'Innovation Agenda' Is Advancing in Congress
San Jose Mercury News (CA) (05/01/07) Davies, Frank
Momentum for the "innovation agenda" is starting to build as Congress
begins to approve key elements of the agenda. The House is expected to
nearly double funding for the National Science Foundation, which recently
received approval from the Senate for a funding increase, and following
votes in the House last week, Congress is set to approve about $1.5 billion
in grants to train 10,000 math and science teachers each year and increase
in-service training for current instructors. John Denniston, a partner
with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, hopes that current budget increases
will mirror what happened about 30 years ago when federal funding for
defense research greatly aided emerging information technology companies,
and an increase in federal funding for medical research helped developing
biotechnology firms. So far, the increased spending has received support
from both parties as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has made it a
priority and the Bush administration has been supportive. Not all elements
of the technology agenda are receiving widespread support. The majority of
Congress is looking to increase the cap of H-1B visas for foreign engineers
and other technology workers, but larger controversies over immigration are
tying up the issue, and patent reform, widely supported by software and
other IT companies that want to be able to challenge patents, faces strong
opposition from drug companies who want to protect their lucrative patents
and ensure violators pay damages. Perhaps the most innovative proposal
this year would be the creation of a new agency, modeled after the Cold
War-era Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The proposed Advanced
Research Projects Agency-Energy would fund "high-risk, high-return"
projects aimed at advancing energy technology, with funding that would
start at $300 million and grow to $1 billion over five years.
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Can't Humans and Computers Just Get Along? Microsoft
Research Is Trying to Make Sure They Do
WebWire (04/30/07)
At the ACM International Computer/Human Interaction (CHI) 2007 Conference
numerous innovative technologies and projects, several from Microsoft, were
presented, all with the objective of enriching people's lives by making
technology more user friendly. Microsoft researcher Patrick Baudisch
believes the best technologies are the ones that escape our notice, which
is the idea behind one of Baudisch's latest projects, Shift. Shift is a
new technology that lets a person accurately operate a stylus-based device,
such as a PDA or ultra-mobile PC, without a stylus, allowing the user to
control the device with their fingers. Shift corrects the problem many
users encounter when operating a device with their fingers that the
on-screen target becomes obscured by fingers and thumbs, which are
significantly larger than a stylus. When a user touches the screen
surface, Shift makes a copy of the obscured area visible, along with a
pointer that can be guided with finger motion. Once the pointer is
correctly positioned, the user lifts his thumb or finger to make a
selection. A paper on Shift submitted to CHI is one of three papers by
Microsoft being honored at the conference. A second paper focuses on the
use of eye-tracking technology in Web searches, and the other details an
experimental study using a SenseCam. Microsoft submitted a total of 19
papers to the conference, on subjects ranging from mobile devices,
searches, inking, emerging markets, how to operate a mouse in mid-air, and
teaching computer skills to non-literate populations.
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More IT Jobs, Less Filling of Them
Computerworld (05/01/07) Thibodeau, Patrick
Recent reports on employment trends indicate that IT professionals should
find it easier to find a job, but that employers may start having an even
more difficult time filling job openings. The Conference Board said that
about 4.37 million online job postings were placed in April, a 24 percent
increase over the same period a year ago. Of that total, about 323,000 ads
were "computer and mathematical" positions, a 15 percent increase over the
number of job postings for the same type of positions from the previous
year. The Conference Board's Gad Levanon said companies typically do more
advertising in the spring to attract new college graduates, but the data
showing year-over-year increases could be a signal that the job market is
improving, and that increases in online advertising may be an indication of
a tight labor supply. Cyberstates 2007, the latest annual report of
high-tech employment trends by the American Electronics Association, said
that high-tech jobs in the U.S. totaled 5.8 million last year, a 3 percent
increase, or about 146,600 more jobs. Foote Partners CEO David Foote said
many companies are becoming very specific about the workers they want,
requiring new employees to have specific skills and experience, such as
security administrators with forensics skills, or storage administrators
with storage-area networking experience.
