Language Theorist Lauded for Information Efforts
IEEE Spectrum (03/24/07)
Karen Sparck Jones will be awarded both the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award
and the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award at ceremonies in June and July. Sparck
Jones has been involved in language and information retrieval since the
1950s, where she developed ways for people to interact with computers using
ordinary language, a breakthrough that has been crucial for modern search
engines. Her career began with a doctoral thesis on lexical co-occurrence,
the concept that word classes can be derived by clustering words based on
their frequency and patterns. She pioneered the use of document
collections to automatically evaluate information retrieval systems and
discovered the value of term weighting, the ability to measure how
important a word is in a document. Since 1990, she has focused on speech
applications, database querying, user and agent modeling, summarizing, and
information and language system evaluation. The Newell Award is given to
researchers whose career displayed a "breadth within computer science," and
the Athena Award is given to women who have made "fundamental contributions
to computer science." Sparck Jones was also awarded the BCS Ada Lovelace
Medal a few weeks ago for her work "in the advancement of information
systems." In the past, she has won the Association of Computing
Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award, the Grace Hopper Lecture from the
University of Pennsylvania, and the ACM-SIGR Gerald Salton Award. For more
information, see
http://campus.acm.org/public/pressroom/press_releases/3_2007/athena2007.cfm<
/A>
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IBM to Unveil Fast Chip With Optical Connections
Wall Street Journal (03/26/07) P. B6; Bulkeley, William M.
IBM has announced the development of a prototype chip that combines
traditional semiconductor technology with optical transmissions of photons
and is able to move data approximately eight times faster than previous
technologies. The chip is capable of running at 160 billion bits of data
per second, which means it could transmit a high-definition movie over a
short distance in a fraction of a second. Future applications of this
technology could include instantly beaming a digital X-ray to a handheld
screen, but it will probably be first used to increase the speed of
supercomputers and reducing the power and cooling they require. The
project is "an amazing use of" conventional semiconductor technology, says
Envisioneering Group's Richard Doherty. The research, which was funded by
DARPA, signals the ability to overcome the high costs that have hindered
widespread adoption of optical chips in the past. Work on the chip was
done at IBM's T.J. Watson Research center and the prototype will be
presented at the Optical Fiber Conference in Anaheim.
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Numbers Show Big Decline of Women in IT
CIO Insight (03/22/07) Chabrow, Eric
Information technology does not appear to be as attractive to women today.
Last year, when overall IT employment reached a record of nearly 3.47
million positions, women held 26.2 percent of the jobs, according to the
Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. There were 908,000 women
in 2006 who were managers, computer scientists/systems analysts,
programmers, software engineers, support specialists, database
administrators, network/computer systems administrators, and network
systems/data communications analysts. The number is down 7.7 percent from
2000, when 984,000 women filled these eight IT occupation categories.
Seven years ago women accounted for 28.9 percent of the 3.41 million IT
positions. Employment figures for women have not fallen in a straight line
since 2000. For example, the number of women in the industry rose by
35,000 in 2003 after the economy stabilized following the dot-com fallout,
but the next year there was a 43,000 decline.
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IC Routing Contest Boosts CAD Research
EE Times (03/22/07) Goering, Richard
The ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA)-sponsored IC
global routing contest held at the International Symposium on Physical
Design (ISPD) showcased new directions for routing algorithms. "The
purpose of the contest is to guide researchers toward the most urgent
challenges in the EDA industry, and also to map out state-of-the-art
solutions," said ISPD 2007 chair Patrick Madden. By requiring more
realistic requirements for IC placement algorithms, organizers hoped the
contest would "lead to better placers in fairly short order," according to
ISPD 2006 chair Lou Scheffer. "Also, existing global routers should make
it easier to build an academic detailed router--perhaps our contest for
next year." IBM engineers and researchers defined performance metrics for
the contest, which compared routers based on the number of routing
violations and total routing wire length. However, a router that completed
the most connections finished second place in the 3D category. "The ISPD
community is still trying to define a good metric," explained ISPD 2007
program chair David Pan. The winning 2D entry was Fairly Good Router
(FGR), which also took third place in the 3D category. FGR's creator plans
to open-source the technology. The winning entry in the 3D category, which
took second place in the 2D category, was MaizeRouter, which contained only
1,500 lines of code.
