Florida Shifting to Voting System With Paper Trail
New York Times (02/02/07) P. A1; Goodnough, Abby; Drew, Christopher
Florida Governor Charlie Crist yesterday announced that the state will do
away with touch-screen voting machines in favor optical-scan machines in
time for the 2008 election. This decision, coupled with proposed federal
voting legislation requiring independent audit abilities, could signal the
end of touch-screen machines. "For Florida to be clearly contemplating
moving away from touch screens to the greatest extent possible is truly
significant," said VoteTrust USA director Warren Stewart, stressing the
symbolic importance of Florida in U.S. elections. Many other states have
called for paper trails, although no decision has been made as to whether
they will scrap touch-screen machines or simply retrofit them with
printers. The 15 Florida counties that already have touch-screen machines
in place will be allowed to use them in the early voting before the 2008
elections. "The price of freedom is not cheap," said Crist. "The
importance of a democratic system of voting that we can trust, that we can
have confidence in, is incredibly important." He also announced that the
state will work to help the blind and speakers of foreign languages use the
optical-scan machines. A recent survey by Election Data Services found
that 56 percent of U.S. counties have purchased optical-scan machines,
which experts say are cheaper than touch screens. Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.)
will propose a bill that requires a paper trail and authorized $300 million
in federal money to implement the necessary changes.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Carnegie Mellon Professor Jeannette Wing Chosen to Head
Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate at NSF
National Science Foundation (01/31/07)
National Science Foundation (NSF) funding for computer science will soon
be in the hands of Jeannette Wing, who has been hired as assistant director
for Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the federal
agency. Wing, head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon
University, will join the NSF on July 1, 2007. CISE has a budget of more
than $527 million, and accounts for 86 percent of computer science research
funded by the federal government. NSF director Arden L. Bement, Jr.
expressed confidence in Wing's abilities as the Internet impacts science,
business, and other aspects of society at an amazing pace. "Jeannette Wing
will bring enormous vision and ability to continue the transformation and
enable the United States to uphold a position of world leadership in
computing, communications, and information science and engineering," says
Bement. Wing is an expert in formal methods, and trustworthy computing,
especially with regard to software security, has been a recent focus of her
work. She is an ACM fellow and an elected member-at-large on the ACM
Council.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Engineering Education Prepares for 2020
EE Times (02/01/07) Goering, Richard
Future engineers will need to be taught new attributes and in new ways,
2007 IEEE President Leah Jamieson said during her keynote address at the
DesignCon 2007 conference on Jan. 31. She gave an overview of the new
National Academy of Engineering (NAE) report on engineering in 2020, which
said engineers will need to be creative, flexible, leaders, and have
business skills. "It's not just about how much math and circuit theory you
know, it's communication, the ability to work in teams, to understand
professional ethics," said Jamieson, dean of engineering at Purdue
University. She expressed concern about the impact that technological
change, globalization, and offshoring would have on engineering knowledge
in the years to come, and wondered if the rapid pace of change would make
it obsolete in as little as five years. Jamieson also discussed the
current state of engineering in the United States, saying the workforce is
stable or declining while interest in studying engineering is falling. She
noted that the industry has not had much success attracting women or
minorities since the mid 1990s. The NAE report also said biotechnology,
nanotechnology, and photonics would be applied within an urban physical
infrastructure in the years to come.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Net Neutrality, Broadband Taxes Top House Tech
Agenda
CNet (01/31/07) Broache, Anne
U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), co-chairman of the Congressional Internet
Caucus Advisory Committee, says it is imperative to reach a consensus
between Internet firms and network operators over Net neutrality
legislation. In 2006, Boucher supported an amendment that would have set
strict rules on broadband providers; that amendment failed to pass. On
Jan. 31 at the committee's yearly summit, Boucher said he does not want
legislation that would impede "innovation inside the network," but also
feels that Internet providers need the option of charging fees to finance
large infrastructure investment. He also said he expects Congress to
swiftly pass legislation calling for all network operators to offer
customers the choice of buying Internet access services by itself, without
having to bundle it with telephone or other services. Boucher along with
Rep. Terry Lee (R-Neb.) supports legislation that would introduce new
broadband taxes. Under the proposal, companies that receive such subsidies
would be able to use them for launching broadband service. Telecom firms
such as those that offer DSL, wireless, pay-phone, and traditional phone
services are already taxed on a predetermined portion of their
long-distance revenue. Last year the FCC extended a comparable requirement