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Study: China Leaps Forward in Advanced Tech
Education
Investor's Business Daily (05/02/07) P. A5; Riley, Sheila
China is producing more graduate degree-level engineers with advanced
research and development skills than the United States and India, according
to a Duke University study published in the March edition of the National
Academy of Science Issues Magazine. "The outsourcing of engineering jobs
will continue and gain momentum, and what will go next is research and
design," declared lead author of the study Vivek Wadhwa. China churned out
9,427 engineering Ph.D.s in 2005, compared to 7,333 by the United States
and around 1,000 by India. Although the report disputed the popular notion
that the United States is facing a shortage of engineers, concerns that
America is lagging behind other nations are once again rising. China
experienced a monumental jump in the number of engineering Ph.D.s it
produced between 1995 and 2005, while the engineering doctorate rates for
the United States and India hardly increased. Wadhwa argued that the
United States needs to move away from its concerns over offshoring of
lower-level tech jobs and concentrate on the overseas migration of critical
R&D. Among the factors deemed to be contributing to the problem are
misconceptions about the engineering field and student views about what
constitutes a good career, and more media coverage of engineering
breakthroughs would help rectify this situation, says Engineering Trends
founder Richard Heckel. Robert Litan with the Kauffman Foundation says the
offshoring of R&D could be prevented by allowing highly-skilled immigrants
to stay in the United States on a permanent rather than temporary basis.
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SIGGRAPH Animation Contest Deadline Approaching
Business Wire (04/27/07)
Computer graphics experts have until May 15, 2007, to sign up for the
SIGGRAPH 2007 international computer graphics animation competition.
Sponsored by DreamWorks Animation, FJORG! (pronounced FORGE) will pit 16
teams of three members in a 32-hour challenge before a live audience to
develop a character-driven animated sequence (of at least 15 seconds in
length) based on a theme chosen by an elite panel of judges from the
entertainment industry. "Everyone from the international computer graphics
community is encouraged to enter this competition," says Patricia
Beckmann-Wells, SIGGRAPH FJORG! chair. "We expect it to be an extremely
challenging, engaging, and memorable animation contest." There will be a
special ceremony for the winners, who will receive prizes, during the 34th
International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and
Interactive Techniques, which is scheduled for Aug. 5-9, at the San Diego
Convention Center in San Diego, Calif. ACM SIGGRAPH is the sponsor of
SIGGRAPH 2007, which is expected to draw some 25,000 computer graphics and
interactive technology professionals from around the world for several days
of technical and creative programs, and an exhibition of products and
services. For more information about SIGGRAPH 2007, or to register, visit
http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/
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Respectful Cameras
Technology Review (05/02/07) Borrell, Brendan
University of California, Berkeley computer scientists have developed
"respectful cameras," a new type of video surveillance technology that
covers a person's face with an oval for privacy but removes the oval in the
event of an investigation. Respectful cameras are still in the research
phase, as they are only capable of covering someone's face if that person
is wearing a marker such as a green vest or yellow hat, but the cameras
could be a compromise between privacy advocates and those concerned about
security, according to UC Berkeley computer scientist Ken Goldberg. The
researchers used a statistical classification approach called adaptive
boosting to teach the system to identify the marker in a visually
complicated environment, and added a tracker to compensate for the
subject's velocity and other interframe information. When the system was
tested using a vest at a construction site, the marker was correctly
identified 93 percent of the time, and under more uniform lighting
conditions while testing a hat in a lab, the system was 96 percent
successful, even when two marked individuals crossed paths. Goldberg said
the marker is necessary as face-detection algorithms are not advanced
enough yet, but that a less conspicuous marker, like a button, could be
used, particularly with systems of multiple cameras. Still, even if
privacy protection camera systems were widely deployed, there likely would
be debate on how difficult it should be for governments and law enforcement
to see fully unobscured video footage.
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Tech Students Are in the Chips; Computer, Engineering
Employers Comb Campuses
Sacramento Bee (CA) (04/30/07) P. D1; Swett, Clint
Demand for graduates with computer and engineering degrees is so high that
college career centers are constantly receiving requests for graduates and
businesses are waiting in line to participate in college job fairs. Cici
Mattiuzzi is the director of the career center for the College of
Engineering and Computer Science at California State University, Sacramento
(CSUS). "I've done this job for 30 years and across the board it's the
best hiring market I've ever seen," Mattiuzzi said. "These companies want
students so badly I feel like I'm being harassed." Demand for computer
science and engineering students has increased recently as the economy
recovers from the dot-com bust and baby boomer computer scientists and
engineers retire, opening up numerous positions. The U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics predicts a 34.2 percent increase in computer and math specialist
jobs in California between 2004 and 2014. The problem is that not enough
students are graduating with computer and engineering degrees. Enrollment
in computer programs at American River College is down 35 percent since
2000, and enrollment in the engineering and computer science department at
CSUS fell nearly 25 percent between 2000 and 2007. Enrollment in
tech-related fields is expected to increase as students recognize the
lucrative job market, but the non-profit group LEED (Linking Education and
Economic Development) is hoping to help the problem resolve a little
faster. LEED has partnered with 12 California middle and high schools to
encourage students to study engineering and computer science, including
programs helping high school students land summer internships at Intel and
special math and science curriculums in the schools.
