Berners-Lee Gets Technical on the Hill
InternetNews.com (03/01/07) Mark, Roy
Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee spoke before the House Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and the Internet on Thursday to tout the importance of
network neutrality and the need to do away with DRM protection.
Berners-Lee pointed out that network neutrality is accepted in other
countries, and said, "I feel a non-discriminatory Internet is very
important for a world based on the World Wide Web ... The special care we
extend to the World Wide Web comes from a long tradition that democracies
have of protecting their vital communications channels." He said a slight
compromise on the issue may be appropriate, but maintained that "we should
err on the side of keeping a medium blank sheet." In his argument against
DRM protections, Berners-Lee stressed that the growth of the Internet is
based upon open standards, scalable architecture, and access to standards
on a royalty-free basis. "E-commerce entrepreneurs have been able to
develop services with the confidence that they will be available for use
with an Internet connection and a Web browser," he said. Berners-Lee also
noted that Apple's use of non-standard technology for its copy-protection
scheme has led to slow growth, while its open-standard podcast component
has grown significantly. Instead of using DRM, he suggested software that
"let[s] people do the right thing," although he is not sure "if we will
[ever] move to a totally DRM-free world."
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Online Voting Clicks in Estonia
Wired News (03/02/07) Borland, John
The first national election to feature online balloting for all voters is
being held in the Baltic state of Estonia. "No one has managed to prove
that e-voting actually raises participation, so that remains unanswered,"
says National Electoral Commission secretariat Arne Koitmae. "But this
gives people another possibility." The system requires a national ID card
equipped with an electronic chip that identifies the card holder, while
card readers are available at low prices or for free; voter authentication
is facilitated through two sets of PINs. The ID card is slotted into the
reader, and the voter application displays a list of parties and candidates
via Internet Explorer. A registered vote is encrypted and routed through a
chain of relay servers to an archive until its decoding on Sunday. Many
other countries, particularly the United States, are concerned about the
security and reliability of e-balloting, and U.S. critics are worried that
voting systems that employ conventional Windows PCs and the open Internet
could be compromised by outsiders as well as insiders. Estonian government
services are already online, while wireless connections have spread to
almost all city cafes, parks, bars, and commuter trains, so concerns about
e-voting's security are somewhat muted. Political scientists are more
optimistic of e-voting systems than computer scientists, as long as voters
trust the system.
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Science Competitiveness, Bit by Bit
Inside Higher Ed (03/01/07) Lederman, Doug
The 109th Congress failed to pass legislation intended to enhance research
and science education as a result of in-fighting between committees, but a
new version of the competitiveness bill, stripped of the contested
provisions, has been proposed in the House. The "Sowing the Seeds Through
Science and Engineering Research Act" would give out awards to outstanding
early-career researchers in academic and nonprofit research environments,
grant graduate research assistantships in areas of national concern, and
create a "national coordination office" to establish priorities for
university and national research infrastructure needs. House Science panel
Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), who introduced the bill, says the goal of
the committee was to "slim the bills down so they are basically just in our
jurisdiction. We've tried to accommodate the Senate on some of their
quirks over there." Gordon says, "We�re trying to not just talk about
things but try to get some competitiveness things forward through the
Congress."
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Will the Mouse Go Away?
Technology Review (03/02/07) Greene, Kate
An easy-to-operate user interface that tracks eye movement has been
developed as an alternative to the computer mouse by Stanford University
doctoral student Manu Kumar. "Eye-tracking technology was developed for
disabled users, but the work that we're doing here is trying to get it to a
point where it becomes more useful for able-bodied users," Kumar notes.
The core component of Kumar's technology is EyePoint software that requires
a person to stare at an item and hold a "hot key," which triggers
magnification of the area being looked at. Once the user pinpoints her
focus in the enlarged area and releases the hot key, the item is opened.
Kumar wrote an algorithm to compensate for the natural jitter of the user's
pupil, and he says the elimination of cursor control is one the interface's
advantages. By combining eye and hand movement, the interaction becomes
more natural. Around 90 percent of the project participants who tested the
EyePoint interface said it was preferable to the mouse, although a 20
percent error rate could be problematic, according to MIT Media and Arts
Technology Laboratory professor Ted Selker. Although Shumin Zhai of the
IBM Almaden Research Center says Kumar's work is important, he acknowledges
the need for users to undergo a calibration process in which the EyePoint
software measures the rapidity of their eye movement.