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A Cheaper Route to Speeding Up the Web
Technology Review (03/26/07) Greene, Kate
Alcatel-Lucent Bell researchers have developed a filter made completely of
silicon that could allow for the expansion of bandwidth thanks to its
ability to be mass-produced inexpensively and to be integrated with
electronic systems. The high cost of such components, made from materials
like gallium arsenide and indium phosphide, has limited the growth of
fiber-optic networks in the past. The silicon filter, which outperforms
other filters, could also allow photonic data transfer to computer circuit
boards and microprocessors, according to Bell Labs manager Sanjay Patel.
Chips that contain both photonic devices and electronics could be key
components in optical and cellular communication systems as well as in
computers. Light enters the filter and is split into two beams, which then
go through a series of loops known as ring-resonators, which adjust the
light's phase and amplitude. The beams are then recombined and sent out of
the filter. To make the device in silicon, the researchers used resonator
architecture that works even if the rings are not perfect, meaning it can
withstand the natural variations that occur in silicon fabrication. "It's
not just a filter," says University of Southern California professor of
electrical engineering Alan Willner. "It's a superfilter." He praises the
innovation for potentially allowing optical systems to carry more data over
longer distances. The research will be presented at the Optical Fiber
Conference in Anaheim.
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Developers: Expect New Major Language Within Five
Years
eWeek (03/26/07) Taft, Darryl K.
More dynamic languages are likely to emerge in the next few years,
according to software experts at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas.
During the "2010: A Developer's Odyssey" panel discussion, Walmart.com
enterprise architect Eugene Ciurana said the Java Virtual Machine would
likely feature more scripting languages to improve usage and development,
while Formicary chief technology officer Hani Suleiman anticipates more
componentization with regard to JVM. Neward & Associates founder Ted
Neward and Azul Systems CTO Gil Tene expect to see more language
experimentation. Tene added, "I think we're five years from the next big
language--to be where Java is today." Suleiman also expressed optimism for
domain-specific languages, while Interface21 CTO Adrian Colyer was partial
to a move toward a message-based paradigm. XML is unlikely to go away over
the next 10 years, Suleiman said in response to a question by Tangosol
President Cameron Purdy, and Ciurana added that convergence between Java
and other technologies is likely to pick up. The task will not get any
easier for developers, who will face "more APIs, more frameworks, more
stuff," said Colyer.
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It's All About Software Now
Electronic News (03/23/07) Sperling, Ed
Greenhills Software CTO Dave Kleidermacher, Virtutech VP of marketing Paul
McLellan, VaST VP of marketing Jeff Roane, and CoWare marketing director
Marc Serughetti recently discussed software development's future, and
started off with observations about the problems plaguing software
development today. Problems they cited included reliability, time to
production, an increase in the number of problems developers must deal
with, and hardware availability. McLellan said that "There are a lot of
issues, but whatever your issue is, it's getting worse." The panelists
concurred that the rising cost of software is concurrent with the
ballooning amount of software, with Kleidermacher noting that software is
becoming so complex that traditional management methods no longer apply,
and that the transition to a multicore architecture is being driven by
microprocessors' inability to operate faster without adequate power
dissipation. Serughetti argued that software performance must be designed
into the hardware much earlier, instead of at the end of the design cycle.
According to Roane, there must be a maturation of the tools that enable the
partitioning of software, while simulation technology should be used as
well. "The issue for us is not whether my system is going to take
advantage of multicore, but whether there's a standardized way of doing
multithreading," said Kleidermacher. McLellan observed that a more
holistic consideration of systems is emerging.
