Project Manager, Stephen Simms, said, "A network like NLR's PacketNet
allows IU's Data Capacitor to play a role in all steps of the data
life-cycle, from acquisition to creation, through computation to
visualization, to archive storage." The "Heroic Effort" award was given to
a Caltech high energy physics team that used a single 10 Gbps link from NLR
to carry data in both directions, achieving a disk-to-disk throughput of
17.77 Gbps between server clusters on the show floor and at Caltech.
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ISSCC 2007 Preview
EDN (11/29/06) Wilson, Ron
Multidimensionality is the theme of the upcoming 2007 International Solid
State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) scheduled for Feb. 11-15. The technical
papers to be presented at the conference point out that scaling can no
longer deliver higher performance and improved density with a low level of
innovation, and assumptions about how architecture and system design play
into the multiple dimensions of chip engineering are being reevaluated, as
illustrated by papers that cover processor design, analog design, and
packaging. Multicore chips are described for the first time in all of the
papers in the microprocessor section, and also to be detailed are
increasingly broad sensor networks implemented across chips to watchdog
operating parameters, and more advanced mechanisms to keep chip operations
within their functional thresholds. A 2.5 GHz, 90-nm fractional-N
synthesizer that runs at 650 mV will be the focus of one paper, while
voltage regulators to be incorporated into systems-on-a-chip (SOCs) will
also be described. Data converters that fall into the 90-nm technology
domain will be detailed in at least eight papers, and 3D packaging
techniques will be stressed. Efficient capacitive- and inductive-coupling
methods for the transmission of extremely high-frequency signals between
dice in 3D schemes will be covered. The advent of medical applications for
IC technology will also be emphasized at ISSCC 2007.
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Online World as Important as the Real World?
University of Southern California (11/30/06)
Online communities are as important as real-world communities to a large
number of Internet users, according to the sixth annual survey of the
social impact of the Internet, conducted by the University of Southern
California-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. The survey
found that 43 percent of respondents answered that they "feel as strongly
about" online communities as they do about those in the real world. USC
Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future director Jeffrey I. Cole
says, "We are now witnessing the true emergence of the Internet as the
powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become." Over 20
percent of the members of online communities were found to take part in
actions related to these communities offline, and 64.9 percent of those
involved in social activism communities online were not involved in any
social activism before participating online. Blog use by America has more
than doubled over the last three years, from 3.2 percent of Internet users
to 7.4 percent, and 12.5 percent of Americans currently maintain a personal
Web site according to the survey, a number that has seen steady increase.
Respondents say they have made an average of 4.65 friends online who they
have never met in person, and have met 1.65 friends in person who they met
online. Over 40 percent of users say that using the Internet has allowed
them to communicate with more friends and family, although this number has
decreased by a few percentage points since 2002.
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It all Depends on Your Point of View
Economist Technology Quarterly (12/06) Vol. 381, No. 8506, P. 6
Carnegie Mellon researchers have developed software that is able to create
a 3D image from 2D images. The system analyzes images of outdoor settings,
differentiates between sky and ground, and then uses visual cues to
differentiate vertical surfaces from horizontal ones. Then, by cutting and
folding the images, applying real-world knowledge such as the sky is blue
and objects tend to rest on the ground, the system reconstructs the scene
in three dimensions. Several different images of the same setting are used
to eliminate the ambiguity that often troubles attempts at such technology.
Other researchers are using the system to enhance surveillance systems,
and aerodynamics of the sails of yachts. Rensselaer researcher Richard
Rake is developing a system whereby hundreds of cameras, divided into small
groups, examine and analyze their surroundings by comparing what they see,
in order to recreate the scene in front of them. Real-time 3D modeling
could also have major implications for military or disaster response
technology.
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Race to Succeed Flash Memory On
Nikkei Weekly (11/27/06) Vol. 44, No. 2262, P. 14; Matsuda, Shogo
There is a race to develop the successor to flash memory, but no clear
contender has yet emerged. NEC and Toshiba are collaborating on the
development of magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM): NEC wishes to
use MRAM as a memory for mixed chips, while Toshiba's goal is to have MRAM
succeed flash for standalone memory. Freescale Semiconductor in the United
States is leading the MRAM field, promoting a commercial 4 MB MRAM chip for
system backup and large-capacity reserve memory, with designs on the
automotive sector once the high temperature issue is addressed. Other
materials being designed as possible successors to flash include
phase-change RAM (PRAM), which stores data by shifting between the
crystalline and amorphous states of the recording medium; ferroelectric RAM
(FeRAM), which does the same by changing the orientation of a ferroelectric
material's atoms; and resistive RAM (RRAM), in which data is stored as a
change in resistance in an oxide film of a transition metal positioned
between electrodes. RRAM is of particular interest as an inexpensive,
power-efficient material for high-density storage, though it may have other
traits and applications that are still unknown. "I can see RRAM being used
as embedded memory in microelectromechanical systems," projects Masayuki
Fujimoto of the Shizuoka University Innovative Joint Research Center.
Japan leads the world in RRAM development, while the United States and
South Korea are leading the development of FeRAM, MRAM, and other kinds of
memory.
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The Shortest Path to the Future Web
Internet Computing (12/06) Vol. 10, No. 6, P. 76; Ayers, Danny
The World Wide Web Consortium purports to be the body that can lead the
Web to realize its full potential, but independent developer and consultant
Danny Ayers says whether such a feat can be accomplished is a question
whose answer lies within the Web itself. He lists human interface,
services, and data as Web domains that can be studied with improvement in
mind, and projects the Web's transformation from an archive of
interconnected documents to a more dynamic system of interconnected data.
Ayers writes that application developers and possibly end users can combine
all types of information distributed around the world through the use of
Semantic Web technologies, but the technical feasibility of this approach
is countered by the chasm between the current Web and a Web of Data; the
typical Web developer is not very familiar with Semantic Web technologies,
but the move toward a Web of Data is proceeding incrementally. Incremental
development's pluses include greater control over the project, feedback
that can receive rapid responses, and continuous assurance that the system
is functioning properly. Interaction is being augmented, at least
ornamentally, by the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) toolset, but
mashups--the combination of data or content from multiple online
sources--have the potential to be significant, according to Ayers. He
points to three general approaches incremental developers can take for
finding what he terms "the appropriate language in which to make [data]
available on the Web": The addition of Semantic Web-oriented interfaces to
existing systems; the embedding of machine-readable data in existing HTML
content; and the enhancement of human-readable content with
machine-readable metadata. "I think one path [to a future Web] begins
with document metadata (as found around microcontent and syndication) and
travels through the world of microformats and embedded data," Ayers
concludes. "A waypoint will be a Semantic Web that leverages these
approaches, along with those offered by an environment more capable of
managing first-class data directly."
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