House Bill Seeks to More than Double H-1B Visa Cap
Computerworld (03/22/07) Thibodeau, Patrick
An immigration reform bill introduced in the House this week would raise
the annual H-1B visa limit to 180,000 and do away with limits on visas
issued to foreign nationals that have an advanced degree in science,
technology, engineering, or math from U.S. universities. The measure,
known as Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy
(STRIVE Act), was proposed by Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and Jeff Flake
(R-Ariz.). The initial cap on H-1B visas would be set at 115,000, but if
this limit was reached, it could be automatically increased to 180,000
based on market demand. Under the bill, advanced degree holders would no
longer be exempt from some of the requirements for obtaining a green card.
The STRIVE Act is very similar to last year's SKIL Bill, which died after
becoming entangled in the larger immigration debate. Both Gutierrez and
Flake are members of the House Judiciary Committee, which means the bill
will at least get a hearing there. The bill has received the backing of
Compete America, which says the H-1B cap for fiscal 2008 will be reached
next month, even though fiscal 2008 doesn't begin until October. A Senate
bill with similar intentions is also in the works.
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Son of TIA Will Mine Asian Data
Wired News (03/22/07) Weinberger, Sharon
Singapore is set to launch a data-mining effort that goes beyond the
Pentagon's controversial 2003 Total Information Awareness Program (TIA)
proposal, which was scrapped due to an uproar from privacy groups. The
Singaporean program, known as Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning (RAHS),
will search for threats to national security by collecting data across all
government agencies, making it the most comprehensive data-snooping program
in the world. RAHS creates "a large network that is constantly scanning
the horizon looking for weak signals that point toward the possibility of a
significant event that would have important implications for Singapore,"
says the Arlington Institute's John Peterson, who is consulting for the
Singapore project, along with others formerly involved in the TIA program,
including Dave Snowden and former national security advisor and TIA
architect John Poindexter. Snowden stresses RAHS' ability to spot "weak
signals" that would normally be missed by humans. He says, "Instead of
having analysts trawl through huge amounts of data to decide what it means,
the data is tagged very quickly, then they decide what the patterns in the
metadata mean." He also defends the program against privacy advocates,
stating that only metadata, not the data itself, would be shared among
agencies. RAHS will initially focus on "open source" information until the
procedures for working with classified information can be worked out,
according to Singapore security official Patrick Nathan, who adds that the
city-state is currently piloting a data anonymization system. Privacy
advocates claim that surveillance by a machine rather than humans does not
serve to protect individual privacy. Snowden applauds the "pragmatic and
forward-thinking" attitude behind RAHS. He says, "Singapore just walked
around and saw what they liked, and said, 'The hell with it, let's just
make it operational.'"
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Moore's Law Hits Physics in Memory Chips
Reuters (03/21/07) Hillins, Scott
Memory chip manufacturers know the day will come where the laws of physics
and memory prevent them from making their chips any smaller, meaning a new
technology will need to emerge, but there is no clear solution on the
horizon. "I'm quite nervous about this because 25 nanometers is not that
far away, and if you have to change a process in a couple generations, then
that is really challenging," said Applied Materials CEO Mike Splinter. The
end of Moore's law is expected to come sooner for memory chips than for
processors, because the chips use pools of charged electrons to store data,
and as the amount of electrons in the pool shrinks, data becomes harder to
read. "It's a question we've had forever, and we've always had an answer,"
said Samsung's Tom Trill. "There's been a resurgence in terms of pessimism
... in the last few months." Potential alternatives include M-RAM, P-RAM,
molecular memory, and carbon nanotubes. IBM's creation of a prototype chip
that is 500 times faster than current flash memory and uses half the power,
as well as circuits as small as 20 nanometers, is "like a green light to
the industry to say, OK, let's invest in this technology going forward,"
says IBM's Spike Narayan. In order for a new technology such as magnetic
memories, polymer, or custom-design molecules with electrons that can be
easily manipulated to catch on, it must display its effectiveness and
either use current manufacturing processes or prove so valuable that it
would convince companies to invest in new factories. "Every two years
someone comes up and says they have found better memory technology, but
there's always some technical limitation, and this has gone on for 30
years," says In-Stat analyst Jim McGregor.
