US Immigration Reform Bill Could Pass by July
IDG News Service (02/26/07) Mullins, Robert
An immigration reform bill with a provision to boost the cap on the H-1B
visa program could be passed by July, according to U.S. Rep. Howard Berman
(D-Calif.). "It could pass both houses by July, go to conference, and be
on the president's desk by September," Berman said in a speech during the
first Tech Industry Summit in San Jose, Calif. Berman, chairman of the
House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, said he is more
optimistic about the bill because Democrats have control of both chambers.
The H-1B program currently has a limit of making 65,000 visas available to
skilled foreign workers per year, which has already been reached for 2007.
An increase to 115,000 H-1B visas per year is favored by technology
companies. "About half of the students enrolled in engineering schools in
the U.S. are foreign nationals who have to return to their home countries
after earning their degrees, depriving U.S. companies of the chance to hire
them," Microsoft's Pamela Passman said at the summit.
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From Math Teacher to Turing Winner
CNet (02/27/07) Lombardi, Candace
New A.M. Turing Award Winner Frances Allen spoke recently with CNet about
the past, present, and future of computer science, diversity in the field,
and her role in both. Allen considers her greatest achievement to be
"enabling users to have access to high-performance computing ... being able
to achieve high performance by the use of parallel computational
computers." She says that when she began working for IBM, the term
"computer science" did not exist, and the field was more open to broad
experimentation. However, as the field became more structured in the 1960s
and became a science, Allen noticed that it was mostly men who met the new
requirements being established. She does not believe that women are less
interested in science than men are, and espouses the abilities of mobile
technology to allow people to work from outside the office, since the
"culture of the workplace" may not cater to some women, especially mothers
of young children. Mentoring has allowed Allen to make in impact on the
number of women going into sciences and to be "an advocate for women," she
says. Allen plans to place her $100,000 Turing prize money into a fund
that will help educate poor people, with an emphasis on young women, who
would not have such an opportunity otherwise. As for the future of
computing, Allen "would like to see the computer languages change to be a
little bit more user-friendly ... there are lots of experts in that. But
we build very high-performance computing machines--and they're getting ever
faster and ever bigger, not in size but in terms of their capabilities.
We've got to find ways for them to be easier to use." For more information
on Frances Allen and ACM's A.M. Turing Award, visit
http://campus.acm.org/public/pressroom/press_releases/2_2007/turing2006.cfm<
/A>
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The Art of Identification
Technology Review (02/28/07) Erard, Michael
Researchers at the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Heritage are working
on a system that generates traceable "fingerprints" for works of art as a
way to discourage the flourishing underground trade in stolen art and
artifacts. The system, known as FingArtPrint, creates a fingerprint using
two steps. First, a one-centimeter square of an original work of art is
selected, and the color of every pixel in the area is mapped using a
scientific-grade digital camera. Next, the roughness of the area is
examined using a white-light confocal profilometer, a type of microscope
that scans micron by micron, turning what appears to be two-dimensional
into a three-dimensional landscape that is unique to the object. The color
and roughness information is then combined to make a fingerprint that is
stored in a computer database. To ensure the authenticity of an object, a
curator or buyer would have to capture a fingerprint from the object and
match it to the original fingerprint stored in the database. A test
conducted by the research team showed that FingArtPrint was able to capture
reliable fingerprints from a variety of works of art and could even
distinguished between two sculptures made from the same mold. The system
has an advantage over other techniques for verifying authenticity because
it has no physical effect on the object itself. However, because
FingArtPrint examines patterns of cracking or fading due to aging to create
fingerprints, further aging after an original fingerprint is taken could
make an original work appear to be a forgery.
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How IT Makes Johnny More Productive
Computerworld (02/26/07) Malymuka, Kathleen
Marshall Van Alstyne won the award for best paper at the International
Conference on Information Systems in December for his pioneering research
into the effects of IT use on productivity at the individual desktop level.
By measuring dollars generated, contracts executed, and start and stop
dates of projects, compared with what IT applications employees were using,
Alstyne found that overall, increased IT use resulted in decreased speed,
but multitaskers, though slower at completing individual tasks, were found
to be more productive overall. The relationship between multitasking and
productivity appears as "an inverted U-shape," according to Alstyne, where
productivity increases to a point of multitasking, then begins to wane as
multitasking increases past this point. His advice is to cultivate IT
skills, but to be aware of "your limits." Emailing and databases were
found to facilitate multitasking most efficiently. A social networking
statistic called "betweenness" was measured by observing the frequency that
someone appears in the shortest communication path between two other
people. Another indicator dubbed "reach" was found by measuring the number
of people that a worker talks to and then the number of people they talk
to. Increased betweenness and reach were both found to be related to
increased productivity. Alstyne recommends that businesses "invest in IT
skills. High IT skill levels reduce the perception of information overload
and facilitate multitasking, which is directly associated with increases in
revenue."