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Washington University's Yixin Chen Receives Prestigious
Microsoft Award
EurekAlert (04/30/07)
Microsoft Research has named Yixin Chen of Washington University in St.
Louis a 2007 New Faculty Fellow. The prestigious award is designed to
support the research efforts of young computer scientists by providing them
with $200,000 in cash and other resources such as software and conference
travel and the opportunity to work with Microsoft researchers over two
years. Chen, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, won
the fellowship for his research into nonlinear optimization, which could
have a significant impact on automated planning, medical procedures such as
radiotherapy, computational biology, and engineering design. He spent five
years developing an algorithm that can provide an answer to a nonlinear
problem in 100 seconds that in the past would have taken a 100-node
parallel computer a week to solve. For example, NASA rovers and satellites
would be able to execute decision procedures in 30 seconds rather than two
hours, with Chen's algorithm. "The goal is that, by reducing the
computational complexity of nonlinear optimization, we will develop fast
and robust decision-making tools and significantly extend the ways that
computing can be used in medical, scientific, and engineering
applications," he says.
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Women in IT: Find Us If You Can
MC Press Online (05/01/07) DeGiglio, Maria
Recent statistics from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor
Statistics on women in IT are inaccurate because they fail to account for
female professionals who have transitioned into business analyst roles and
female freelancers, writes analyst Maria A. DeGiglio. According to the
Department of Labor, the number of female women in IT fell by 76,000 from
984,000 in 2000 to 908,000 in 2006. DeGiglio argues that these numbers
only accounted for eight very specific groups in the IT industry: managers,
computer scientists/system analysts, programmers, software engineers,
support specialists, database administrators, network/computer systems
administrators, and network systems/data communications analysts. DeGiglio
believes these categories have extremely rigid definitions and do not
account for women who may have more ambiguous IT jobs but no official IT
title, such as consulting professionals, technical writers, journalists,
and industry analysts. These professionals may not have true IT positions,
but a large portion of their jobs is IT related. DeGiglio says that if the
number of women in IT is truly decreasing, there are several reasons for
the trend. One is that some women may have felt that IT was too thankless
and that they hit a glass ceiling, but DeGiglio believes that the main
reason women are "leaving" the field is that they have reinvented
themselves and have pursued graduate degrees or more lucrative professions.
She says the "IT career paradigm is morphing into a new paradigm--one that
is non-traditional and dynamic." For information about ACM's Committee on
Women in Computing, visit
http://women.acm.org
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Microsoft Invites Collaboration With Grid Computing
Research
TechNewsWorld (04/30/07) Germain, Jack M.
Microsoft has released details about its Security Policy Assertion
Language, or SecPAL, to encourage collaboration on security and access
controls methods from the grid computing community. Microsoft created
SecPAL as a research project to develop a more simple and accurate way of
expressing decentralized authorization policies, and to investigate
computing language design and semantics as well as related algorithms and
analysis techniques. Microsoft hopes that making SecPAL's implementation
and design information available will encourage the security and grid
research communities to test, experiment, and contribute to the project.
"We made it flexible enough to work with several grid platforms," says
Microsoft lead software architect Blair Dillaway. "We have been
experimenting with SecPAL internally for one year. I feel very positive
about this progress." By sharing computer resources through a grid, users
can run a single resource for solving large-scale and data-intensive
computer applications. So far, the University of Virginia and the
University of New Castle are actively working with SecPAL. Other
universities and organizations have downloaded the information as well, but
have not yet responded.
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Mouse Brain Simulated on Computer
BBC News (04/27/07)
Researchers from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada
have used the BlueGene L supercomputer to model half a virtual mouse brain
with 8 million neurons that have up to 6,300 synapses, or connections, with
other nerve fibers. Interactions in brain tissue are complex and numerous,
making them a challenge to simulate. Half the brain of a real mouse can
have about 8 million neurons each with up to 8,000 synapses. In the short
research note entitled "Towards Real-Time, Mouse-Scale Cortical
Simulations," researchers James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and
Dharmendra S Modha write that such a modeling initiative puts "tremendous
constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any
computing platform." The BlueGene L supercomputer was used to run the
complex simulation for 10 seconds at a speed that was 10 times slower than
real life. The speed was about one second in the brain of a real mouse.
