Users Are Putting Band-Aids on Software, Says New Federal
Research Chief
Computerworld (03/08/07) Thibodeau, Patrick
Increased funding for basic technology research efforts must be
established in order to maintain the strength of U.S. private industry,
says Jeannette Wing, the new head of the NSF's computer and information
science and engineering directorate. Wing blames the shortage of research
funding on an image problem in computing: Attention is focused on Web 2.0
technologies and faster processors, while algorithm development is being
ignored. Bill Gates spoke before the U.S. Senate this week, explaining
this need. Wing applauds Gates and aims to make basic research issues more
relevant to users. "Today in security, we are patching systems and
fighting viruses and worms and doing source code analysis using techniques
that the basic research community invented 20 years ago, or even longer
than that," she says, citing Google as the type of advancement that can
come about as the result of a single algorithm. Other issues demanding
attention include software code with weaknesses that make it vulnerable to
crashes or attacks. "We need this [research effort] because we need to
retain society's trust in the computing system that touches us on a daily
life," says Wing. The NSF currently funds 18 percent of the proposed
projects, turning away many computer scientists, while China has sufficient
funding to "do whatever they want," she says.
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Abandoning Net Neutrality Discourages Improvements in
Service
University of Florida News (03/07/07) Keen, Cathy
A University of Florida study has found that Net neutrality is in the best
interest of Internet users because it encourages expanded bandwidth. "The
conventional wisdom is that Internet service providers would have greater
incentive to expand their service capabilities if they were allowed to
charge," says UF department of decision and information sciences professor
Kenneth Cheng. "That was completely the opposite of what we found." The
researchers, who claim to have no opinion on the issue, used game theory to
evaluate who the "winners" and "losers" would be if cable and telecom
companies were able to charge content providers. Their results showed that
Internet providers would "win" and cable companies would "lose," and that
users would only win if their preferred content provider agreed to pay for
faster service. The study also revealed that an end to Net neutrality
would do away with the incentive for Internet providers to expand their
infrastructure, since because "The whole purpose of charging for
preferential treatment to content providers is that one content provider
gains some edge over the other," says Cheng. "But [if] the capacity [were]
expanded, this advantage becomes negligible." Japan and Korea have both
found that increased competition results in better service, according to
Cheng. "Abandoning Net neutrality has far-reaching and rippling effects
when you consider how the Internet has become part of our daily life
experience," says Cheng's co-researcher Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay.
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Guide to Computing Careers Helps Students Develop Right
Skills
AScribe Newswire (03/07/07)
ACM will unveil its new computing careers brochure at this week's ACM
SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) conference.
"Computing Degrees & Careers" discusses what computer scientists and
engineers do, career opportunities in computing, the computer-based skills
necessary for the wide range of computing jobs, the major areas of study
within computing, and what educators can do to get students interested in
careers in computing and information technology. The career guide has
already drawn heavy interest from educators at the high school and
university level. "Almost every major challenge facing our world is
turning to computing for a solution, from conquering disease to eliminating
hunger, from improving education to protecting the environment," says Eric
Roberts, co-chair of ACM's Education Board and a Stanford University
computer science professor. "We hope students grappling with decisions
about their career paths will use the information provided by this
publication and the accompanying Web site to broaden their awareness of the
opportunities open to them in this dynamic field." ACM also hopes the
career guide will help the greater public understand that the computing
industry is thriving, and that there are more jobs today than there were
years ago when dotcoms were the hot story. The IEEE Computer Society and
the Association for Information Systems (AIS) assisted ACM on the career
guide.
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Drop in CS Bachelor's Degrees Granted
CRA Bulletin (03/08/07) Vegso, Jay
The number of new computer science majors may be stabilizing after six
years of declines, according to the CRA Taulbee Survey of computer science
departments that grant PhDs. In the fall of 2006, computer science
departments had 7,798 new computer science majors, down only slightly from
7,952 new majors in the fall of 2005. The schools had 15,958 new computer
science majors during the fall of 2000. Meanwhile, enrollment fell 14
percent to 34,898 from 2004-2005 to 2005-2006, and is down 39 percent from
the high point in 2001-2002. Computer science departments granted 10,206
bachelor's degrees in 2005-2006, but the number is down 28 percent from
2003-2004.
