Researchers Call For More Funds, Easier
Immigration
EE Times (07/16/07) Merritt, Rick
A panel of experts at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., on Monday
concluded that the U.S. government needs to spend more money on long-term
research and multi-disciplinary education as well as provide more
opportunities for international researchers. The conclusions will be
expanded upon in the report of a government task force that will be
published this summer. "The big take away is we need to think more
audaciously and stimulate the government to support that thinking," said
panelist Dan Reed, one of the report's authors. The report, from the
President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), is the
first independent update on government technology spending since 1999. The
report examines the global competitiveness of the U.S. technology industry
and education system. One of the report's major conclusions is that too
little time and resources are spent on long-term research. Microsoft's
chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie agreed, and singled out
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in particular for
focusing too much on short-term projects instead of big technological
breakthroughs. "If DARPA doesn't go back to where it once was we will have
to look elsewhere because we are not hitting the right balance," Mundie
said. "We don't have enough people doing the core computer science work."
Reed said the PCAST report calls for the government to simplify visa
procedures and an increase in fellowship money for international graduate
students who want to work in the United States. Reed and other panelists
also suggested a greater focus on multi-disciplinary research. "I really
do believe computational thinking will be fundamental like reading, writing
and arithmetic," said the National Science Foundation's Jeannette Wing.
"We have to spread this to K-12 education because if we wait until students
are undergrads it's too late."
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Tech's Green Problems
USA Today (07/17/07) P. 1B; Kessler, Michelle
Nearly every major PC and electronics manufacturer is rolling out "green"
programs that aim to recycle used machines and design more environmentally
friendly, power-efficient products. The annual U.S. electricity costs of
leaving PCs on unattended is $1.7 billion, while just 11 percent of
electronics is currently recycled and 44 percent is discarded. The green
initiatives are being driven by customer demand, among other things,
according to Motorola's Scott Martin. It is a struggle to make products
greener; reducing a product's power consumption can inhibit performance,
while recyclers frequently spend more on labor than they earn through
reselling materials. "If everything else is equal, a consumer will choose
to purchase a product that's more socially responsible," says Sharp
Electronics' Stewart Mitchell. "But I'm not going to say they'll pay more
for it." Computer TakeBack Campaign national coordinator Barbara Kyle says
the lack of a strong recycling system is why many recycling programs suffer
from low levels of reclamation; she wants manufacturers to follow
Motorola's example and take back old products, which would motivate them to
design easily recyclable goods. Others cite the sponsorship of recycling
drives as a more affordable strategy, while still others endorse a
combination of recycling drive sponsorship and direct recycling, which is
generally supported by U.S. officials.
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Science, Tech Advocates Eye Increased Federal
Resources
National Journal's Technology Daily (07/13/07) Sternstein, Aliya
Washington is starting to focus more on science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics (STEM) education. Education advocates say efforts such as
the president's budget request are needed, considering students and
teachers involved in STEM programs continue to struggle. "The budget
request contained the first meaningful increase for the National Science
Foundation's education programs in many years, something the STEM ed
community has really made a high priority," says James Brown, co-chairman
of the STEM Education Coalition. While the House and Senate are working to
significantly boost funding for NSF STEM education programs, Brown says the
two chambers could also hammer out their differences this summer on
legislation to improve the competitiveness of the country. Sen. Michael
Enzi (R-Wyo.), a member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Committee, also says a comprehensive higher education bill could be passed
this year, adding that it would help improve technological competitiveness.
The Education Department recently awarded $22 million in grants to help
prepare qualified individuals to teach math, science, and other core
subjects in high schools. Education also awarded $3.5 million to improve
the prospects of employment in science and technology for ethnic
minorities.
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Microsoft Supports Higher Education With More than $6
Million in Grant Money
Associated Content (07/16/07) Aller, Tiffany
Microsoft Research announced on Monday that Microsoft will award almost
$6.5 million in grants to colleges and universities across the United
States to supplement research, research faculty, and research facilities.