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BCS: Funding Cuts Will Harm Computing Research
ZDNet UK (02/27/07) Espiner, Tom
The British Computing Society (BCS) criticized the United Kingdom
government recent announcement to cut science and technology research
funding. The government said that funding for research councils was cut 68
million pounds this year, down to 128 million pounds, with science and
technology councils receiving the worst of the cuts. Funding for the
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has been lowered
to 29 million pounds. "It is unclear what the impact will be on EPSRC's
future ability to fund computing research," said BCS vice president Steve
Furber. "The government seems to be signaling to potential science
applicants that computing research is not accorded a high priority." BCS
says that with less money going to research, there will be less financial
incentive for IT and engineering graduates to stay in the U.K. Last
November, the BCS cited a 30 percent decrease in the number of students
pursuing full-time undergraduate computer science degrees, a trend that,
when combined with an IT sector that is losing skilled workers, could do
significant damage to the U.K. economy, according to BCS President Nigel
Shadbolt. Research councils have also expressed concern over the budget
cuts, especially since a good deal of their budgets are committed several
years into the future.
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European Research Goes for Gold
BBC News (02/27/07) Amos, Jonathan
After five years of planning, the European Research Council (ERC) has been
established, with the goal of increasing the global competitiveness of
Europe's scientific community. In the past, the EU's Framework Programme
was in charge of funding public research, and was known to be overly
bureaucratic and to favor intricate collaborations. But the ERC, which
will receive 7.5 billion euros by 2013, will not require specific themes,
collaboration, or the return of a proportion of grant money to contributing
nations. A main point of the ERC's philosophy is the importance of
emerging researchers, those who have held a Ph.D. less than nine years.
The administrative structure will support the young researchers, allowing
them to put their own teams together. One ERC application, being created
by Dr. Kalina Bontcheva, a Sheffield University computer science professor
who specializes in natural language processing, will investigate the use of
"virtual characters" to help people interface with computers. "We want to
make it easier for people to interact with our advanced search technology,"
says Bontcheva. "You could then ask these characters what you want and
they would understand you and go away and get the information for you."
The success of the program will be measured by the amount of scientific
papers published by ERC researchers, citations they receive, and the
ability to both bring researchers back to Europe and attract new ones. "We
have a collection of small scientific communities, and that means you have
a tendency to select the best in small parts, rather than looking for what
will survive in global competition," says ERC President Fotis Kafatos.
"The ERC is about pooling our efforts so that all of Europe can be a big
player."
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Professor Fights a Mathematical Battle to Keep the
Virtual World Running Smoothly
University of New Mexico (02/26/07)
University of New Mexico computer science professor Jared Saia has
completed algorithms that are able to support computer systems that have
hundreds of millions of users and provide formidable resistance to an
attack. Based on the Byzantine Agreement that traitors are working behind
the scenes to plot an attack, the algorithms make use of mathematical tools
such as expander and extractor graphs that can be used to develop reliable
distributed systems, in addition to the probabilistic method. They are
robust and scalable. Saia says that people collaborating on a Web-based
project should be able to proceed with their work even if one-third of the
participants are working to sabotage the effort. He now plans to focus on
turning his research into a commercial product. Saia recently received a
National Science Foundation Career award, and he will use the $400,000
award over five years and other grant money that he has received from the
NSF and Sandia National Labs over the years to press ahead with the
project.
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Experts: No Cure in Sight for Unpredictable Hard Drive
Loss
Ars Technica (02/25/07) Anderson, Nate
A study by Google researchers entitled "Failure Trends in a Large Disk
Drive Population" concluded that individual drive malfunctions cannot be
effectively predicted with Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting
Technology (SMART) information, and that there is no correlation between
drive failure and temperature and CPU utilization levels. Alfredo
Milani-Comparetti, creator of the SpeedFan temperature and SMART monitoring
tool, found Google's argument that SMART cannot be employed to model
individual drive failure to be "very odd," and he thinks his tools and
SMART data together can help people spot failing hard drives. SpinRite
creator Steve Gibson notes that drive watchers have long regarded the SMART
system's value with skepticism, although he acknowledges that the optimal
methodology for determining whether a drive is failing or not is sector
reallocation counts. Gibson observes that the "very high temperatures"
that can impact drive lifetimes often occur in home PCs. "Failure rates
are always much higher than the manufacturers claim," he says, but the
manufacturers' need to continue selling drives to remain in business
creates an incentive for not boosting their products' reliability. This
month's FAST '07 conference cited an exemplary report on disk failures from
Carnegie Mellon computer science professors concluding that the rate of
drive failures is actually much higher than indicated in the manufacturer's
mean time to failure. Also discovered in the study is a steadily rising
rate of failure that starts at a very early point in a drive's lifetime.