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Gates Testifies About Declining Enrollments, Research
Funding
Computerworld (03/07/07) Thibodeau, Patrick
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testified that the United States is in
danger of losing the ability to "remain a technology powerhouse" when he
addressed Congress on Wednesday as a witness for the Committee on Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions. The number of students pursuing
undergraduate computing courses as well as the percentage of submitted
proposals that the NSF is able to fund are both down significantly from
2000. The projects that are being funded by the NSF are increasingly those
that focus on short-term fixes, explains Purdue University Center for
Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security executive
director Eugene Spafford. "The result is that really innovative basic
research that could lead to lead to major shifts in the way we do things
... isn�t really being done now," says Spafford, and "it has the additional
effect that students being trained now are not being trained to look at
long-term solutions." The America Competes Act was introduced in the
Senate this week and would double research budgets for the Department of
Energy and Science and the NSF and bolster technical education, including a
program to entice elementary schools to observe a "Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Math Day" twice during each school year. Gates suggested
that research grants of $500,000 be given annually to the 200 most
exceptional early-career researchers. He also called for the creation of a
"National Coordination Office for Research and Infrastructure" to oversee a
centralized infrastructure research fund of $500 million every year and
that the research and development tax credit be made permanent.
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Microsoft Links Technology, Common Tools
Associated Press (03/06/07) Mintz, Jessica
At Microsoft's Techfest, the company displayed its idea that average users
will have the easiest time using platforms that bring new technologies into
familiar tools. Prototypes on display included a system that prints out
text messages as sticky notes and one that lets people write notes on a pad
and have the note converted to a text message and sent to a phone. Such
technologies may never be available to consumers, rather Techfest gives
researchers a chance to share their work with Microsoft employees in hopes
of having it incorporated into future versions of Microsoft software. A
game on display allowed children to control a robot appearing on the screen
by selecting tiles with individual actions or objects on them. The game is
centered on the idea that it is a short leap from children having fun
playing video games to becoming interested in designing them, says
Microsoft Research's Matt MacLaurin. Techfest also featured a
videoconferencing system that uses cameras and projectors to allow
real-time, long-distance whiteboard brainstorming, Wi-Fi advertising for
mobile devices that does not rely on a network connection, and speakers
that can only be heard by someone standing directly in front of them.
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W3C to Develop New HTML Specs
eWeek (03/07/07) Taft, Darryl K.
The World Wide Web Consortium has announced its intentions to establish a
new HTML standard and to enhance the XHTML specification. A call has been
issued to browser vendors, application developers, and content designers to
participate in the working groups that will oversee the new standards.
"HTML started simply, with structured markup, no licensing requirements,
and the ability to link to anything," says W3C director Tim Berners-Lee.
"More than anything, this simplicity and openness has led to its tremendous
and continued success. It's time to revisit the standard and see what we
can do to meet the current community needs, and to do so effectively with
commitments from browser manufacturers in a visible and open way." The
transition of HTML into an XML based format (XHTML) was originally planned
in 1998, but XHTML was slow to be adopted and received little support from
developers. W3C says XHTML has proven effective in mobile devices,
enterprise applications, a growing number of Web applications, and on the
server-side. XHTML 2.0, which will delineate an XML syntax for the new
HTML in addition to the traditional HTML syntax, is intended to be as
generic as possible, reusing appropriate XML standards rather than HTML
features that have similar functions. In addition to the new HTML and
XHTML 2.0 Working Groups, W3C plans to re-charter the HTML Coordination
Group and charter the Forms Working Group, which will continue working on
the Xforms architecture.
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These Robots Are Inspired by Ants
Newark Star-Ledger (NJ) (03/08/07) Washington, George C.
MIT Ph.D. candidate James McLurkin studies ants to better develop his
robots' ability to communicate with one another. In his office at the
school's Computer Science ad Artificial Intelligence Lab, McLurkin has an
ant farm of about 500 ants, which he says "are on version 8 billion,"
referring to the evolution the insects have gone through to improve their
communication systems, which rely mostly on tactile and olfactory senses.