The researchers have seen "biologically consistent dynamical properties" of
thought patterns in real mouse brains in smaller simulations.
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Virtual Reality Helps MS Patients Walk Better
American Technion Society (04/30/07)
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology scientists have developed a
virtual reality device that uses auditory and visual feedback to improve
the walking speed and stride length in multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's
patients. Lead researcher and computer science professor Yoram Baram said
a cell phone-sized device measures body movement, and processes and sends
audio feedback to the user through earphones. The visual feedback is
provided through a device Baram developed for Parkinson's patients 10 years
ago. Through a tiny piece that clips onto the users glasses, the user is
presented with a virtual, tiled-floor image in one eye, allowing the user
to distinguish between the virtual floor and real world obstacles.
"Healthy people have other tools, such as sensory feedback from muscles
nerves, which report on muscle control, telling them whether or not they
are using their muscles correctly," said Baram. "This feedback is damaged
in Parkinson and MS patients and the elderly, but auditory feedback can be
used to help them walk at a fixed pace." Results from a small study showed
that patients' stride lengths and walking speeds improved not only while
wearing the device, but after the device was removed, indicating the device
has some residual short-term therapeutic effects. Parkinson's patients
showed less improvement than MS patients on the whole, however. The device
is the first to respond to the patient's motions rather than providing
fixed visual or auditory cues, and is already being used by several medical
centers in Israel and the United States.
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Researchers: Health Sensors Open New Doors for
Hackers
ASU Insight (04/30/07) Evans, Deanna
A time when our health is constantly being monitored by a network of tiny
sensors implanted in our bodies may not be as far off as some might think,
according to Sandeep Gupta, an associate professor in the Department of
Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. Not only
does Gupta believe such a scenario could occur, but he has already
considered the possibility that the "body sensor network" could be an
information theft vulnerability. Like all other types of information
exchanges, transferring information from tiny body sensors to a larger
computer that interprets the data is vulnerable to theft and would need to
be protected. Gupta has proposed a possible security solution using an
algorithm based on a physiological property to generate a key to prevent
unauthorized access. Using a synchronized measurement of some phenomena in
the body, a key would be generated simultaneously by two sensors so the key
would never need to be sent between the two, keeping the key unknown to
potential criminals. "This is a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem of
secure data transmission," Gupta said. "Using the physiological parameters
of the body, you can secure the information, and because the sensors are
using their environment to derive the key, a person outside the body cannot
measure the environment." While implant security is not yet a hot-button
issue, Gupta says that as medical practices become more pervasive,
specifically systems that use networks, security will become a critical
issue.
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Program to Help Girls Click With Computers
Catonsville Times (MD) (04/26/07) Weybright, Scott
The fifth annual Computer Mania Day at the University of Maryland,
Baltimore County, is scheduled for May 5, 2007. The event targets middle
school girls with a day's worth of technology-related activities, with
hopes of attracting them to careers in information technology, engineering,
and other technology-related fields. Pamela Ezzat, the director of
kindergarten through 12th grade programs at the Center for Women in
Technology at UMBC, says the young girls have an opportunity to gain some
professional role models. "We require that [the teachers] be women in the
classrooms teaching the workshops," says Ezzat. "The girls can see that
women are really out there." UMBC officials add that it is unacceptable
that girls accounted for only 10.5 percent of students who took the
computer science Advanced Placement test last year. The guest speaker for
the Computer Mania Day will be "eighth-grader Jennifer Webb," a digital
puppet developed by young girls who attended the event in previous
years.
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Better Touch Screens for Mobile Phones
Technology Review (05/01/07) Greene, Kate
Haptics researchers at numerous universities and companies are working on
touch-based feedback that could make faux touch-screen buttons feel more
like real buttons. When using a touch-screen keyboard, people are more
accurate typists when they receive some kind of feedback, according to
University of Glasgow professor of computing science Stephen Brewster.