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Security That Nets Malicious Websites
Queensland University of Technology (03/23/07)
An IT researcher at Queensland University of Technology wants search
engines to use reputation systems to warn users against visiting dangerous
sites. "Just because a Web site ranks highly on a search engine doesn't
mean it's a good Web site, in fact highly ranked Web sites can be malicious
Web sites," says QUT professor Audun Josang, referring to various practices
that can elevate a Web site's rank. Most people can identify a dangerous
site, but those who cannot need to be informed about such sites. Josang
envisions browsers equipped with an Internet security system that allows
users to rate Web sites as dangerous. A page that received low rankings
would be made "invisible to unsuspecting users," he says. "Social control
methods, also known as soft security, adhere to common ethical norms by
parties in a community," explains Josang. "They make it possible to
identify and sanction those participants who breach the norms and to
recognize and reward members who adhere to them." Security systems such as
the one Josang envisions could become crucial for maintaining the
legitimacy of the Internet. "There is a deception waiting for you around
every corner on the Internet and the technology we develop will protect
people from that," Josang says.
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UCF Researchers Work on Spy Drones
Orlando Sentinel (FL) (03/22/07) Cobbs, Chris
Two University of Central Florida researchers are developing drones of
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can provide the military with more
comprehensive views of enemy locations than the single UAVs currently in
use. The researchers will use a Defense University Research
Instrumentation Program grant to buy three unmanned planes with six-foot
wingspans and three helicopters in 48-inch bodies, plus cameras,
communications equipment, and computers to control the UAVs. The single
UAV systems currently in use in Iraq and Afghanistan make it difficult for
operators to piece together separate images, but the UCF work aims to allow
flocks of 10 or more UAVs to efficiently combine and analyze the images
their cameras capture. What the UCF researchers are doing is the next step
to make spy planes more proficient," says aircraft manufacturer Steve
Morris. "The idea is to have a bunch of them working together like an ant
colony. A single ant is not a threat, but a swarm can strip a cow to the
bone." Months could pass before the new aircraft is purchased, but the
researchers hope to see results within the year. UAV swarm technology
could be also used in law enforcement or search-and-rescue operations.
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Taking a Stroll Through Virtual Dublin
Irish Times (03/23/07) Lillington, Karlin
Researchers at Trinity College Dublin are constructing an immersive 3D
replica of the city, complete with pedestrians, stonework, and the ability
to pan upwards for a vertical view. The people who walk the streets of
Virtual Dublin wear various clothes that move separately from their bodies,
and the carvings on the side of buildings can be appreciated for their
detail. "This is much more realistic than [online virtual world] Second
Life," says TCD computer science professor Carol O'Sullivan. "It's a good
framework for doing studies into human perception." While the most obvious
use for the technology developed by the effort, known as Project
Metropolis, would be video games, the work could also contribute to health
care and urban planning, as EU regulations will require planners to provide
citizens with simulations that take into account road noise, pedestrian
traffic, and the aesthetic effects of new buildings. "This will improve
our understanding of the human brain," explains TCD cognitive
neuroscientist Fiona Newell. "A world like this could be used to
rehabilitate people who are socially disabled--who are agoraphobic,
perhaps, or autistic--because all the variables can be controlled. You
could also safely put people into otherwise dangerous situations." So far,
2 square km of the planned 5 square km have been completed in high detail,
and there are currently 50,000 virtual people walking the streets. Project
Metropolis is part of a 2.5 million euro Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)
initiative.
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AI Software to Tighten up Production Lines
New Scientist (03/20/07) Simonite, Tom
U.K. researchers have developed artificial intelligence software that can
provide advice on how complex production lines can be improved for
efficiency. To do so, the software studies the relationship between the
end product and the numerous variables involved in the production process,
a task that other programs have tried but failed due to complexity issues.
Rolls Royce has already started using the program, known as X1 Recall, to
reduce waste in the casting of metal parts. Simple software rules would
require enormous computing power to consider the impact of altering any of
the variables of a production process, but X1 Recall can handle over a
hundred variables with little direction thanks to its technique of creating
a global store of data about causes and effects. "It looks at the nature
of individual relationships between variables and combines them into a
'hypersurface' that represents all the knowledge about the causes and
effects," explains Swansea University's Rajesh Ransing. "A hypersurface
only exists in mathematical terms since it has more than three dimensions.