to certain Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers. Meanwhile,
proposed additions to a House communications law include a section that
would allow local governments to offer their own broadband service.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Clocks' Early Spring Forward May Bring About a Few
Falls
Washington Post (02/01/07) P. A1; Babington, Charles
Congress's decision to extend daylight savings time by two weeks did not
receive a great deal of attention when it was announced last year, but as
the new March 11 "spring forward" date approaches, many are scrambling to
make adjustments and spread awareness. The decision was made as a way to
conserve energy, but could result in a wide range of technical problems,
from airlines to banks. Thousands of technicians are currently adjusting
automated systems to switch on the new date, reminding some of the Y2K
scare, although the fact that we were able to avoid catastrophe on that
date is comforting to many. However, Rutgers University information
technology specialist Matthew Kozak says, "After building bunkers in the
desert for Y2K, we're not even talking about this, and it's happening in
less than two months." On its Web site, IBM notes, "Any time sensitive
function could be impacted by this change ... It is important for users to
asses their environments and develop appropriate plans for applying the
necessary changes." Microsoft has listed its operating systems that need
manual updates in a similar message, and Cisco has offered documentation
explaining how to update their products. However, analysts report that
much of the private sector remains oblivious to the change in date. "I
haven't heard about it," said Barry Koling of SunTrust Banks. "It seems to
me, we managed to get through Y2K. If we can accomplish the change of the
millennium, we can handle a change in daylight saving time."
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Making Animated Fluids Look More Realistic
Technology Review (01/31/07) Greene, Kate
One of the biggest challenges facing special effects animators has been
fluid motion; some even choose to draw it by hand. California Institute of
Technology computer science professor Mathieu Desbrun is developing a new
way to animate liquids using new equations based on physical properties
that traditional equations do not express. The method utilizes novel
mathematics called differential geometry, which designs equations
specifically to be solved by computers For the past few decades, computer
scientists have been breaking equations explaining physical properties into
smaller chunks, which a computer can compute, but the animated liquid they
produced still flowed unnaturally. Desbrun's approach is different because
"instead of just approximating [swirling motions], we can capture the
dynamics faithfully," he says. "And we show it pays off visually." His
work focused on whirlpools. While past approaches approximate a liquid's
velocity at various points and use this information to approximate motion
along a circular path, Desbrun's method models the actual circulation of a
liquid. By breaking a whirlpool into small pieces and determining the flow
at each location, the system can determine flux, the fundamental property
of the circulation of liquid. University of Southern California aerospace
and mechanical engineering professor Eva Kanso says, "It's a big step for
the computer-graphics community to look at physical laws and try to
simulate them." While this new technique is just as time consuming as the
old one, its results look considerably better. Desbrun admits that his
system could not be applied to the movies right away, but if it could be
implemented into software, animators could create far more accurate
representations of liquid than they can today.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
EU to Offer Euros 1.2 B for IT, Telecom Research in
2007
IDG News Service (02/01/07) Blau, John
The European Union's 7th Framework Program for research and development
has a budget of 9.1 billion euros (about $11.8 billion) for 2007, and 1.2
billion euros (about $1.6 billion) will go toward research on new
information and communications technologies. ICT will receive the bulk of
the framework budget. The EU is interested in research in communications,
software systems, networked media, and embedded systems, and wants the
region to become a leader in next-generation Internet technology and other
areas. In late December, the EU announced it would be accepting proposals
from research organizations, which will have until early May to submit
their research ideas. Through 2013, the program will have a budget of 50
billion euros (about $65 billion) for research and development. Meanwhile,
the EU has devised a new strategy for funding technology research that
combines the R&D funding of companies and research institutes with money
from member states and the EU. The EU announced the Joint Technology
Initiatives program in November, with the first being Artemis for research
on embedded systems.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
UIC Team Ready to Get Medieval on Spammers
Chicago Sun-Times (01/31/07) P. 64; Guy, Sandra
University of Illinois computer science department head Pete Nelson has
developed Spamalot, an anti-spam system intended to trick spammers into
wasting time and money, or even getting themselves caught. "The whole idea
is to create a system that starts a dialogue with the spammers or their
systems, consuming their resources so the spammers can no longer send their
messages inexpensively," said Nelson. Spamalot is set-up in an email
account and is able to detect the type of spam it receives and respond in
kind. Three different agents can be deployed based on the type of spam.