Ants are divided into soldiers and workers, and are divided even more so
within these groups. Separate interactions comprising complex group
behavior is known as distributed systems, or swarm behavior. McLurkin's
biggest challenge is developing robots with the communication abilities
necessary for swarm behavior. So far, software has been written that
allows the robots to simulate locating an object on another planet, with
some robots creating a safety perimeter and others conducting the search.
The robots can cluster, spread, form a line in sequential order, and even
sense when their battery life is running low and return to a recharging
station. Once communication is perfected, "You could send a group of small
robots into an earthquake, fire or disaster zone and they would be able to
locate survivors or hot zones," McLurkin says. "They then could relay that
information to larger robots who would go about clearing the area and save
the survivors."
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Hack That Urban Forest
Wired News (03/08/07) Swaby, Rachel
The Urban Forest Mapping Project will make it easier for San Francisco to
track and maintain its approximately 140,000 public trees. Previously, the
city relied on volunteers to walk through its streets with
fill-in-the-blank paper forms and old-fashioned maps to locate groups of
trees. Sometimes the volunteers did not find trees where they were
supposed to be because they were mapped incorrectly in the historical
records, which then would require them to spend several hours reentering
data correctly. With the Urban Forest Mapping Project, volunteers can
easily upload the type of tree, location, permit records, parasites, and
miscellaneous information such as graffiti tags into the open-source
database through a Web-based interface using handhelds and laptops.
Interest in an online tree-mapping tool from the Friends of the Urban
Forest gave software maker Autodesk an opportunity to adapt its open-source
Map Guide project, and provide the local nonprofit with a solution that
offers color illustrations over aerial photography.
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Evaluating Application Performance on Big Iron
HPC Wire (03/09/07) Vol. 16, No. 10,
The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory recently completed a performance
evaluation of supercomputers that looked for strengths and weakness as well
as future bottlenecks for scaling applications. The team, led by Berkeley
Lab's Lenny Oliker, ran six scientific codes representing a range of
disciplines on each of the machines to evaluate their ability to handle
different methods. Oliker discussed the groups' work in a recent
interview. "As you move codes from machine to machine, it's not just a
process of running the codes and entering different numbers," he explained.
"You are looking at problems that can be addressed for each type of the
machines and thinking about how to best use those resources." Along with
exhibiting the great potential of today's parallel vector systems, the
project found that the imbalance in speed between scalar and vector on the
Cray X1 impacts some applications negatively. "In terms of superscalar
systems, our studies show encouraging data that the slide in the sustained
performance of microprocessor cores is not irreversible if architects are
willing to invest the effort to address the bottlenecks of scientific
applications," said Oliker. The next challenge for the field will be
finding ways to use large numbers of simple processors effectively.
Oliker's team is also interested in widening their code base to comprise
the increasingly intricate numerical approaches being employed. "Although
many methods used today rely on regularly structured computations, emerging
multi-scale applications will require irregular and dynamically evolving
simulations," he said.
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Robots Evolve to Deceive
Technology Review (03/08/07) Duncan, David Ewing
A University of Laussanne researcher has developed simple robots that
mimic evolutionary processes, providing a unique perspective on human
behavior. Laurent Keller designed his seven-inch "s-bots," with a life
span of two minutes, to find "food" and avoid "poison." The s-bots are
equipped with wheels, cameras, ground sensors, a light, and a programmed
"genome" that determines their response to surroundings. If the robots
find food they can "mate," passing along their "genome," but if they do not
find food they "die off" along with their genes. The research was intended
to compress thousands of years of development, or 500 generations, into one
week. Keller found that bots would eventually blink their light to signal
to those sharing their genes that they had found food. The bots would also
blink their lights far away from food to trick those not sharing their
genes. Keller hopes to use the s-bots to gain insight into many questions
about human nature, such as reasons for altruism and self-destructive
behavior.
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Intel Competition Is Where Science Rules and Research Is
the Key
New York Times (03/07/07) P. A21; Berger, Joseph
The failure of any students from the Bronx High School of Science or
Stuyvesant High School in New York, two once-perennial finalists, to reach
the Intel Science Talent Search for the third straight year is convincing
many of the widespread effect the competition is having on science and
technology education in the United States. The 40 finalists of this year's
competition were chosen from 1,075 students from 487 schools in 44 states.