Microsoft Research's Rich Rashid said computer science impacts all types of
work and industries, and investing in academia will lead to better
technologies and better lives. Microsoft said research aimed at the use of
cellular phone technology, particularly the enhancement of health care
services in both rural and urban settings, will receive $1 million.
Genome-wide association studies, which will lay the groundwork for patients
to receive more personalized treatment based on genetic mapping, will
receive $700,000. Three projects dealing with enhanced computing
capabilities will each receive $500,000. One project focuses on
Intelligent Web 3.0 and a human-centric, context-aware model of information
access. The second will attempt to enable safe and scalable concurrent
programs. The third will try to make computer systems more energy
efficient. Microsoft is also funding a research project focused on
enhancing the level of interaction between humans and robots, which will
try to bring gadgets to the market within five to 10 years. An additional
$2.75 million will be donated to other recipients, including $1 million to
the A. Richard Newton Breakthrough Research Award. Five chosen faculty
members will also split $1 million through the Microsoft Research New
Faculty Fellowship. The final portion of the grants will be used to
establish the Center for Collaborative Technologies at the University of
Washington, which will receive $750,000 over the next three years.
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Looking for Signs of Life
Technology Review (07/17/07) Graham-Rowe, Duncan
Researchers at Sweden's Halmstad University have developed a "liveness"
detection system that will help facial recognition programs tell the
difference between a picture and a real person. Professor of signal
analysis Josef Bigun, who led the research, says liveness is going to be a
major issue for biometrics, particularly with face recognition. He says
some facial recognition systems have simple defenses to spot photographs,
but they can be easily tricked by bending the picture. One current defense
is to measure how similar the face being presented is to a stored image of
the person. The biometric system is looking for differences between the
two images and will reject a face that too closely matches the original.
This defense can easily be bypassed by adding statistical noise to the
image using a digital copy and basic photo-editing software. The second
approach uses optical flow to measure the movement of key parts of the face
in relation to each other. The purpose is to detect slight movements of a
photo as it is held in front of the camera. If all areas of the face move
in a perfectly linear fashion, it is a photograph. However, this system
tends to reject people if they are holding their facial expression very
still, and it can also be tricked by bending a photo to move at slightly
different trajectories. Bigun's solution takes the optical-flow defense
and improves upon it. The researches examined the differences between how
real faces and bent photos move to identify differences in the trajectories
of key facial points. The trajectories of 3D features are more complex and
follow a particular pattern relative to each other. The researchers
created a system to test the accuracy of a system that could tell the
differences in trajectories. Bigun says the only way to beat the system he
worked on would be to make a 3D mask of someone's face.
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Sharp Drop in Extended Mass Layoffs in IT Industries
Since 2001
CRA Bulletin (07/16/07) Vegso, Jay
Although the information technology industry struggled with layoffs like
the rest of the economy at the turn of the century, reaching a low point in
2002, ever since the industry has seen a dramatic drop in the number of
layoffs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, the decline
has been dramatic, with the number of layoffs lasting more than 30 days and
involving more than 50 people in the four subdivisions of the IT industry
down as much as 91 percent in 2006. In comparison, layoffs for all other
industries are down 36 percent, and the number of workers who have lost
jobs is down about 41 percent. In 2001, all four subdivisions of the
computer industry had a total of 1,021 layoff events and 203,561
separations. Last year, there were 123 layoff events and a total of 23,787
separations.
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Latest Weapon Against Spam Also Enlists Computer Users to
Assist the Internet Archive
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (07/18/07) Yao, Laura
As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000, Luis von Ahn
worked on Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and
Humans Apart (Captcha), the online tests that ask users to decipher a
distorted word to gain access to a site. At first, Captchas were
unreadable to computers, but resourceful hackers found ways for computers
to solve Captchas. Von Ahn, now an assistant professor of computer science
at Carnegie Mellon, then started working on another test. "It's an arms
race," von Ahn says. "We come up with something that programs shouldn't be
able to read. Then somebody comes up with a way to read it, so we have to
come up with a better one." The solution von Ahn released in late may,
called reCaptcha, not only provides a secure test, one that von Ahn
predicts will take years to break, but also contributes to the Internet
Archive, a nonprofit that is working to create digital records of books.