"This is an interesting observation, because it does not agree with the
common assumption that after the first year of operation, failure rates
reach a steady state for a few years, forming the 'bottom of the bathtub,'"
the researchers wrote.
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Group Might Be the Key to Bridging the Digital
Divide
Investor's Business Daily (02/27/07) P. A4; Kontzer, Tony
Although there have been several programs aimed at bringing computers and
the Internet to the Third World, they have mostly worked in isolation and
have struggled to make a real impact. But a new project operating out of
the University of California, Berkeley, known as the RiOS (research,
innovation, organization, and societies) Institute aims to enhance the
effectiveness of such programs by supplying technology development
organizations with business advice and supplying businesses with technology
development advice. Since its inception at a conference in Silicon Valley,
RiOS has signed a 10-year pact to work with the United Nation's Global
Alliance for Information and Communications Technology Development.
"There's no use having lots of programs to get technologies out to
societies that can derive no value from them," said Cassatt CEO Bill
Coleman. Coleman says that without true economies, "the digital divide
doesn't mean anything" to many countries. Providing computers so that
people can do something like play video games is useless, "But if you can
create jobs, then you're making a fundamental change," says the World
Bank's Djordjija Petkoski. One example of the type of work RiOS plans is a
program conducted by the Development of Disadvantaged People, which allowed
women in India to produce 225 liters of drinking water a day, for only one
dollar, and sell the water for profit. "What used to be philanthropic
activity is now becoming a more important part of doing business," says
RiOS executive director Paul Braund. "There's no single government and no
single company that can deal with all these issues."
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Technology Keeps Tabs on Newborns
Star Phoenix (02/26/07) French, Janet
A system developed by Monique Frize, a professor at Carleton University's
systems and computer engineering department, could allow computers to
monitor babies' vital signs to predict health problems and alert doctors.
Doctors would use the system as a decision support tool, since predicting
whether a sick baby will live or die is a very difficult and sensitive
task. Although the computer's decision may not change a doctor's mind, it
could alert them to watch for warning signs or to act faster. To train the
computers to make predictions, the Frize compiled health information from
about 24,000 babies whose outcomes were already known. Frize also created
a program for predicting premature births, using information from a U.S.
Center for Disease Control Database. She hopes that she can develop tests
for mores specific conditions such as Down syndrome. "My machine works
with just data," Frize said. "You don't have to do any tests on the
person. You just glean some information, you put it in and it seems to be
as accurate as some of the invasive techniques." Babies are normally
hooked up to many machines that analyze data independently, and Frize's aim
is to integrate this analysis into a single machine that takes information
from several sources. She is also involved in a project that is exploring
the use of infrared light to visualize pain in patients.
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EPA Begins Evaluation of Data Center Power, Cooling
Issues
eWeek (02/23/07) Preimesberger, Chris
An EPA workshop was held last week to establish a new "Energy Star"
certification for data center power consumption. The workshop included
representatives from major IT companies, power and cooling service
providers, and others who have an interest in the matter. "We don't want
to look at incremental change," said the EPA's Andrew Fanara. "We're
thinking 'whole system design' change here. We need to produce more
energy-efficient servers, no question about it. This is the group that's
going to help quantify all this." A recent report from the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory approximated that the electricity used by
servers doubled between 2000 and 2005, due in large part to the significant
increase in the number of active servers as well as critical ancillary
systems such as cooling and lighting. Stanford University scientist Jon
Koomey, who worked on the Berkeley National Laboratory report, says,
"There's a lot of opportunity for improvement." Rep. Ann Eshoo
(D.-Calif.), who co-authored the bill that called on the EPA to review the
issue, says, "The cumulative energy cost for servers and data centers in
the U.S. is approximately $3.3 billion annually, and studies have shown
energy-efficient servers can save up to 80 percent in electricity and
cooling costs." The workshop produced several industry-centric groups that
will add to the EPA's final report to Congress by focusing on areas such as
software, architecture, and processors.