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Sending U.S. Soldiers to a 'Virtual Iraq'
Computerworld (02/28/07) Havenstein, Heather
An immersive virtual reality system is being used to help soldiers
returning from Iraq deal with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by
exposing them to the scenarios they experienced in Iraq. The system
utilizes sights, sounds, vibrations, and smells to simulate being shot at,
having nearby vehicles explode, and seeing fellow soldiers being shot.
Soldiers wear goggles and head phones and sit on a platform that can both
vibrate and emit smells such as gun powder and burning rubber. "We're
basically trying to use computer systems to create as immersive an
environment as we can," says the University of Southern California
Institute for Creative Technologies' Albert "Skip" Rizzo. "The sense of
smell is directly tied to areas of the brain that are responsible for
memory and emotion." Such exposure is thought to lessen the symptoms of
PTSD. A system operator uses a tablet PC to increase the frightening
effects of the stimuli, so "a person experiences a little bit of anxiety,
and they stick with it and talk about it, and eventually the anxiety
extinguishes," explains Rizzo. Of the six soldiers that have been treated
using the system, four have shown "dramatic improvements" and one has even
gone back to Iraq.
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Q&A: Microsoft UK Head of Innovation Jim Lawn
silicon.com (03/01/07) Simpson, Gemma
As head of innovation at Microsoft UK, Jim Lawn is tasked with designing
and implementing a strategy in which Microsoft continues to fulfill its
role as IT industry innovator while also managing innovation among its
clients and partners. Lawn notes that there is an IT skills gap but
Microsoft has been attempting to mitigate this gap by offshoring to bolster
the economy and compensate for the shortfall. "I think the real issue--and
one that we need to get better at measuring--is that while companies like
Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM do require the great skills that come out of
computer science departments, the Internet has moved much more into
mainstream society," he says. Lawn notes that computer science enrollments
have fallen as optimism in Britain has plunged as a result of the dot-com
meltdown, but the growing spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation in the
United Kingdom makes him confident that interest in choosing computer
science as a career will once again rise. Lawn says the decline in
computer science is not just about the number of people in the computer
science field. "It is about how IT-savvy are people in other departments
and how IT-savvy do they need to be able to have productive careers and
innovate in the U.K." As part of an effort to help Britain's innovation
catch up with that of Silicon Valley, Lawn is collaborating with key U.K.
entrepreneurs on the organization of a "bi-national trade mission" in which
they will spend time in Silicon Valley to get insights on the best
innovation strategies. Lawn says the chief goal of Microsoft's UK
Innovation program is to help others innovate on Microsoft's platform
rather than driving programs, and he envisions collaboration between
Microsoft, other industry players, government, and academia to host more
contests in order to fuel innovation.
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NASA's Robotic Sub Readies for Dive Into Earth's Deepest
Sinkhole
Carnegie Mellon News (02/28/07) Spice, Byron; Watzman, Anne
An underwater robot created by the NASA-funded Deep Phreatic Thermal
Explorer (DEPTHX) project, running on software developed by Carnegie Mellon
researchers, has performed very well in a test run and is now being
prepared for the world's deepest sinkhole. "The fact that it ran
untethered in a complicated, unexplored three-dimensional space is very
impressive," said project leader Bill Stone. DEPTHX uses autonomous
navigation and mapping software to safely maneuver in confined spaces. The
AUV's dead reckoning ability is based on depth, velocity, and inertial
guidance sensors to calculate its position. It has 56 sonar sensors of two
different ranges that allow the robot to detect obstacles and find itself
on a map. In unmapped areas, the sonar works with simultaneous
localization and mapping (SLAM) software to create maps of the environment.
The AUV will dive to depths that no diver or surface sonar is able to
reach. NASA is using the mission to test technologies that could
eventually be used to explore Europa, a moon of Jupiter.