The archive project scans books and uses word recognition software, much
like hackers do, to create digital records. The problem is that the
software is often unable to recognize some of the words in older books.
ReCaptcha presents users with two words to decipher, one the archive
already knows and one that it was unable to recognize. When enough users
have entered the same answer for the unknown word, the archives accepts the
stores the word. "We only take words the computer can't read," von Ahn
says. "That extra step makes it much more secure, because we just threw
away everything a computer could read." Meanwhile, von Ahn is also
developing online games that use human intelligence to solve problems
computers have problems with. One program, Matchin', asks users to
identify attractiveness, allowing an image to be archived and searched for
on its degree of "prettiness."
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End of the Line for PHP 4
CNet (07/16/07) Shankland, Stephen
The PHP development team recently announced that support for PHP 4,
originally released in 2000, will stop at the end of 2007. Critical
security fixes will continue on a case-by-case basis through Aug. 8, 2008,
but overall support will no longer be available for the popular open-source
program. The announcement that PHP 4 will no longer be supported came on
the third anniversary of the launch of PHP 5. Project programmers said
they want to focus more on the upcoming release of PHP 6. Despite the more
recent PHP 5, and the soon to be released PHP 6, the PHP development team
may find it difficult to end support for such a popular and widely used
piece of software. "PHP 5 has been, from an adoption point of view, a
complete flop. Most estimates place it in the single-digit percentages or
at best the low teens," says WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, who uses
PHP. Mullenweg says instead of dropping support for PHP 4, the developers
should consider why PHP 5 failed to catch on what changes that will be a
part of PHP 6 are really necessary. Andi Gutmans, co-founder and co-chief
technology officer of Zend, a startup that commercializes PHP, says PHP 4
is not as popular as some make it out to be. He says 80 percent of Zend's
customers have already switched to PHP 5, and believes the PHP community
was "conservative" in setting their termination of support date. Original
PHP author Rasmus Lerdorf says ending PHP 4 support is necessary. "We are
an open-source project with limited resources," Lerdorf says. "With PHP 6
on the way, we don't have the resources to support three different versions
of PHP at the same time."
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The New Theories of Evolution
Telegraph.co.uk (07/17/07) Jones, Steve
The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference focused on computer
scientists' application of Charles Darwin's evolutionary principles to
tackle challenges inside as well as outside the discipline of biology,
writes University College London genetics professor Steve Jones. "The
theoreticians use evolutionary robotics, genetic algorithms and their
relatives to mimic the notion of descent with modification," he notes.
"The equivalents of mutation, sex and natural selection crack challenges
too complex for the fine scalpel of pure mathematics." Scientists have
modeled ants and their route-finding behavior in the computer, and this
method is being used to plan the design of phone networks that maximize
efficiency and the management of wireless messages through a receiver grid,
among other things. Another application for computerized evolutionary
science with major potential is designing life-saving drugs that block
disease bacteria's signal to cohere into a sticky film over a wound or a
vital organ. Such breakthroughs could be possible because social insects
and microbes' collective behavior follow mathematical rules, according to
Jones.
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Emotion-Recognition Software Knows What Makes You
Smile
Wired News (07/16/07) Martinelli, Nicole
Dutch researchers who trained software to recognize emotions via facial
expression were hired by Unilever to use their invention as part of a
European consumer test project to enhance taste tests and similar market
surveys. The software noted that the incidence of happy expressions was
higher the sweeter the food was. Emotion-recognition software works by
mapping the face in three dimensions, identifying a dozen trigger areas
such as the corners of the eyes and mouth. These key points' movements are
then matched to six fundamental expression areas (happiness, sadness, fear,
anger, surprise, disgust) by a face-tracking algorithm. "Technology helps
when subjects don't have good conscious access to what's going on, or where
people might want to conceal things," notes psychologist Marcia Pelchat of
the Monell Chemical Senses Center. "But it will never do the job
alone."