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Scientists: Data-Storing Bacteria Could Last Thousands of
Years
Computerworld (02/27/07) Mearian, Lucas
New technology developed by researchers at Keio University Institute for
Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus offers huge
possibilities for long-term data storage. Current disk and storage systems
can store data for up to 100 years in most situations, while the use of
bacteria DNA could provide a medium for storing data for thousands of
years. The researchers used the technology to create an artificial DNA
that can carry more than 100 bits of data within the genome structure. The
artificial DNA carries data, makes numerous copies of its DNA, and inserts
the originals and the copies, or the backup files, into the bacterial
genome sequence. The Japanese researchers say the first application of the
technology could be to track medication. The new technology has the
potential to enable the storage of text and images for many millennia.
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Videos Have Net Bursting at the Seams
Chicago Tribune (02/23/07) Van , Jon
The growing popularity of sending video clips over the Internet is testing
network limits and requiring significant investment from operators, but
whether or not regulation is needed to keep pipes from becoming clogged is
a point of much contention. "We don't see anything catastrophic near term,
but over the next few years there's this fundamental wall we're heading
towards," said Qwest CTO Pieter Poll. Traffic volume has outpaced computer
power, and a recent report by Deloitte Consulting predicted that Internet
demand would exceed capacity in 2007. Deloitte partner David Tansley says
that "so many business models assume Internet capacity to be ubiquitous and
inexpensive that capacity isn't seen as a limiting factor in applications."
He says network operators will soon need to extend capacity, although some
will not have the required capital. Telecoms have always viewed the
Internet as a scarce resource, and are now claiming that it needs to be
regulated in order to survive, an argument that Internet executives call
posturing, citing past efforts to regulate VoIP on the grounds that it
would exceed network capacity. Changing habits, such as the trend of
sending video from user to user, have made telecoms' job of predicting
demand quite difficult. Internet companies have always treated the
Internet as an abundant resource, noting that technology such as VoIP has
come on gradually, allowing networks to step up to meet demands. As
high-definition video becomes easier to record and access, the bandwidth
crunch will continue, although "With appropriate continuing investment, the
Internet is capable of handling any applications," claims Level3
Communications vice president John Ryan. "What we're starting to see is a
distinction between those operators who have the capital to fund expansion
and those that don't."
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Will C# Ring True for Embedded Apps?
EE Times (02/26/07)No. 1464, P. 46; Goering, Richard
Embedded designers have been slow to embrace the C# language that
Microsoft has developed. Primarily limited to the desktop, C# does not
have as many symbolic requirements as C++ and as many declarative
requirements as Java. "We're trying to bring that sort of capability into
a new environment," says Colin Miller, Microsoft director of the .Net Micro
Framework. The company recently introduced a free software development kit
that embedded developers will be able to use to build applications in C#
with a subset of the .Net libraries that are available for the desktop.
Miller notes that C# runs inside a managed environment, is more foolproof
than C/C++, and makes debugging easier, facilitating desktop developers'
transition to deeply embedded applications. Researchers at the University
of Montreal saw the same potential in the use of .Net and C# for
system-level design a few years ago. Professor El Mostapha Aboulhamid
described C# as bringing together "what is nice in Java and what is nice in
C++."
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To Be Almost Human or Not to Be, That Is the
Question
Electronic Design (02/15/07) Vol. 55, No. 4, P. 37; Harris, Daniel
Researchers developing robots as caregivers and assistants to the
handicapped and the elderly are on the horns of a dilemma: Whether to
strive for a more humanoid appearance and function or embrace a more
artificial, science-fiction model. Advocating the first case are
scientists such as professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University's
Department of Adaptive Machine Systems, while project leader of Honda
America's North American Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility (ASIMO)
Stephen Keeney and other researchers support the second option. ASIMO uses
a variety of sensors and algorithms to access distance and direction,
process moving objects, and interact with people, but Keeney says the
robot's human features--legs instead of treads or wheels, hands to
manipulate objects, etc.--are incorporated so it can fulfill its function
as a caregiver. "We should always be cognizant that ASIMO is a machine and
should be approachable and not be scary to children," notes Keeney. "It is
a comfortable middle ground between machine and humanoid androids that
others are working on." Ishiguro's goal is to create androids that are
indistinguishable from humans at first sight with such technologies as
tactile sensors, actuators, and human-looking artificial skin. Of
particular interest to the scientist is the use of androids to provide
entertainment, fulfill communication needs, and serve as companions, and
one of the bigger obstacles researchers face is the Uncanny Valley, which
is people's tendency to reject machines that look, move, and act human
beyond a certain point of acceptability. Human-like movement is key to the
success of androids, according to Ishiguro, and other necessary
breakthroughs include the ability to comprehend answers, deduce information
based on conversations, and distinguish individuals within a crowd.