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Consortium for Embedded Systems Sets Stage to Make Global
Impact
Arizona State University (02/27/07) Kullman, Joe
The Consortium for Embedded Systems, which operates within the Arizona
State University School of Computing and Informatics, has appointed a new
director and set its sights on leading the development of embedded
technology that will have a profound effect on the 21st century. ASU
engineering professor Sarma Vrudhula, the consortium's new director,
expects embedded systems to be a $100 billion worldwide industry in the
near future. "One big goal is to see the kind of high-performance
functions you have on your personal computer become available on your
wireless handheld electronics," Vrudhula says. Founded in 2001 with Intel
and Microsoft as corporate partners, the program needs to tap additional
private resources if it hopes to achieve its goals. To entice companies to
join, the consortium is creating "an industry-friendly intellectual
property model to ensure corporate partners get substantial value for their
investments," according to Vrudhula, which will partner faculty researchers
with individuals from participating companies and make all the results
available to members for a single fee. The consortium also wants to bring
other U.S. universities into the fold. During the consortium's first five
years it has establish a firm foundation and is supporting over 30
faculty-led research projects and 16 graduate and undergraduate courses.
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Digital Fair Use Bill Introduced to US House
Ars Technica (02/27/07) Fisher, Ken
Reps. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and John Doolittle (R-Ca.) have announced a new
House bill that would amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to
permit greater "fair use" of copyrighted material. However, the bill does
not allow consumers to make personal use copies of encrypted material such
as DVDs and online music files. Analysts say the Freedom and Innovation
Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007 (FAIR USE Act) is basically
a weakened version of Boucher's DMCRA, which failed to pass in two sessions
of Congress and was vehemently opposed by the content industry. The DMCRA
would have legalized any "fair use" of digital goods, regardless of
anti-circumvention laws, but the FAIR USE Act does not provide for this.
The FAIR USE Act would add several exemptions to anti-circumvention rules,
including allowances for some obsolete technologies and cell phone
unlocking. Current exemptions provide for the circumvention of
anti-copyright technology for the use of software that requires the
original disk or hardware in order to operate and dongle-protected
programs, so long as the dongle no longer functions and a replacement
cannot be found. The bill would also impose limits on statutory damages
resulting from infringement and indirect infringement, laws that would
appease technology companies concerned by MGM v. Grokster.
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'Robots to Conduct Surgeries by 2018'
Korea Herald (02/28/07) Si-young, Hwang
The Institute for Information Technology Advancement in Korea, working
with 3,500 researchers from industry, academia, and research centers, has
released a study on future trends in IT, including 365 wide-ranging
technology needs. Predictions include mobile phone batteries that will
last up to two months off of a single charge, available by 2012, and robots
that can perform surgery, available by 2018. An example scenario involves
a person being hit by a car and knocked unconscious: They could be
identified by examination of their eye and their family members alerted via
a nationwide integrated medical system. Once at the hospital, a remote
treatment system could then redirect them to surgery if necessary, where a
micro robot could conduct the operation under the remote direction of a
doctor. Out of the 365 technologies the researchers envisioned, 52 were
judged to be core technologies that should be developed and deployed
immediately based on criteria including technological relevance,
time-to-market period, technological complexity, and who will lead the
development. Seventy-six percent of the 52 core technologies are predicted
to be completed by 2011, and about 75 percent of the 52 will make it to the
consumer market by 2013.
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New Graphene Transistor Promises Life After Death of
Silicon Chip
University of Manchester (03/01/07)
Researchers at the University of Manchester have developed one-atom thick
graphene-based transistors that could enable the rapid miniaturization of
electronics to continue after silicon-based technology can progress no
further. Graphene is an individual atomic plane that resembles chicken
wire made from a gauze of carbon atoms. Recent improvements in graphene
transistors have done away with the "leaks" that kept them from being
functional in the past. The Manchester team has shown that graphene
remains highly stable and conductive even when cut into strips a few
nanometers wide; all other known materials become unstable at such widths.
"We have made ribbons only a few nanometers wide and cannot rule out the
possibility of confining graphene even further--down to maybe a single ring
of carbon atoms," says Manchester Centre for Mesoscience & Nanotechnology
director Andre Geim. His team envisions all-graphene electric circuits
carved from a single graphene sheet, which could include the central
element, or "quantum dot," semi-transparent barriers to control the
movement of single electrons, interconnects, and logic gates. "To make
transistors at the true-nanometer scale is exactly the same challenge that
modern silicon-based technology is facing now," explains lead researcher
Leonid Ponomarenko. "The technology has managed to progress steadily from
millimeter-sized transistors to current microprocessors with individual
elements down to tens nanometers in size." Geim does not expect
graphene-based circuits to be deployed until 2025, during which time
silicon will be dominant. He points out that graphene-based technology
contains many elements of other approaches considered as an alternative to
silicon-based technology, such as carbon nanotube, single-electron, and
molecular electronics.