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Last Hurrah for the Lost Remote
The Age (07/18/07) Hutcheon, Stephen
People soon may be able to turn on their TVs, change channels, and turn up
the volume with hand gestures, if technology from researchers in Australia
continues to gain momentum. Dr. Prashan Premaratne, a lecturer at the
University of Wollongong's School of Electrical, Computer, and
Telecommunications Engineering, and a former student, Quang Nguyen, are
behind the technology, which could also be used to control video recorders,
set-top boxes, and even gaming applications. They have developed a working
prototype of the technology, and when connected to a TV and VCR it has
shown to be 100 percent accurate under normal lighting conditions and
responsive to hand gestures up to a distance of 10 meters, according to
research published in the Institution of Engineering and Technology's
Computer Vision Research Journal. The technology is designed to convert
simple hand gestures, such as a closed fist, an open palm, a thumbs up, or
the "pistol" gesture into electronic commands, and it makes use of a small
camera to capture the image of the gesture. The prototype then matches the
image to a pre-defined command, before providing a TV, VCR, or set top box
with instructions for what to do. Currently, the prototype can work with
10 gestures and two consumer electronics devices, but its capabilities can
be expanded.
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Making a Difference in the Developing World
MIT News (07/13/07) Manning, Heather
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is hosting the first
International Development Design Summit, which focuses on using technology
to create real, workable solutions for problems in developing countries.
More than 50 people from 16 countries, including many from developing
nations, are participating in the conference, which takes place from July
16 to Aug. 10. The summit follows the vision of Amy Smith, who received a
master's in engineering from in MIT in 1995, won a MacArthur "genius" grant
in 2004, and teaches a series of courses at MIT focused on international
development at MIT's D-Lab. "I believe very strongly that solutions to
problems in the developing world are best created in collaboration with the
people who will be using them," Smith says. "By bringing this group of
people together, we get an incredibly broad range of backgrounds and
experiences." Those attending the summit include a farmer from Ghana, a
doctor from Pakistan, a carpenter from Haiti, a bicycle mechanic from
Guatemala, and students from Brazil, Guatemala, India, and the Democratic
Republic of Congo. "With all these people working together to identify
problems and create solutions to them, there is an extraordinary richness
in the problem-solving teams," Smith says. The primary objective of the
summit is to adapt and implement new technologies that can solve problems
in developing countries, and that residents will be able to use in their
homes. "The output of this conference will be real devices, things that
people can use," Smith says. "Participants will be able to take prototypes
home with them and start testing them."
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New Public Surveillance Research
Scenta (07/12/07)
The effectiveness of public surveillance tools and strategies for security
and marketing purposes is the subject of two separate research projects of
students from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics &
Computer Science. In "A Comparison of Background Subtraction Techniques,"
Sarah Deene notes that background information often prevents the display of
a clear image of an object in closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage,
then combines a number of current methods to develop her own system. "It
was apparent that a simple subtraction algorithm was needed to allow the
high computational efficiency that is required by CCTV applications," says
Deene, in highlighting the complexity of background subtraction.
Meanwhile, Matthew Sharifi examined how well face recognition software and
Bluetooth recognize faces in "Audience Recognition in Public Spaces." All
of the frontal faces seen in a reception area were picked up by a camera
but only 8.33 percent by Bluetooth, in which individuals also needed to
carry the devices, and the results of the study has Sharifi considering
pursuing a larger video dataset so he can continue the research. Sharifi
says "it would be interesting to combine the two techniques into a
multi-modal identification technology which could couple the ubiquity of
face recognition with the recognition accuracy of Bluetooth."
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NRL Researchers Report Spintronics Advance
EE Times (07/17/07) Johnson, R. Colin
Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory have used ferromagnetic film
as part of a metal and tunnel barrier contact to inject spin-polarized
electrons into silicon semiconductors. NRL is the first group to report a
spintronics approach that would work with standard CMOS processing
techniques. Their approach suggests that silicon semiconductors encoding
bits based on the spin of individual electrons could be inserted into
standard CMOS processing techniques with ferromagnetic materials similar to
those already used for magnetic random access memory. Gallium arsenide and
even chromium-doped indium oxide is being used by some researchers, but
such materials can not be integrated like CMOS. "Our demonstration showed
a 30 percent polarization of the injected electrons, which is not bad
considering that polarization of electrons in magnetic metals is about 45
percent," says lead scientist Berend Jonker. "Now we want to build an
electronic detector, rather than use an LED, as the next step toward
silicon spintronics."