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Interview: Once More With Feelings
New Scientist (02/24/07) Vol. 193, No. 2592, P. 48; Gefter, Amanda
AI pioneer and author Marvin Minsky believes that by studying human
emotion artificial intelligence researchers can gain insight into what
makes them so resourceful. Humans are able to look at something in many
different ways and use different mental and physical resources to solve
problems, while computers usually have only one way of thinking about
something. Minsky believes that emotional states are actually simpler than
most other ways of thinking. He says emotions simply block certain mental
processes, or resources, allowing a system to have many processes, yet only
make use of what it needs. Computers have never been capable of what we
call "common sense," since people are able to take in millions of fragments
of information and thousands of processes, while computers only are fed
information about a single subject, although some projects are now
collecting massive amounts of everyday knowledge and looking for ways to
organize and apply it in computers. Minsky, recipient of ACM's A.M. Turing
Award in in 1969, has developed the "Critic-Selector" model of mind, which
imagines the brain as a machine containing numerous resources that make up
"ways to think" when combined in certain ways. The Critic element would be
aware that a task was too difficult as it was being carried out and try to
approach the problem from a new angle, or divide it into parts, and the
Selector could turn processes on or off to suit relevant needs. AI has not
progressed much since the 1980s, according to Minsky, because "AI
researchers have developed many techniques for solving various types of
problems, but few of them have tried to come up with schemes that combine
multiple ways of thinking."
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W3C Publishes Eight New XML-Family Specs
SD Times (02/15/07)No. 168, P. 5; Worthington, David
XQuery, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) 2.0, XML Path
Language (XPath) 2.0, and five other specifications were published by the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in order to hasten enterprise initiatives
to connect databases to the Web and influence the integration of databases
and document systems. "These specifications provide a much needed bridge
between two worlds: Documents with complex but irregular internal
structure on the one hand, and databases and simple data with atomic values
on the other," said Michael Sperberg-McQueen of the W3C. The goal of
XQuery is to deliver a unified interface for multiple-source data access
using tools for querying structured and semi-structured data that is not
restricted by schemas. XPath 2.0 is described by W3C as a superset of the
original language as well as a subset of XSLT 2.0 and XQuery, with the
added functions of stronger text processing via regular expressions,
support for conditional statements by path expressions, and additional data
type support that augments the language's information processing capacity.
"XPath is widely regarded as the standard mechanism for locating objects in
XML," reported IBM research fellow Don Chamberlin. "The fact that this is
adopted in common for XSLT and XQuery is very important to the industry
because these have become a suite of standards and are converging into a
compatible family." Broadening the range of XML transformations with an
expanded library of functions that maintains most backward compatibility is
the purpose of XSLT 2.0, and the standard's authors claim that the spec
eases error filtering, primarily due to data conversions between XML
schemas. The other five specs are complementary to XQuery, XPath 2.0, and
XSLT 2.0 as supporting technology.
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Enabling the 21st Century Health Care Information
Technology Revolution
Communications of the ACM (02/07) Vol. 50, No. 2, P. 34; Agrawal, Rakesh;
Grandison, Tyrone; Johnson, Christopher
The U.S. government's push to create a health care information
infrastructure requires technologies that support the sharing of electronic
medical records while protecting the privacy of patients, and the authors
write that such technologies are components of their Hippocratic Database
(HDB). HDB's Active Enforcement (AE) component is responsive to emergent
privacy and security requirements, permits the negotiation of policies
covering the disclosure of personal information between patients and health
care institutions, and enables cell-level management rather than row- or
column-level management in the database, using the three-stage process of
policy creation, preference negotiation, and application data retrieval.
HDB AE provides a general methodology for managing and classifying policy
and preference information, transparent policy enforcement for enterprise
applications, underlying database-technology agnosticism, and enhanced
query processing speed. There are methods AE can be combined with to allow
queries over encrypted data without incurring a performance penalty. HDB's
Sovereign Information Integration component enables autonomous entities to
exchange information securely and privately through the use of a Web
services framework that applies a series of commutative encryption
functions to uniquely recognizable information in different orders and at
different sites, yielding encrypted values that can be matched against each
other while maintaining the privacy and security of the data sets. The
government's vision of a health care information framework calls for
efficient and cost-effective data access tracking systems for determining
the identification of people who access patient information and whether
such access is authorized, and HDB meets this challenge with its Compliance
Auditing solution. Compliance Auditing employs a logical logging system to
register all queries and contextual data and an audit application to
recreate the state of the database at any given past time using query logs
and backlog tables. HDB can de-identify information for research and
analysis through its Privacy-Preserving Data Mining component and its
optimal k-anonymization component.
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