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Canadian Researcher Proposes Algorithm to Match
Data
ITBusiness.ca (02/28/07) Schick, Shane
IT systems could operate faster if they employed a process that involved
pairing pieces of data, according to Brendan Frey, a professor in the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of
Toronto. Frey calls the approach "affinity propagation." He has developed
a customized version of the algorithm to assist biology researchers in
analyzing some 75,000 DNA segments. Software using the algorithm will be
able to exchange messages between many pieces of data simultaneously to
find similarities within a set of data points. Business intelligence,
customer relationship management, and enterprise resource planning are
among the potential applications for affinity propagation. For example,
affinity propagation could be used in machine learning software to improve
an application that recommends movie titles based on a consumer's
interests. Rather than pare down a random sample of titles, messages are
sent back and forth about all selections and matches are set aside in a
process that is similar to the way brokers strike deals on the trading
floor, according to Frey.
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New Research Could Lower Language Barriers Across
Europe
Electronics and Computer Science (02/28/07) Lewis, Joyce
Xerox's European Research Center in France is heading a project that plans
to use machine learning techniques to make English, French, Spanish, and
other European languages less of a burden for other people on the continent
who do not speak them. The Statistical Multilingual Analysis for Retrieval
and Translation (SMART) project will study how new technology affects
professional translators, consider how technicians using technical
documentation in one language are able to assist a caller who speaks
another language, and allow users to access portions of the multilingual
Wikipedia in languages in which they are not fluent. "The project aims to
extend the more traditional methods based on log linear models, and also
apply recent developments in machine learning for structured prediction
which have led to many new powerful techniques that show great potential in
this area," says Dr. Craig Saunders, project partner at the University of
Southampton's School of Electronics & Computer Science. The European Union
is providing financial support for SMART over the next three years. "Xerox
works across lots of different languages and cross-language information
access could be very useful in this context; the possibility of posing a
query in one language and getting documents back in another is useful in a
wide variety of applications," says Saunders.
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Virtual Reality Helps With Real Research
Arizona Daily Wildcat (02/28/07) Conrad, Claire
The University of Arizona's virtual reality technology is proving very
useful for faculty who wish to immerse themselves or others in environments
that would require traveling great distances, or that they have created
themselves. The Arizona Laboratory for Immersive Visualization
Environments (AZ-LIVE) consists of three mobile projection walls and a
floor projection that can accommodate large or small groups. AZ-LIVE is
considered to be one of the 15 most advanced immersive labs in the country.
Users can experience a "fly-by" of a virtual world and navigate through
the space using a wand. Classics professor David Soren has used the
technology to recreate an ancient Roman spa, which he not only uses for his
own research but to lead prospective donors through in hopes of convincing
them to contribute to his excavation efforts. College of Fine Arts
research fellow Lucy Petrovich has used the technology to create a virtual
work of art, a memorial to those who have died of heat exhaustion and
dehydration crossing the desert near the U.S.-Mexico border. "I created
the 'Desert Views, Desert Deaths' not as a virtual reality but more as a
virtual un-reality in the sense that I manipulate images and create a new
virtual reality for people to interact with," Petrovich said. She also
teaches a class where students use the immersive lab to create virtual
works of art while they learn basic programming of the technology. AZ-LIVE
hopes to see computer science students team up with different departments
in order to broaden the reach of the facility.
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IBM's Innovation Boss Gets Ready to Bow Out
Guardian Unlimited (UK) (03/01/07) Moody, Glyn
As his retirement approaches, IBM VP for technical strategy and innovation
Irving Wladawsky-Berger reflects on his 37-year career and the development
of the Internet. He says IBM was very excited about the Internet's
potential, but had no idea of how powerful and popular the Web would
eventually become, or of its eventual role as a major component for all
businesses. Wladawsky-Berger points out that IBM's Internet strategy
smoothed the way for its early adoption of open source, but he does not
think IBM will follow Sun's example and release all of its source code as
open source because "the key to open source is not the ability to see the
open software, it's the forming of a community around it that will
participate in its development and its maintenance." IBM sees great
possibilities in virtual worlds beyond their current concentration in
gaming, including better simulation and visual interfaces to enhance
learning and training, according to Wladawsky-Berger. He says IBM intends
to build intraworlds that run on their own intranets, noting that many of
IBM's clients will desire intraworlds in the same manner that they have
intranets. Seamless navigation between the intraworlds and public worlds
will be critical, he says. Because IBM follows a different business model
than Google, Wladawsky-Berger sees no point in IBM setting up a rival Web
search engine; he explains that IBM's influence and solid research and
development track record does not translate into proficiency in the search
engine sector. Wladawsky-Berger concludes that the most enriching aspect
of his career has been being "very, very involved with advanced
technologies, but figuring out how to make them successful in the
marketplace."