Arthur handle Nigerian spammers, those who tell people that a rich oil
baron has died and the sender needs to find someone's account to transfer
the oil baron's money into. Patsy takes on requests to enter sensitive
information in mortgage application and prescription medicine forms, and
Lancelot goes after phishers. Lancelot works by providing phishers with a
false password and user name that is coded so a bank can track it and shut
down the computer from which it is used, and potentially prosecute the
spammer. Another method to foil spammers is to have them call a monitored
telephone line, a technique used by Nelson when he first had the idea for
Spamalot. The system is currently being tested in the school's AI lab.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Atomic 'Transistor' May Switch Using Quantum
Clouds
New Scientist (01/30/07) Dume, Belle
Using a special type of matter, physicists have developed a way to build
atomic transistors, an essential step in creating atomic circuits. The
University of Colorado's Alex Zozulya and colleagues at Worcester
Polytechnic Institute showed that Bose-Einstein condensate, a super-cold
gas cloud of atoms of the same quantum state, can be manipulated using
three adjacent chambers that are made by trapping magnetic fields or laser
beams. The population of atoms in the center chamber determines the
movement, or tunneling, of atoms between the two outside chambers. The
left chamber functions as a source electrode, the middle as a gate, and the
right as a drain, in a manner very similar to an electronic-field-effect
transistor. "Our calculations show that a small number of atoms can be
used to control the flow of a large number of atoms," Zozulya says.
Quantum interactions between ultra-cold atoms display a coherence that does
not exist in room temperature electrons. The resulting properties make the
number of atoms moving from the source to the drain extremely sensitive to
the number of atoms in the gate, which means that atomic transistors could
be used as amplifiers. "Once you have such an amplifying device, it is
relatively easy to understand how one could make atom 'circuits' by
interconnecting basic atom elements--something that is in complete analogy
with electronic circuits," says Zozulya.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Robot Will Race in City
The Tartan (01/29/07) Vol. 101, No. 14, Leong, Jun Xian
Carnegie Mellon's robotic Chevy Tahoe will compete in the DARPA Urban
Challenge in November 2007, where it will need to navigate through city
traffic. Whereas the previous DARPA autonomous vehicle contests, held in
the desert, were more about navigating wide-open terrain, the Urban
Challenge will require the negotiation of traffic signals, moving traffic,
intersections, and other urban obstacles. Tartan Racing, as the team has
named itself, has equipped a 320-horsepower Chevy Tahoe, named Boss, with
25 sensors, three miles of extra wiring, 10 computers with 208,000 lines of
new code, 64 off-the-shelf components, and 350 custom parts. For guidance,
Boss has radar, laser sensors, a GPS system, and a motion camera to detect
its location as well as other vehicles. Boss was able to make its way
around a test course at speeds not exceeding 20 miles per hour, follow
traffic signals, and even allow user-operated vehicles to pass if they
arrived first at a stop sign. The team is not as concerned with the $2
million, $1 million and $500,000 prizes being awarded to the teams whose
vehicles first make it through the course within the six-hour time limit as
they are with contributing to the effort to "make driving safer, to create
new autonomous navigation and robotic technologies, and to change the
world's perception of what is possible," according to team leader William
"Red" Whittaker.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Project Analyzes Internet Security
The State News (01/29/07) Jourdan, Kristi
Michigan State University professors Robert LaRose and Nora Rifon believe
that continuing user education offers a way for computer users to be more
proactive with computer security. The two conducted a national survey of
557 home Internet users last year and found that only about 10 percent said
they felt safe when surfing the Web. "There are a lot of automatic
protections available through software companies and Internet service
providers, but they aren't totally protective," says LaRose, a
telecommunication, information studies and media professor. Today, hackers
and computer criminals are hoping that Internet users will open email
attachments, click on pop-up advertisements, download files from the Web,
and follow the instructions in phishing emails. The school plans to launch
a campaign about the potential risks online. Rich Wiggins, senior
information technologist for Academic Computing & Network Services, says
computer users should turn on a personal firewall, use current antivirus
software, and stay alert. "We're trying to push the necessity aside from
automatic protection but want user education to continue," says LaRose.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
A Sense of Security
The Engineer Online (01/30/07)
An EU-funded project will develop a mobile device that monitors the vital
signs of elderly users and can even predict falls before they happen. The
Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment will implement wireless
technology, GPS, and various sensors to keep track of physical parameters
such as ECG monitoring, oxygen saturation, and heart rate. The fall
detection system would use accelerometers that could tell the mobile device
that a fall was about to occur. Rather than being in constant
communication, the mobile device, a modified wireless phone, would collect
data when a fall is predicted or vital signs show dangerous changes, in
order to conserve bandwidth and power. GPS would be used to alert
emergency response services to the user's location if the device's
algorithm detected that they are in trouble. The project aims to use as
many standard and commercially-available technologies as possible,
including a Web cam set up with a simple PC to allow care takers to check
in on the user at any time. "The key is we are planning an open system
with plug-and-play architecture so the mobile sensor networks can accept
any new sensors being plugged in," says Plymouth University School of
Health Informatics' Maged Boulos. He expects future projects to focus on
niche markets such as blood-glucose sensors for diabetics. A prototype of
the system should be ready for testing next year.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
IBM Tunes Up for Jazz Open-Source Project
CNet (01/30/07) LaMonica, Martin
In June, IBM will launch Jazz.net, a projected intended to create
standards for distributed software development. "A significant portion, if
not all developers, are operating in a geographically distributed fashion.