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IBM Makes Software, Web Accessibility Push
InternetNews.com (03/22/07) Needle, David
IBM intends to make accessibility a more important part of IT education,
with the goal that all applications would eventually be built with the
disabled in mind. A recent survey conducted by IBM showed that
accessibility is not covered in the majority of IT classes. To instill
accessibility in IT education, the company will team with six universities
and the U.S. Department of Education to create and distribute a wealth of
repeatable learning materials that will expose student developers to the
concepts of accessibility and help them build more accessible software.
"To create a truly inclusive society, all forms of information technology
need to be more accessible," said the Department of Education's Dr. Bonnie
Jones. "If we can't do this, people with disabilities land on the wrong
side of the 'digital divide.' We have to capture the intelligence and
imagination of our next generation of IT developers now." By influencing
education, IBM hopes to create a generation of developers that will create
applications that allow for increased productivity and Web sites that more
people can access. Three students recently won an IBM Open Document Format
(ODF) contest for their code that checks word processing documents for
adherence to the ODF. The company is also involved in a variety of other
accessibility projects, including a software-hardware project to help
people with tremors use a mouse, and a system that transfers spoken words
to text. Universities involved in the imitative include the University of
Illinois, California State University at Long Beach, Georgia Tech, the
University of Toronto, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
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Discussing the Many-Core Future
HPC Wire (03/23/07) Vol. 16, No. 12, Tulloch, Paul
The introduction of multi-core technology by the hardware industry has set
us down a path that could eventually lead to a world where thousands of
processing cores could reside on a single chip, and the transition from
serial-based thinking to parallelism represents a frustrating challenge for
the software community, according to Statistics Canada economist/data
analyst Paul Tulloch. Indeed, many in the software industry argue that
such a challenge can never be met, and that technological innovation will
screech to a halt as a result. Tulloch suggests that the end of
single-core technology and the limitations of serial computational speed-up
should be a cause for celebration, because the shift to many-core
technology brings the dream of implementing cheap, high-performance
computing on the desktop within reach. Several demonstrations show that
hardware architecture is on a trajectory toward combined specialized CPU
and GPU type cores, and Tulloch thinks the software community "unjustly
focuses criticism on the most difficult of future challenges that
parallelism presents, while seemingly discounting a whole new array of
possibilities." He calls this focus unjust because "it is precisely the
asymmetrical distribution of how these cores and threads will be unleashed
and applied to a whole new set of programming challenges that is the key to
realizing and envisioning this new dynamism and its potential." In terms
of intensive parallel innovations, Tulloch thinks the most immediate
upgrade appears to be offered by data parallel efforts, while initiatives
that will have the most widescale market rollout will probably be lightly
parallelized applications comprised of helper or add-on enhancements to
numerous popular apps such as word processing, spreadsheets, and databases.
To realize these and other advancements, the relationship between the
hardware and software industries needs to be rethought into something more
organic, Tulloch concludes.
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Researchers Develop Intelligent, Driverless Car
University of Essex (03/20/2007)
Researchers at the University of Essex plan to test an autonomous model
car this summer, and believe the intelligent, driverless car can serve as
the prototype for the development of smart model cars. A standard remote
control model vehicle will be used to build the completely anonymous car.
"Similar principles have been applied to full-size cars in the past--for
instance in the DARPA challenge to navigate across the Mohave Desert--but
the cost implications of developing the technology using real cars mean it
just isn't viable for most researchers," says Dr. Simon Lucas, a researcher
in the Department of Computer Science. "By using model cars, we will be
able to investigate the possibilities of the technology far easier and more
cheaply." A PC mounted on the chassis, a video camera, sensors, and
special software will be part of the system that will allow the car to
navigate the Colchester campus race track and make tactical decisions. The
IEEE Computational Intelligence Society is funding the research, and plans
to hold a race for autonomous cars at the IEEE World Congress on
Computational Intelligence in 2008 in Hong Kong. Lucas believes driverless
cars could be seen on city streets in the next 15 years.