"Am I happy that our kids aren't winning first prizes? No," says Bronx
Science Principal Valerie J. Reidy. "But that it's traveling far and wide
and other kids are getting hooked, I'm thrilled about that." More schools
are beginning to expose students to cutting-edge research, rather than
simply teaching through textbooks. "Not only do we have to have equity and
close the famous achievement gap," says Commission on 21st Century
Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics co-chair Leon
M. Lederman. "We also have to have innovation if we're going to survive,
so you have to nurture the gifted kids." New York city schools long had an
advantage because the city's subway system allowed students to travel to
top-notch research facilities, but recent advances in the Internet and
email have allowed students across the country to interact with
researchers. Some rural and southern schools have even built dormitories
in attempt to establish themselves as breeding grounds for technological
innovation. Byram Hills High School senior John Granata entered this
year's competition with software that lets the disabled communicate using
brain waves to signal letters on an electronic board.
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U Researchers Prepare to Build Autonomous Car
Daily Utah Chronicle (03/06/07) Fieldsted, Paige
A University of Utah team is preparing its specially modified Chrysler
minivan for the first round of qualifying for the DARPA Urban Challenge.
The automated vehicle's intelligence system consists of three parts:
Control, which actually makes the vehicle move and turn; perception, which
observes what is going on around the vehicle; and cognition, which figures
out how to make it from one point to the next. "The cognition system is
responsible for the overall behavior of the vehicle," says computer science
graduate student Jacob Quist. "You can think of it as the brain of the
vehicle, where it receives inputs from the perception system, and issues
commands to the control system." The team must make it through a
qualifying run at a site of their choosing, subject to DARPA approval, and
then through one of two national qualifying events in October before being
admitted into the final event. "The real problem for us is none of us have
spent a lot of time working with cars; we usually do other stuff, like
robots," admits team leader Thomas Henderson. The competition is part of
military's goal to have one third of its vehicles automated by 2015.
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A Mobile Gizmo With Ginza Info
BusinessWeek (03/06/07) Hall, Kenji
Ubiquitous computing aims to provide location-aware information to users
on a mobile device without relying on an Internet connection. Downtown
Tokyo's Ginza Shopping District is serving as the testing grounds for
University of Tokyo professor Ken Sakamura's Tokyo Ubiquitous Network
Project. More than 1,200 RFID chips, 270 infrared sensors, and 16 Wi-Fi
stations have been placed around the area to provide information pertaining
to sites that users come across, such as menus, schedules, or whether an
item is in stock. Currently, the system can only transmit the information
to a specially made media player, but Sakamura expects to have it working
on cell phones eventually. The signals sent out by sensors and chips to be
processed by a mobile device would alleviate Internet download times,
inconvenient search processes, and connection charges. Sakamura's network
is open source and has the backing of Microsoft, IBM, and others. At this
point, several improvements must be made to the system: Current network
costs prohibit expansion; cell phones have been found to create
interference; and slow information retrieval can cause information to be
presented to a user only as they are leaving the corresponding area. HP is
considering a ubiquitous computing network of its own, to be used for
gaming that combines real sites with the virtual world.
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Novel Search Engine Matches Molecules in a Flash
New Scientist (03/01/07) Knight, Will
Oxford University researchers have developed a way to match molecules of
the same shape using the relative position of the atoms in a given
molecule, an innovation that could be used to identify potential drugs very
quickly. Similar shaped molecules are likely to have similar bioactive
effects, causing a smaller medicinal effect in the human body. The 3D
shape of a molecule is currently found by superimposing it over another
molecule and measuring how much it overlaps, but this new technique, known
as Ultrafast Shape Recognition (USR), maps and stores the relative position
of atoms in the molecule, creating an accurate mathematical picture of its
shape. The system allows molecules to be compared quickly and without
concern for orientation in the database, which could prove extremely
valuable given the billions of molecules currently contained in many
databases. The technology could also be applied elsewhere. "Being able to
match 3D objects is an important problem that might become even more
important as we get more and more 3D models of our world--such as Google
earth," says Carnegie Mellon image analysis expert Luis von Ahn. However,
Imperial College molecular analysis expert Henry Rzepa says "part of the
problem is that too little 3D shape information in a usable form actually
exists. Even for molecules, proper 3D coordinates which define these
shapes are all too rare."