But its purely mathematical nature also provides novel ways of handling
complex information." By analyzing the properties of this "surface,"
recommendations can be made to prevent defects in the finished product.
"The system can very quickly give advice like a human expert, and will keep
learning," says Ransing. Another version of X1 Recall is being considered
for helping doctors decide on treatment options for specific patients.
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Supercomputer Aims to Cut Energy Costs
IT Week (03/19/07) Young, Tom
The University of Edinburgh has unveiled an energy-efficient supercomputer
called Maxwell that uses field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to handle
real-world industrial applications. Built by the Edinburgh Parallel
Computing Center (EPCC), Maxwell will offer improved computational
performance while using 10 times less power. The FPGA High Performance
Computing Alliance spent 3.6 million British pounds developing the green
supercomputer over the past two years. The Scottish SMEs Nallatech and
Alpha Data designed and manufactured Maxwell. Industries that have
sizeable processing needs such as military defense, drug design, medical
imaging, and financial engineering are likely to benefit from the new
supercomputer. "The high performance technology could be used to deliver
significant improvements in productivity potential in Scotland's key
industries such as financial services, energy and life sciences," says
Graham Fairlie, project manager at Scottish Enterprises' Enabling
Technology and Engineering Team. Maxwell will be introduced to U.K.
industrial sectors in a series of seminars that will begin in May and end
in 2008.
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Evaluating Advanced Search Interfaces Using Established
Information-Seeking Models
University of Southampton (ECS) (03/23/07) Wilson, Max L.; schraefel,
m.c.; White, Ryen
Keyword searching may not fulfill users' needs if their goals are complex
or poorly defined, so more advanced systems to support richer search modes
are under development. The increasing versatility of environments provided
by advanced systems are difficult to compare, but it can be done through
the quantification of their pluses and minuses in supporting user
strategies and fluctuating user conditions. The authors present a
framework for assessing advanced search interfaces that mixes established
models of users, user requirements, and user behaviors. Two models of
information seeking--Information-Seeking Strategies (ISS) conditions
outlined by Belkin in his episodic model and Bates' levels of user search
activities (move, tactic, stratagem, and strategy)--are combined to
evaluate a trio of faceted browsers (mSpace, Flamenco, and RB++), thus
enabling a rating of the interfaces' strengths and weaknesses over the
support for tactics, the support supplied by interface features, and the
support for 16 unique user conditions. There are six stages to the
framework's application: Feature identification, measurement of support
for tactics, metrics summarization, feature strength analysis, tactic
support analysis, and user conditions analysis. The purpose of the
framework is to augment a search system's design phase before costly and
complicated user studies are used to evaluate versatile systems that are
increasingly harder to compare. The authors say the framework complies
with the principles of designing insightful, affordable, repeatable, and
explainable experiments, and allows designs to be refined during their
formative development through the simulation of core user interactions.
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County, University Team Up on Research
Atlanticville (03/21/07)
Researchers from Monmouth University's Center for Rapid Response Database
Systems recently presented their system for detecting and tracking disease
outbreaks to the United Nations. The epidemiological modeling system,
known as the Markov Chain Model for Epidemics, "can predict and/or detect
the spread of diseases occurring naturally or intentionally" and has
"worldwide interest and impact," said Monmouth County health coordinator
Lester Jargowsky. The Monmouth "County Health Department and Monmouth
University have been working very closely to develop computer technology
and database systems that would greatly enhance communications and
intelligence gathering to detect, respond, and recover from events ranging
from an outbreak of illness to a major chemical or biological incident,"
Jargowsky said. The system could be used for situations ranging from a
"small scale or a very large regional event and aid decision makers," added
Jargowsky. The UN committee discussed the computer modeling technology for
several hours and spoke of some practical uses for it. The research was
indirectly linked to a bio-terrorism grant given to the county's health
department by the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services and
university programs contracted by the U.S. Army's Edgewood Chemical
Biological Center.