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UCF's Conservatory Theatre Beams Actors Onto Stage
Performance in Illinois
University of Central Florida (03/22/07) Kotala, Zenaida Gonzalez
An audience at Bradley University in Illinois was treated to a play
performed by two virtual actors, whose images were projected onto the stage
from their physical locations in Florida and Canada universities via
Internet 2, and one live actor. The project was "the first successful
adaptation of an emerging art form and culture of multimedia that enables
seamless presentations," says University of Florida professor James
Oliverio. Two computers at Bradley University handled up to 130 Mbps of
data from both the University of Central Florida and the University of
Waterloo as it received the virtual actors' images and projected them along
side the actual actor in real time on a stage comprised of 2D and 3D sets
on multiple screens. At some points in the show the audience was unable to
tell real from virtual. The next step for the theatre is to have shows put
on simultaneously at each of the three schools, made by projecting the two
virtual actors from the other schools on stage with the each school's
actual actor. Logistics and technical considerations for this novel
performance are currently being worked out. "The collaborators involved in
this project believe we are on the cusp of another creative movement and we
are happy to be part of the exploration," says UCF "techtheatre" expert
John Shafer.
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Communication With Emotional Body Language
Tubingen University (03/21/07) Katz, Ellen
The European Commission's Communication with Emotional Body Language
(COBOL) project will provide three years of support for research into the
way humans perceive and use body language. The project will involve
psychologists, computer scientists, and engineers. Researchers are
currently collecting data concerning behavior and developing techniques for
synthesizing and simulating body language for use in communications
technology. Motion capture software and computer graphic technology are
being used to create body movements for neuropsychological study of the way
they are perceived. Graphics specialists have developed applications that
analyze and animate dance and aspects of locomotion that relate to
emotions. Various computer vision algorithms that are able to model and
quantify intricate movements will be used to analyze emotional expressions
in video data. Recently, the ability to express basic emotions has been
implemented in robots that interact with people, and is also thought to
have great market potential in various types of computer programs. One of
the main goals of COBOL is to study the ways body language is perceived
across different cultures, and the extent to which culture influences body
language. In addition to insights about communication, increased
understanding of body language could aid our understanding of illnesses
such as autism, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's.
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Tool Turns Unsuspecting Surfers Into Hacking Help
CNet (03/20/07) Evans, Joris
A new security tool that can make the PCs of unknowing Web surfers search
for flaws in Web sites shows that JavaScript can be used for malicious
purposes, a fear expressed by many security experts. SPI Dynamics security
researcher Billy Hoffman developed the tool, known as Jikto, to enhance Web
security. "Jikto turns any PC into my little drone," he explains. "Your
PC will start attacking Web sites on my behalf, and you're going to give me
all the results." The tool, which audits public Web sites by silently
crawling through them and sending vulnerability information to a third
party, can be embedded in an attacker's site or injected into a trusted
site by exploiting a cross-site scripting flaw. Jikto can then connect
back to its controller for further instructions. "Half of hacking is
collecting information and then sorting it," says Hoffman. "An attacker
can now distribute this job to many people." Although Jikto shows that
JavaScript can be used maliciously, the traditional vulnerability scanners
that hackers use to break into systems are probably more effective.
Operating from compromised machines, these vulnerability scanners "can
generally scan pretty widely with impunity, or they can just use a chain of
proxies," explains Nmap Security Scanner inventor Fyodor Vaskovich.
However, since it is JavaScript, Jikto can run in most Web browsers without
any way of the user knowing. "As a user you really can't do much against
Jikto or other JavaScript-based threats," Hoffman says. "I am not really
compromising your computer. That is what makes this so scary." Next,
Hoffman plans to work on a version of Jikto that can exploit
vulnerabilities and extract data.
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UCLA Among Six Universities to Collaborate in Study of
Biologically Assembled Quantum Electronic Systems
UCLA News (03/19/07) Abraham, Melissa
A five-year $6 million grant from the U.S. Defense Department will allow
researchers at several universities to work with biological assembly to
study quantum electronic systems that could eventually change the way
electronics are made. "Highly interacting and correlated systems will be
extremely important in creating future robust nanoscale electronic
devices," said UCLA Engineering's Kang Wang. Working with nanoparticle
arrays requires extreme precision, especially given the etching techniques
used to assemble semiconducting devices, but biologic assembly could
present new possibilities. "By exploiting biology to precisely control
size, spacing, composition, and coupling in the arrays, we will be able to
examine the effects of electronic, magnetic, and optical interactions at
much smaller dimensions than in the past," says project leader Richard A.