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Carnegie Mellon Hosts National Linguistics
Olympiad
The Tartan (03/05/07) Leong, Jun Xian
The inaugural North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad will be
held on March 29 in various east coast cities as well as online for those
who are unable to attend. The competition, aimed at students in grades
nine through 12 but open to all students, aims to locate talent in
computational linguistics, help interested students pursue higher education
in related fields, and increase awareness of the field. "Computational
linguistics aims to make computers 'think' more like human beings, so that
interacting with a computer is more like interacting with a real person,"
says the competition's second chair Thomas Payne. NAMCLO will include
machine translation between natural languages, artificial intelligence,
handwriting and voice recognition, and text analysis and processing, tasks
meant to replicate the challenges faced my today's computational linguists.
"The problems are 'self-sufficient' in the sense that no outside
information (dictionaries, courses in the languages) is needed to solve
them," says Payne. "They are based on pure logic and analytic reasoning,
at a level that is totally appropriate for high school students." One such
problem would be to decode the meaning of individual words in unidentified
languages based on a few scrambled and unmatched sentences. Younger
students are thought to have an easier time solving linguistic problems
because they "have more flexible minds, and are more willing to 'enter
into' the logic of an unknown language than many adults are," Payne
says.
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IBM's Many Eyes App After One Month
Read/Write Web (03/05/07) Wattenberg, Martin; Viegas, Fernanda B.
The motivation behind the creation of IBM's Many Eyes project was to
create societal-scale software by setting up a participatory Web site that
was available to the whole of the Internet to test the hypothesis that
visualizations have a strong social aspect, according to Many Eyes
developers Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viegas. Scaling in terms of
the audience rather than the data is Wattenberg and Viegas' goal, and in
the month since Many Eyes' launch several interesting visualizations have
been generated. In one instance, a user of the Many Eyes site employed
graph visualization to generate a network schematic of certain New
Testament figures who were mentioned together, and other users were in turn
inspired by this visualization to establish visualizations of their own.
Another notable visualization facilitated by Many Eyes was a bubble chart
listing the top 50 books on LibraryThing, with a highlighting feature that
indicated what books a person had or had not read. Wattenberg and Viegas
comment that their Web site is one of three notable sites that share "a
belief that the Web enables a new, social kind of data analysis; a type of
statistical thinking that is both playful and serious."
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Is E-Government Ready for Prime Time?
Internet Computing (04/07) Vol. 11, No. 2, P. 80; Ruth, Stephen; Doh,
Soogwan
E-government's chief goal is to connect citizens with user-friendly
services that offer state-of-the-art information technologies, but there is
substantial evidence to support the contention that e-government is not
yielding the maximum benefits in even the most technologically
sophisticated nations. The poorer countries usually boast modest
e-government implementations, while the United Nations believes
e-government can be used to positively effect national policy via the
three-step inclusion/access/connectivity process. The UN, Japan's Waseda
University, and Brown University in the United States offer comprehensive
rating schemes that can help researchers assess national and municipal
capacities to support e-government, and the rankings gauge such
representative properties as ease of navigation, digital signatures,
presence of online services, Web site personalization, privacy and security
features, availability of online publications and databases, commercial
advertising, audio and video clips, non-native languages or foreign
language translation, disability access, automatic email updates,
credit-card payments, and premium fees. The Freedom House says the world's
leaders in e-government proliferation are countries with high ratings for
press and government, yet only 68 percent out of 192 nations are ranked as
"free" in both domains. It comes as no surprise that the more developed,
richer countries with greater access to technological resources feature
more extensive e-government deployments, but the World Bank's Robert
Schware offers the sobering claim that only about 15 percent of
e-government initiatives fulfill their objectives, while over one-third are
utter failures. In addition, he observes that e-government measures are
stepped up to win over voters at election time in certain developed
nations. Despite these failures, there is still a lot of global enthusiasm
for e-government because its potential advantages are long-lasting.
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