Jazz adds a layer onto the development process to be aware of what each
other is working on," analyst Stephen O'Grady said. Until now, development
tools have concentrated on helping individual programmers work more
efficiently, but Jazz sets its sights on the entire development process,
including geographically disparate teams and business partners. An example
of Jazz's use would be an instant message sent between development team
members that shows how source code fits into an application, rather than
simply presenting it as static text. The Jazz project is an extension of
IBM's Eclipse project, an open-source development framework popular among
software vendors and programmers. Jazz open-sources a "framework," which
lets third parties create extensions, and works with software other than
Eclipse-based applications. A company can either run a hosted mode of the
Jazz software over the Internet or install the software on its network.
O'Grady explains that IBM's decisions of what to release will determine
Jazz's market impact: "In a perfect world what they do, which would be
great for the Eclipse community, is to really have an open-source
foundation that makes the developer experience for folks working remotely
that much more seamless. The question is where they draw the line between
what is open-source and what they keep as their special sauce."
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Davulcu's Research Corrals NSF Career Award
Arizona State University (02/01/07) Kullman, Joe
Arizona State computer science and engineering professor Hasan Davulcu's
work in creating a way for people to automate the scheduling of tasks has
earned a $400,000 NSF Career Award. Davulcu aims to create a formal policy
specification language and methodology for software that allows the
capabilities of a wide range of services providers to be aligned to the
requirements of consumers. Davulcu's goal is to allow "users [to] write or
edit policy rules conveniently so that software agents can find and talk to
each other to make recommendations for organizing and scheduling ordinary
tasks, such as car repairs or travel plans." The system would allow
service providers to collaborate on scheduling. For example, a user's
calendar and bank could talk to a mechanic to find a good time for an
appointment. The initial step in creating these abilities would be for
organizations in specialized fields to adopt a standard language an
terminology to create descriptions of themselves that could be edited
locally, "then the algorithms will do the services composition to satisfy
their users' goals," Davulcu says. He expects to have a prototype ready in
three years that could incorporate RFID devices. The test would be carried
out in a campus building and would allow the user to access location- and
profile-aware information and services; a student could be alerted to a
presentation occurring when he is out of class, for example.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Back to School: Getting Girls Into IT
InfoWorld (01/29/07) Nobel, Carmen
Girls will have to be targeted as far back as the elementary school level
if information technology is to see a greater representation of women in
the years to come, according to many industry leaders and experts. "They
do very well in math and science for a while, and then seem to lose
interest," says Sandy Carter, vice president of SOA and WebSphere strategy
at IBM. To keep young girls from giving up on math and science early,
women in the industry will need to go back to their schools and mentor
them. Mentorship is seen more as a long-term strategy for solving the
problem. IBM offers access to female mentors throughout the school year to
young girls who participate in its EXITE (EXploring Interests in Technology
and Engineering) camps. "It's going to take decades, but once you have
that pipeline going, things will change for the better," says Cisco's
Jayshree Ullal. Through its Girls/Women in Technology Initiative, Cisco
offers a number of programs for girls, including those in kindergarten.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Demo '07 Conference Showcases Encrypted Messaging,
Inkless Printing
InformationWeek (02/01/07) Claburn, Thomas
Demo '07 showcased many new products as well as the emerging attitude of
placing priority on the customer rather than technology. One example of
the user-friendliness trend is the Ceelox program that allows users to
embed hidden data in images, hopefully spurring the sharing of coded
messages by both customers and advertisers. Shipwire.com, a startup,
introduced a shipping service that lets customers outsource the shipping,
receiving, and warehousing of products that is not linked to any online
store. An online service by 6th Sense Analytics was on display that allows
programmers to keep track of development done by dispersed collaborators.