Kiehl of the University of Minnesota. DNA technology will first be used to
build 2D and 3D scaffolding for the nanoparticle arrays, then peptides and
proteins will be used to make nanoparticle clusters to be assembled on the
scaffolding. Metallic and magnetic nanoparticles with organic shells will
self-assemble to the scaffolding and manipulate the interparticle coupling.
The electronic, magnetic, and optical properties of the arrays can then be
observed. "While our goal is to use biology to construct a 'nanoscale test
vehicle' for the systematic study of basic physics today, this work could
lead to a practical biological route for the assembly of quantum electronic
systems in the future," said Kiehl. Other participating universities
include New York University, the University of Texas at Austin, the
University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University.
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National Experts Explore Cutting Edge Computing Models at
University of Maine Conference
University of Maine (03/21/07)
A meeting hosted by the University of Maine brought together experts in
different fields to discuss possible directions and challenges for
ubiquitous computing. Originally imagined before the birth of the
Internet, ubiquitous computing has become increasingly plausible as "our
world is becoming more and more full of small but powerful computing
devices and of sensing instruments in cars, warehouses, appliances ... and
even clothing," explains University of Maine spatial information science
and engineering professor Kate Beard. "These devices must be able to
'know' where they are located in space and time, where the people or
phenomena they monitor are located in space and time." Ubiquitous
computing technology will rely on the ability of devices to communicate
with each other and to respect the principles valued by humans, while
making their lives more convenient. University of Maine researchers have
focused on four issues: Modeling spatial and temporal elements of a
ubiquitous computing environment; sensor networks and the ability to
process information; interaction between humans and devices; and how
privacy can be protected in a world with ubiquitous computing. "We worked
to outline a set of research priorities to help build a ubiquitous
computing environment that serves human needs, rather than the other way
around," explains University of Maine spatial information science and
engineering professor Harlan Onsrud. Important areas of research cited at
the conference included developing models for continuous data streams
generated from many sources that allows data evaluation and predication of
possible data, creating ways for devices to question each other and provide
answers using a common querying language, and accounting for gaps in data,
either spatially or temporally, when drawing conclusions based on sensor
data.
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If You're Happy, the Robot Knows It
New Scientist (03/22/07) Biever, Celeste
Robots that respond to people's emotional cues are increasingly relevant
in a world where machines are assuming a greater, more interactive presence
in daily life, and research projects are underway to advance the
technology. One example is RoCo from MIT's Media Lab, which debuted at a
human-robot interaction conference on March 11; RoCo is a computer monitor
and display that can shift its position via a jointed neck in order to
establish sympathy with the user's mood, as indicated by his or her
posture. "Emotion informs cognition, people whose emotion is inhibited
don't perform intelligently," notes Media Lab researcher Cynthia Breazeal,
who is hoping expressive robots such as RoCo could improve the emotional
states, and thus the performance and productivity, of users. She thinks
RoCo could be programmed to assume the correct posture to encourage greater
attention and persistence in kids, among other things. In another
experiment, iRobot researchers tested to see whether people would have
greater engagement with a physical humanoid robot, a projection of the
robot on a computer monitor, or an image of the robot with animated lips.
The physical robot was rated by volunteers as the most lifelike, competent,
sociable, respectful, and responsive of the three options, and was most
likely to influence the volunteers' behavior.
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Software Pinpoints Traffic Accident 'Hotspots'
Ohio State Research News (03/19/07) Gorder, Pam Frost
Scientists at Ohio State University have developed software that can
identify areas on state roadways where accidents are likely to occur. The
system uses statistics concerning injuries, fatalities, and the causes of
accidents to generate predictions for all roads, conditions, and times.
