House to Consider E-Voting Reform Bill
Computerworld (09/05/07) Gross, Grant
The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, introduced by Rep.
Rush Holt (D-N.J.) could be taken up by the House this week. Holt's bill
would require a voter-verified paper ballot for the November 2008 election
as a way to audit voting results. There would be random audits of e-voting
machines in 3 percent of precincts, and e-voting machines would not be able
to have wireless or Internet connections. Although the bill has 216
cosponsors, its passage is not assured because some groups oppose the move
away from existing e-voting machines. Even if it passes the House, there
is no guarantee a similar bill in the Senate will pass, says the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's Matt Zimmerman. "Like it or not, with election
officials arguing that they're running out of time to implement wholesale
changes, this likely amounts to Congress' only attempt to make any serious
improvements to the nation's election procedures ahead of the 2008
presidential election," Zimmerman writes in his blog.
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Coming to Grips With Intelligent Machines
CNet (09/07/07) Olsen, Stefanie
The Singularity Summit taking place this weekend in San Francisco will
bring together accomplished technologists and investors to discuss the
benefits and risks involved with advancing artificial intelligence,
technical issues involved in accelerating technology in a variety of
fields, and what to do if machine intelligence ever surpasses human
intelligence. Foresight Nanotech Institute vice president Christine
Peterson says singularity refers to "a period of accelerating technology
change that our species has never faced before. So the question is how do
we address the issue of change so rapid that it becomes difficult to
project how it will affect us?" Futurists, scientists, and science fiction
writers continue to predict futures where humans and robots become more
similar thanks to bioengineering and brain-computer interfaces. "The
summit is about how we may be developing technology that could expand
beyond intelligence as we know it," says Tyler Emerson, executive director
of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and summit chair.
"And that could be shaped in either a favorable way or it could swing the
other way. It will depend on the choices we make." Other speakers at the
conference include Stanford University's Paul Saffo, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology professor Rodney Brooks, and Yale University's
Wendell Wallach. Singularity Institute director Ray Kurzweil will provide
a 30-minute talk via videoconference.
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DHS Ends Criticized Data-Mining Program
Associated Press (09/05/07) Sniffen, Michael J.
The Department of Homeland Security announced that it will cancel the
Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement
(ADVISE) data-mining tool in response to reports that tests were conducted
using information on real people without establishing the proper privacy
safeguards. The DHS has spent $42 million since 2003 on the ADVISE
project, which was intended for use by DHS organizations, including
immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense, and the
department's intelligence office to help make connections between
suspicious people using small bits of information that might have otherwise
gone unnoticed. In 2004, a DHS research official said every hour ADVISE
would be able to process 1 billion pieces of structured information, such
as databases of cargo shippers, and 1 million pieces of unstructured text,
such as government intelligence reports. In March, pilot tests of the
program were suspended after the Government Accountability Office reported
that the ADVISE tool could mistakenly identify or associate an individual
with activities such as fraud, crime, or terrorism. Since then, the
Homeland Security inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered
that tests were using data on real people instead of made-up data for one
or two years without meeting privacy requirements. The inspector general
also said ADVISE was poorly planned, too time-consuming for analysts to
use, and was not adequately justified. DHS spokesman Russ Knocke recently
announced that the ADVISE project was being cancelled and that it is not
expected to be restarted. The DHS Science and Technology directorate
determined that commercial products are currently available that offer
similar functionality at a significantly lower cost.
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Programming Grads Meet a Skills Gap in the Real
World
eWeek (09/03/07) Taft, Darryl K.
Although colleges and universities have stepped up their efforts to
produce graduates ready to work, there is still a significant skills gap
between what computer science graduates learn as an undergrad and what
skills they need to excel in a work environment. Teachers and
professionals say not enough is being done to ensure the educational system
keeps up with the constantly changing needs of IT. Frequently, entering
the work force is just as educational as attending college, particularly
for programmers. Terracotta CTO Ari Zilka says he thoroughly understands
the skills gap because he worked in the high-tech industry while attending
the University of California, Berkeley. "I found that UC Berkeley had an
excellent curriculum but not only was my schooling lagging behind work, it
became very hard to even go to school because work had me learning the
concepts and their applicability and nuances that teachers didn't even seem
to know," says Zilka. Some of the skills that schools could spend more
time teaching include design patterns, coding style and practices,
scalability and performance tuning, and the entire software development
lifecycle in general, according to Zilka. Additionally, subjects such as
quality assurance, unit testing, and stage and release are usually not
taught. Texas A&M computer science professor and creator of the C++
language Bjarne Stroustrup says the skills gap is difficult to characterize
because there are so many different types of jobs, and that it is important
to remember that universities should educate for a lifetime of future
learning, not train student for specific tasks. However, Stroustrup
acknowledges that many students have no clue about software development and
are completely unable to program, which puts them at a disadvantage even if
their job does not directly involve programming.
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Animation for the Masses
Technology Review (09/06/07) Greene, Kate
Adobe Systems is developing ray tracing software that would allow home
computer users to create high-quality graphics and animations on ordinary
PCs. Adobe's ray tracing rendering technique considers the behavior of
light as it bounces off objects and passes through different substances
such as glass and water. Ray tracing tends to take a significant amount of
time to render and consequently is generally only used for precomputed
effects in movies and video games, according to Adobe senior principal
scientist Gavin Miller. Miller explains that because multicore computing
is becoming more prevalent, more consumers now have machines capable of
computing ray-tracing algorithms. The main challenge is to find ways of
dividing the graphics processes within general microprocessors. Another
type of rendering process, known as rasterization, is faster but does not
allow for much realism. Instead of calculating the light off of every
object in the scene, rasterization only calculates the effect of light on
objects that are seen. In ray tracing, the brightness of any given point
on a surface could be effected by multiple bounces of light, data that is
calculated and stored in a database. Miller says that he and his team are
exploring different approaches to make querying the database more
efficient. "Adobe's research goal is to discover the algorithms that
enhance ray-tracing performance and make it accessible to consumers in near
real-time form," Miller says. The system is currently just a research
project, but Miller predicts that consumers may see real-time ray tracing
products within five years.