The Inkless printing system demonstrated by Zink uses paper that contains
ink, opening up the possibility for devices such as digital cameras to
print out images. A thin, multi-core system on a chip computing
architecture was shown off by Wyse Technologies. The platform allows users
to run Windows without a PC and without the performance suffering. Adobe's
newest application Apollo received a lot of attention for its ability to
let developers work on and offline on a desktop that can easily be
synchronized.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
The Death of Computing
British Computer Society (01/22/07) McBride, Neil
Waning numbers of students enrolling in university computer science
courses and a decline in the computing unit of funding has led to
speculation that computing is dying as a discipline, writes De Montfort
University School of Computing lecturer Neil McBride. "We claim, as the
President of the BCS has recently, that there is still a massive need for
computing students in the U.K. today," he notes. "We look to games
programming for our salvation, designing games programming courses and
reducing a wide-ranging industrial discipline to a set of geeks programming
computers to zap spacecraft and dismember aliens." McBride attributes this
lessening of excitement for computing to the advent of easy-to-do
computation facilitated by tools that one does not need a heavy computer
science background to operate. The result is an erosion of computer
science's glamour and the rejection of the conceit that the discipline can
only be practiced by an elite group of experts. McBride describes computer
science curricula as "old, stale and increasing[ly] irrelevant." The
maturation of commercial software products has dampened the need for
in-house industrial software development, while globalization has made IT
jobs less lucrative in the public's perception. McBride calls for a shift
in perspective on the part of universities, away from system construction
and toward technological applications; an emphasis on interdisciplinary
studies is also a desirable trait of tomorrow's computing department.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Research Aims to Detect Online Terrorist Activity
CSO Online (01/07) Daniel, Diann
The Department of Homeland Security and researchers at Rutgers University,
the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Pittsburgh are finalizing contracts
for a project that will lead to the development of new technologies for
monitoring terrorist activity online. The researchers are expected to
begin work on improving information analysis and computational methods as
soon as the contract details for the three-year, $10.2 million grant have
been completed. Announced by DHS last July, the project is expected to
encompass mathematics graph theory, dynamic data analysis, optimization,
"machine learning," and statistical analysis. The researchers will explore
these methods as they create algorithms that are able to delve into public
sources such as news stories and blogs to find patterns and relationships
that may help lead to the discovery of terrorist plans. The technology
will have to handle the enormous amount of information online, changing
sources, and its pace of flow. Moreover, the tools must determine the
credibility of the information.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Computing Versus Human Thinking
Communications of the ACM (01/07) Vol. 50, No. 1, P. 85; Naur, Peter
University of Copenhagen Professor Emeritus Peter Naur, recipient of ACM's
2005 A.M. Turing Award, presents an overview of his work and how it relates
to clarifying the distinction between computing and human thinking. His
research led to the observation that computing, insofar as it pertains to
science and scholarship, is a form of description that is very helpful in
characterizing many kinds of phenomena. Logical or methodical elements
have no relevance to computing, according to Naur. He argues that
computing cannot describe human thinking because human thinking, at its
core, "is a matter of the plasticity of the elements of the nervous system,
while computers--Turing machines--have no plastic elements." A non-digital
form is required for the description of human thinking, and the author
presents the Synapse-State Theory of mental life as a demonstration. Naur
cites works by William James and Charles Sherrington as important sources
for his theories: James for his insights about mental life, and
Sherrington for his empirical studies of the nervous system's integrated
actions. Naur presents the nervous system as a combination of synapses,
neurons, and nodes where the neurons converge; excitations comprise the
system's activity, while nodes facilitate the critical summation of
impulses. The Synapse-State version of the nervous system features five
layers--the item-layer, the attention-layer, the specious-present layer,
the sense-layer, and the motor-layer--that come with their own synapses
boasting distinctive properties. The item-layer's synapses encompass the
organism's long-term habits, while experience occurs in the excitation of
the nodes in the sense-layer; activation of muscles takes place in the
motor-layer.
Click Here to View Full Article
- Web Link to Publication Homepage
to the top