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Australian R&D Investment Is 'Shockingly Bad'
ZDNet Australia (07/13/07) Tung, Liam
Australia ranked 12th in the world for its investment in information
technology research and development in the Economist Intelligence Unit's
recent IT competitiveness report, "The Means to Compete: Benchmarking IT
Industry Competitiveness." "R&D in Australia is shocking," says IBRS
analyst Kevin McIsaac. "The reason for this is that Australia is in the
middle of nowhere, we've got a small economy and there are no tax
incentives," McIsaac says. He points to Ireland as an example of a country
that has provided those types of incentives and been successful in
attracting new investment. Australia did rank fourth in the world in IT
infrastructure in the EIU report and received special mention for its
"advanced IT and communications infrastructure" and "IT talent and skills
development geared to the future." The report said that most developed
countries have broadband penetration rates of 20 percent or better.
McIsaac says Australia could have ranked higher except for Telstra's
segmented pricing strategy and Australian consumers' ignorance on
high-speed alternatives.
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Fun, Not Fear, Is at the Heart of Scratch, a New
Programming Language
Chronicle of Higher Education (07/20/07) Vol. 53, No. 46, P. A27; Young,
Jeffrey R.
MIT's freely available Scratch programming language is being used by
schools and some colleges as a tool for teaching computer science basics
without resorting to an arcane vernacular that students often find
intimidating. With Scratch, users can drag in sounds or images from other
sources to create interactive games, and Mike Resnick of MIT Media Lab's
Lifelong Kindergarten research group says the language forces students to
think in a systematic manner. "What Scratch really did for us ... was to
free us up and to free the students from some of the distractions of
syntax" to concentrate on concepts and objectives, explains Harvard
University lecturer David J. Malan, who has employed the language in his
introductory computer course. MIT has launched an online playground where
children can share the programs they created with Scratch; the playground
also supports student collaboration and user commentary on each other's
work. "Making computer science or programming more accessible to a broader
audience can only help potentially recruit additional students to the
science," says Malan. Even students who are not interested in pursuing
careers in computer science can benefit from the creative mindset that
Scratch can help nurture, Resnick says.
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Behind the Decline of Women in IT
CIO Insight (06/07)No. 82, P. 24; Cone, Edward
A 2005 ITAA survey concluded that women and other minority groups had a
worse time finding IT work than white males during the IT downturn and
rebound because their initial hold on such jobs was flimsy, and
disadvantages women faced at the beginning only compounded and perpetuated
the difficulty of finding new jobs when the downturn struck. There is
little concrete proof to support this hypothesis, and a professor of the
University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School theorizes that "In boom years,
employers are much more open in terms of who they are interested in
hiring," but the accommodations they make (such as flexible work
scheduling) to increase the jobs' attractiveness to a broader category of
worker disappear when the labor market once again softens. The professor
believes a future upswing will likely support a higher percentage of female
IT workers. Issues he thinks could be contributing to the decline in the
female IT workforce include work experience quality, with "work/life
balance issues getting better in the boom and worse later." Other possible
contributing factors include women's limited access to informal networks in
tech jobs, few mentors and role models, and gender-based stereotypes,
according to a Catalyst study. Catalyst associate Kate Egan cites the
tendency for diversity programs that advance women in IT to be scaled back
or rescinded in periods of difficulty. KVH Industries CIO Kelly Heitmann
opines that the move toward outsourcing has reduced the attraction of IT
careers to women. Former head of IBM's diversity program Ted Childs warns
that the United States will lose its advantage in terms of technology
know-how unless more women and minorities are tapped for the IT
workforce.
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