"Everyone would love to be able to predict exactly where and when the next
crash would be, but there are just too many factors involved, and too much
randomness to do that," says OSU Department of Statistics' Christopher
Holloman. "We can confidently make broad statements, like whether a
particular piece of roadway is riskier at a particular time." The software
serves as a supplement to the highway patrol officer's expertise, and has
mostly confirmed what they already knew. Although it cannot tell why a
certain area might be prone to a certain type of accident, the software
could help the highway patrol gain insight into such questions. Holloman
and his team have recently incorporated Google Earth technology into the
software, which allows the system to color-code roadways so users can zoom
in to see the probability of an accident in any area of the state. The
software uses a 900MB database that contains details on every accident on
Ohio highways between 2001-2005 and produces 50GB of output data. To
customize the software for another state would cost about half of what Ohio
has spent, and the effectiveness of the system would depend on the quality
of the state's accident data.
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New Brunswick University Hosts Hi-Tech Research
Hub
IT World Canada (03/16/07) De Guzman, Mari-Len
Collaboration between the University of New Brunswick (UNB) and Q1 Labs
led to the establishment of the Information Security Center of Excellence,
one of the first Canadian research facilities that concentrates exclusively
on information and network security. The center's lead researcher, UNB
professor Ali Ghorbani, said most of the center's funding comes from a 2004
federal government grant of approximately $2.2 million. "There's a lot of
information that security systems have to gather and analyze," noted Q1
Labs COO Brendan Hannigan. "And then there are some fundamental algorithms
that can be applied to that data to try and figure out what's important and
what's not important; that's a very complex process." Five areas of
information security--network anomaly detection, automatic discovery and
classification of network applications, multi-stage attack graphing and
visualization, attack simulation, and automated security rule tuning,
learning, and adaptation--will comprise the research center's study focus.
A large chunk of research will be committed to the automation of network
security and intrusion detection functions, while Ghorbani said network
anomaly detection research will emphasize the development of technologies
that detect without signature and can build a nominal network profile where
any aberration would be treated as suspicious. Another focus of the
research center is the creation of a system that enables automatic
discovery and classification of network applications with little or no
administrator participation. This would yield technology that can
intelligently spot and flag unauthorized or unfamiliar applications running
in the system, stated Ghorbani.
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'Sensornets' Watching Wildlife or Oilfields Make
Batteries Last Longer Using New Communications Protocol
Science Daily (03/21/07)
The Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute has released a new
communication protocol that will allow for a more than 10-fold improvement
in energy efficiency for wireless sensor networks. ISI research scientist
Wei Ye, project leader John Heidemann, and programmer Fabio Luis Silva in
the ISI Laboratory for Embedded Networked Sensor Experimentation developed
SCP-MAC, and they presented their research in November at the Proceedings
of the Fourth ACM SenSys Conference in Boulder, Colo. Sensor networks are
being used to monitor places that are difficult to access and wire, such as
wilderness parks and oilfields, and a number of battery-powered, sensor
units are strewn across such wide areas. SCP-MAC makes use of power
listening, or switching units on for a short period of time, and scheduled
channel polling, or synchronized and scheduled listening, to achieve its
results, which also include reducing monitoring time to less than two
minutes each day. "To minimize the listening cost, SCP-MAC utilizes
'low-power listening,' which detects channel activity very quickly," says
Ye. "It further reduces the transmission cost by synchronizing the
listening schedules of nodes, so that a unit can wake up its neighbors by
transmitting a short tone."
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Privacy for Domain Owners Moves Forward
Associated Press (03/21/07) Jesdanun, Anick
Domain name owners may soon have more privacy options when entering
contact data in the publicly available Whois database, thanks to a new
proposal that was recently endorsed by an important task force. ICANN will
hold hearings on the proposal, known as "operational point of contact,"
during its upcoming meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. Tucows representative
Ross Rader, a member of the Whois task force, goes so far as to predict
that a big change is coming and that domain name owners will no longer have
to publicly display their personal contact data on Whois. The database has
caused controversy because it stores domain name owners' contact
information, including names, email addresses, and phone numbers. This
information is publicly accessible and is used by a variety of parties,
including law enforcement, ISPs, lawyers, journalists, and spammers. Some
domain owners choose to enter fake data, which puts them at risk of losing
the domain. But under terms of the new proposal, domain name owners would
have a standard option of listing the contact information of third
parties--lawyers, service providers, and the like--instead of their own
contact data.