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Man's Best Friend Just Might Be a Machine
Contra Costa Times (CA) (02/18/06) Mason, Betsy
A good deal of the technology necessary to make robots a functional,
intelligent part of everyday life has been already been developed and must
now be brought together. Robotics experts recently gathered at the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San
Francisco, where they discussed the relatively near future of robotics,
which could include autonomous cars and computers that read and respond to
their user's posture and mood. Innovations that must precede such
robotics, such as voice, face, emotion, and pattern recognition software,
the ability to walk on two legs, automatic recharging, intelligent
grasping, and the ability to exhibit emotional cues, have received a
significant amount of attention. "Most of these technologies already exist
now," said California Statue University roboticist David Calkins. "But
they need to be brought together." Autonomous cars will probably be used
by the military as soon as 2015 and will be on the highway by 2030,
according to Sebastian Thrun, leader of the Stanford Racing Team that is
working on Junior, an autonomous car that will compete in the 2007 DARPA
Urban Challenge. Robots are expected to make an impact on the way the
elderly are cared for, as they can both help around the home and provide
medical care and companionship. To create robots that can maneuver through
varying and problematic terrain, UC Berkeley biologist Robert Full is
developing technology inspired by cockroaches, crabs, centipedes, and
geckos.
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How IT Makes Johnny More Productive
Computerworld (02/26/07) Melymuka, Kathleen
IT users experience a boost in productivity at the individual level
compared to those with less technology at their fingertips, but not as some
may expect, says researcher Erik Brynjolfsson. He says that IT users are
multitaskers and in fact are slowed down by technology, but because they do
multiple things at once, complete long-term goals and long-range projects
quicker and better than lesser-IT users. Brynjolfsson recently completed a
five-year IT productivity study focusing on individual productivity in
1,300 projects, funded by the National Science Foundation, Cisco Systems,
and Intel. His research with Marshall Van Alstyne won the best research
paper award at the most recent International Conference of Information
Systems. Multitasking has a peak performance level, says Brynjolfsson,
after which too much of it becomes a distraction for an individual. He
says that email and databases are the best IT tools for multitasking, and
investing in IT skills across a workforce pays off in long-term
productivity. He adds that people embedded in a social network, including
email and face-to-face, have more access to information more quickly, and
this is an important definer of productive and highly informed people.
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Fighting Bugs: Remove, Retry, Replicate, and
Rejuvenate
Computer (02/07) Vol. 40, No. 2, P. 107; Grottke, Michael; Trivedi,
Kishor S.
The software faults or bugs responsible for system failures cannot be
determined and isolated if the failure cannot be reproduced, and it is
estimated that between 15 percent and 80 percent of all software faults
detected after release are of a variety that are not spotted during testing
for precisely this reason. These "Mandelbugs," as they are called, behave
differently under apparently identical conditions for one of two reasons:
Because there is a long delay between the activation of the bug and the
final failure occurrence, complicating the identification of the user
actions that triggered the bug and induced the failure; or because other
software system elements--the operating system, the hardware, or other
applications--can affect a bug's behavior in a specific application. One
way of dealing with Mandelbugs is to retry a failed action by restarting
the application, and this method can be enhanced via checkpointing, in
which a snapshot of the application is regularly saved in stable storage.
It is also possible to use a replication methodology that employs redundant
resources. Performance degradation of software systems in continuous
operation for a long duration can cause failures to occur more frequently,
and this can be prevented through software rejuvenation techniques. Bugs
related to software aging can cause errors to build up over time, while the
activation rate of an aging-related bug can be affected by the total time
that the system runs continuously. The two primary rejuvenation strategies
are model-based approaches, which use analytic models to catch system
degradation and rejuvenation, and measurement-based approaches where system
properties that might show signs of software aging are periodically
watchdogged. The costs of software rejuvenation include unavailability of
a hosted Web site during a Web server's reboot, or the division of the
workload among running servers in a multiple-server scheme.
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