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ICANN Ponders Registrar Crackdown
Computer Business Review (03/23/07) Murphy, Kevin
ICANN has announced it will take deliberate action to review and reform
its registrar accreditation agreement (RAA) rules and enforcement abilities
in light of the recent problems at RegisterFly. ICANN President Paul
Twomey says the entire registration community needs to work toward
reforming the process to better protect registrants in the immediate
future. Twomey says, "What has happened to registrants with RegisterFly
has made it clear there must be comprehensive review of the registrar
accreditation process and the content of the RAA." ICANN wants to rewrite
the RAA to ensure ICANN can take enforcement action more quickly and
forcefully, a position GoDaddy agrees with. ICANN also is concerned that
identity-masking services at RegisterFly have placed people's domain names
at risk by shielding identities even from ICANN if RegisterFly collapses.
ICANN likely will explore rewriting the RAA to ensure ICANN has access to
registrant data for those using WHOIS privacy services. Twomey's comments
also indicate that he plans to stop the process of registrar accreditation
simply changing hands if a person or company purchases a registrar.
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Be More Than You Can Be
Wired (03/07) Vol. 15, No. 3, P. 114; Shachtman, Noah
Boosting the resilience, performance, and mental capability of American
soldiers is a goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that is
especially relevant in the era of transnational threats, and the agency is
funding various projects to augment troops bodily. Stanford University
researchers have developed the Glove, a device that can lower the wearer's
body temperature and postpone fatigue; DARPA is funding the Glove's
development as a training tool for recruits. Increasing endurance to deep
cold is the aim of a project to modify the Glove so that it can capture
heat and use it to warm the rest of the wearer's body. Life extension for
the purpose of making fatal injuries survivable--a critical factor in
combat--was the focus of research conducted by biochemist Mark Roth, who
was motivated to see if a state of suspended animation could be induced in
mammals through sudden oxygen deprivation. DARPA invested in his
experiments and Roth is now thinking about asking the Institutional Review
Boards for permission to begin human testing. DARPA director Tony Tether
says it will be years or even decades before such performance-enhancement
technologies are used under actual battlefield conditions, which is a good
thing because the agency needs to be extra cautious in light of the many
ethical concerns associated with biotechnology and human testing.
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Semantically Annotating a Web Service
Internet Computing (04/07) Vol. 11, No. 2, P. 83; Verma, Kunal; Sheth,
Amit
Web services (WS) are currently being employed to link various system
components statically into a service-oriented architecture (SOA), but
businesses are starting to consider dynamic value-added propositions such
as interoperability, reuse, and agility, note Accenture Technology Labs'
Kunal Verma and Wright State University's Amit Sheth. Reuse of WS across
various applications was the core goal behind the development of the Web
Service Description Language (WSDL). The client's understanding of the
semantics of each service operation is necessary for the use of a service
provider service, and five years ago researchers proposed Semantic Web
services that addressed this issue by annotating service elements with
terms from domain models, such as industry standards, vocabularies,
taxonomies, and ontologies. One approach along these lines takes an
evolutionary path that maintains consistency with existing standards and
industrial practices, which is the strategy embraced by the managing
end-to-end operations for Semantic Web services and processes project
(METEOR-S); this led to the Semantic Annotation of Web Services (SAWSDL).
So that specifications are relieved of the burden of achieving reuse,
interoperability, and agility of SOA-based systems, the METEOR-S project
concocted and explored a framework with functional, data, nonfunctional,
and execution semantics. The first two types of semantics are directly
supported by SAWSDL, while the remaining semantic types can be incorporated
by service providers via the WS-Policy framework. Verma and Sheth's
near-term prospects for SAWSDL include better support of data mediation
when services need to interoperate, and the augmentation of the current
SAWSDL version with the ability to model preconditions, postconditions, and
effects; their medium-term prospects for SAWSDL include the improvement of
SOA through semantics via the enrichment of policy and agreement
specifications; and their long-term prospects include "a pervasive impact
of semantics through all the states of service and process life cycle,
encompassing publication, discovery, orchestration, composition, dynamic
configuration, and so on, ultimately leading to adaptive Web services and
processes."
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