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On the Heels of a Quantum Revolution
Imprint (University of Waterloo) (03/16/07) Vol. 29, No. 31, Pinto, Brendan
Research that could usher in revolutionary technologies that apply the
unique properties of quantum mechanics is being conducted at the University
of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), whose mission is to
"advance fundamental experimental and theoretical knowledge in relevant
areas of engineering, mathematics and science to enhance the developments
in the field of Quantum Computation and Information Processing." In the
six years since its launch, IQC has been credited with expanding its
quantum computer's size from 10 qubits to 12 qubits, which represents
something close to a 3,100 percent gain in computing power. The
superposition property of quantum systems is the phenomenon in which a
particle exists in two different states simultaneously, and it is within
this property that the computational potential of quantum technology
resides. Quantum computers can efficiently factor immense numbers via
superposition, which could facilitate unbreakable encryption, to name just
one application. Quantum cryptography exploits the quantum universe's
underlying randomness; the quantum property of entanglement, in which
particles separated by distance maintain a direct link that affects each
other's state; and the law that measurement of a system changes the system
in a fundamental way. IQC is focused on the development of an open-air
system for transmitting quantum-encrypted information over vast distances.
Waterloo was chosen to be the IQC's home because the institute needed a
large amount of electrical and computer engineering, physics, computer
science, applied math, chemistry, and combinatorics and optimization
expertise on hand to tap.
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Continued Drop in CS Bachelor's Degree Production and
Enrollments as the Number of New Majors Stabilizes
Computing Research News (03/07) Vol. 19, No. 2, Vegso, Jay
A Computer Research Association survey of Ph.D.-granting CS and computer
engineering departments in North America shows that although the number of
incoming undergrads planning to major in CS seems to be stabilizing, the
annual numbers of students enrolled in undergraduate CS degree programs and
CS Bachelor's degrees granted continue to decline. Between 2000 and 2005,
the number of incoming undergrads planning to major in CS fell 70 percent.
The past six years of decline have left the total number of CS majors in
the fall of 2006 at approximately 8,000, half of what it was in 2000.
However, the decline from 2005 to 2006 was relatively small, suggesting
that the trend may be coming to an end. As a result of incoming CS
students decreasing, CS enrollment fell 14 percent between 2004/2005 and
2005/2006. Overall enrollment in CS has dropped 39 percent from its peak
of approximately 57,000 in 2001/2002. Total degrees granted by
Ph.D.-granting CS departments fell 28 percent between 2003/2004 and
2005/2006, and the decline is expected to continue. A similar drop in
degree production among CS departments happened in the 1990s: After a
fourfold increase between 1980 and 1986 raised the number to more than
42,000, degree production fell and leveled at 25,000, only to surge again
in the late 1990s to more than 57,000 by 2004. Given the economic downturn
and slow job growth during the early 2000s, the present decline was
predictable.
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The Thinking Machine
Wired (03/07) Vol. 15, No. 3, P. 104; Ratliff, Evan
Engineer Jeff Hawkins, who counts the creation of the Palm Pilot and the
Treo among his credits, is focusing on the fulfillment of a long-gestating
dream through his new company, Numenta: The development of software that
mimics the human brain and that can facilitate many functions that have so
far thwarted computers such as vision and locomotion. The software is
similar to the human brain in that it has no knowledge when it is created,
and uses sensory input to learn, construct a model of its environment, and
predict things based on that model. Hawkins' hope is that the software
will enable machines to solve hugely complex problems by perceiving them as
a flow of new sensory data to be interpreted. A "research release" of
Numenta's platform will be comprised of a central problem-solving engine
modeled after Hawkins' vision of the cortex, a suite of open source
software tools, and the code for the learning algorithms, which can be
modified by users. The hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) can identify
images of distorted objects, for example, by processing them through
low-level nodes that view individual pixel segments of the image and pass
the pattern they perceive to intermediate nodes that combine input to form
shapes. The shapes are then sent to top-level nodes that compare the
shapes against a database of objects and choose the best match. That
information is handed back to the intermediate nodes to improve their
prediction of the next shape they will see, while data from higher-up nodes
lets the bottom nodes clean up the image by disregarding pixels that do not
correlate with the expected pattern. The HTM functions according to
Hawkins' perception of the cortex as a tool for creating intelligence
through the fundamental mechanism of prediction.
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