Brewster and his team found that people make errors, such as mistype,
double-press, or slip from one button to another, up to 25 percent less
frequently when vibrations are used to let them know the button was
correctly pressed. While most phones are capable of producing a vibration
as an announcement for a call, Brewster is using specialized actuators to
explore how people respond to different types of vibrations. Research by
PhD student Eve Hoggan, a member of Brewster's team, found that people can
recognize differences in vibrations 94 percent of the time. Different
types of vibrations could be used to send error signals. Brewster believes
that within a couple of years, vibration feedback will be far more common,
and people will be able to select the types of vibrations they feel, much
like how they choose wallpaper on their phone's screens.
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Mobile Phone Game Developed to Combat Culture
Shock
University of Portsmouth (04/27/07)
Researchers at the University of Portsmouth are putting the final touches
on a game for mobile phones that is designed to help prepare international
students for life in Britain. Gaming technology expert Nipan Maniar and
research assistant Dr. Emily Bennett are behind C-Shock, which helps
foreigners deal with "culture shock" by presenting incidents and images
that are likely to be unfamiliar to them, such as drinking alcohol in a pub
or displaying affection in public. "I thought it would be great to have a
learning vehicle or device to help people overcome the culture shock
because if you have not experienced such things before, it's hard to know
how to react or behave appropriately," says Maniar, who left India to
pursue studies in the United Kingdom five years ago. The game starts users
with a "culture shock" rating of 100 and reduces it to zero by presenting
events users are likely to encounter at specific locations on campus. "You
could incorporate a whole city guide into the game so, in effect the new
student has this interactive learning tool to quickly settle into a new
city very quickly," says Maniar, who expects other U.K. universities to use
mobile phone games in a similar fashion. C-Shock should be available to
students later this year.
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Peta Computing's Parallel Universe
CITRIS Newsletter (04/07) Slack, Gordy
The maturation of petascale computing will give CITRIS applications in a
wide array of fields amazing new modeling opportunities. Among the areas
of CITRIS research that would benefit from petascale supercomputers--one of
which will be available to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory--are
earthquake modeling, climate analysis, environmental monitoring, genomics,
nanoscience, and protein analysis. Integrating CITRIS-type applications
with the petascale hardware and systems software is a challenge being
tackled by UC Berkeley computer science professor Katherine Yelick and
colleagues in the Parallelism Lab. "We are trying to expose the best
features of the underlying hardware to the software," explains Yelick.
"The hardware designers are trying to innovate and put in fast networks or
networks with very interesting connectivity patterns, and we want to take
full advantage of that." Yelick's team has devised new compilers and
languages--one C-based and one Java-based--for the new systems, and one of
the major challenges they face involves the measurement and management of
the information stream through massive numbers of processors. The unequal
distribution of tasks among all these processors complicates the
development of new algorithms and new approaches to applications
programming to coordinate the flow and sharing of so much activity. At
least 50 percent of the world's 500 fastest computers will be petascale, if
speed increases keep up at present levels.
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Pervasive Personal Computing in an Internet
Suspend/Resume System
Internet Computing (04/07) Vol. 11, No. 2, P. 16; Satyanarayanan,
Mahadev; Gilbert, Benjamin; Toups, Matt
The authors describe a new mobile computing methodology that uses the
Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) system, which mimics the suspend/resume
capability of laptops, to remove the necessity of carrying hardware along.
The goal of the technique is to locate and use existing hardware at any
location so that personal computing can be liberated from the design
constraints of portable equipment. With such an approach, any
Internet-linked machine could function as a PC on demand, but realizing
this concept involves finding ways to supply efficient on-demand access to
the whole of a user's personal computing environment, guaranteeing
resilience to the Internet's unpredictability, and setting up trust in
unmanaged hardware for temporary use. ISR enables virtual machines to
encapsulate user and customization states or parcels by layering the VMs on
distributed storage, which then transports the parcels across time and
space. The authors have commenced deployment of the OpenISR version of
ISR, based on the lessons learned from three previous ISR implementations.
OpenISR is designed to be virtual machine monitor-agnostic, use content
addressable storage extensively, and exploit techniques to transparently
morph between thin- and thick-client modes of execution. To shield users
from the vagaries of the Internet, the authors promote an asynchronous
network dependence scheme in which ISR provides network connectivity to
support data hoarding and reintegration, while complete disconnection is
acceptable and has no bearing on performance in the interval between these
two events. The authors are addressing the challenge of establishing trust
through the development of the Trust-Sniffer tool, which helps a user gain
confidence in an initially untrusted machine in increments; the tool
features a trust initiation device that boots the untrusted machine in
order that the Trust-Sniffer can run an integrity check of all software
that would be employed in a normal boot process.
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