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U. Illinois to Build Computer Faster Than IU's Big
Red
Indiana Daily Student (09/06/07) Haemker, Heather
The University of Illinois is planning on building what will be one of the
world's fastest supercomputers at the university's National Center for
Supercomputing Applications with the help of $208 million in funding from
the National Science Foundation. The computer, known as Blue Waters, will
be capable of performing one quadrillion calculations per second, according
to NCSA's Trish Barker. "The goal in building a bigger supercomputer is to
give scientists more power that they can apply to their research," Barker
says. Researchers across the country will be able to use Blue Waters for
research in a variety of fields, including chemistry, biology, cosmology,
and high-energy physics. Despite the fact that current supercomputers are
capable of trillions of calculations per second, scientists need even more
powerful computers to examine more variables and to view phenomena at a
finer resolution. "The goal is to develop this system over the next
several years," says Barker. "We plan for it to be operational and
available for research in 2011."
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Congress Pushes Back on H1-B Visas
eWeek (09/05/07) Mark, Roy
The death of the immigration reform bill in May was possibly the tech
industry's last chance in a while to increase limits on the H1-B visa,
which were filled in only one day for 2008, as current pieces of
legislation in Congress would put even more restrictions on H1-B visas
without raising the cap. "What many of us have come to understand is that
these H-1B visas are not being used to supplement the American work force
where we have shortages but, rather, H1-B visas are being used to replace
American workers with lower-cost foreign workers," says Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-V.T.), who introduced a bill that would raise H1-B fees by $1,500 per
application to fund a scholarship for Americans seeking degrees in math,
technology, and health-related fields. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said that if the issue of the H-1B cap is brought
up again, they are unlikely to support an increase without serious program
reform. Grassley and Durbin introduced a bill that strengthens the
penalties for employers who misuse H1-B visas and would ensure priority is
given to American workers. Employers would be required to show that the
H1-B worker did not replace an American worker. The legislation would also
require employers to advertise job openings on a Department of Labor Web
site before submitting a H-1B application, and would require the Labor
Department to randomly audit companies that use the H-1B program as well as
annual audits of companies with more than 100 employees with 15 percent or
more of the workers on H-1B visas.
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UTEP Works to Bridge Language Gap Between U.S. Soldiers,
Iraqis
El Paso Times (TX) (09/06/07) Gilot, Louie
Researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso led by computer science
professor Nigel Ward say they have developed software that would improve
the cultural sensitivity training of U.S. troops in Iraq. They believe the
software could be incorporated into the Arabic language training video game
that University of Southern California researchers developed for the U.S.
government. U.S. soldiers use the Tactical Language Training Program to
learn basic Arabic and culturally sensitive gestures that will prepare them
for interacting with Iraqi civilians, obtaining information, and forming
alliances. The software is designed to have U.S. soldiers listen to an
Arabic speech, and say "uh-huh" into a microphone during short spots where
the pitch goes down. Users would receive a score of hits in real time.
The software delves into back-channeling research. Although Arabic
speakers back-channel as much as English speakers (they say "uh-huh" about
four times a minute), their pause for feedback is shorter, according to
studies. Former UTEP graduate student Yaffa Al Bayyari studied members of
the Iraqi community and found that they prefer to talk with someone who
appears to be a good listener, even if they have poor language skills.
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Justice Opinion Opposes Idea of Net Neutrality
Associated Press (09/07/07)
The Justice Department on Thursday issued an opinion to the Federal
Communications Commission that Internet service providers should be allowed
to charge a fee for priority Web traffic. Some of the largest phone and
cable companies have previously argued that they should be able to charge
some users more money for loading certain content or Web sites faster than
others. Web companies, however, support Net neutrality, the principle that
all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user, and argue
that without Net neutrality regulations phone and cable companies could
discriminate against certain Web sites and services. The Justice
Department says imposing Net neutrality regulations could hinder the
development of the Internet, prevent service providers from upgrading or
expanding the network, and could shift the cost of expanding and improving
the network to consumers. Less than two months ago Federal Trade
Commission Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras cautioned policy makers to
support Net neutrality. The Justice Department says supporting Net
neutrality would prevent Internet innovation and investment, and that it
will monitor and enforce any anticompetitive conduct on the Internet to
ensure a competitive broadband marketplace.
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Venture Capitalist: We Need to Prepare for Artificial
Intelligence
Mercury News (09/07/07) Ackerman, Elise
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is hosting the Singularity Summit, where he
will discuss some of his concerns and why singularity, the possibility that
artificial intelligence could surpass human intelligence, should be taken
seriously. In an interview before the summit, Thiel said that artificial
intelligence has been considered a fringe area in technology because it has
not lived up to the unrealistic hype created in the past 30 years.
However, he believes the technology has the power to change the world and
said people are unaware of how radically different the world could be in 30
to 40 years. He said there are choices that need to be made now to shape
that future. Thiel thinks that some of the disaster scenarios, such as a
computer intelligence that enslaves mankind, are over-exaggerated, but
noted that 100 years ago the idea of a bomb that could destroy an entire
city seemed unrealistic, and that some scenarios might be possible. "Could
you have a government that uses computers to control everything? That's
within the scope of what I could imagine," he said. "There is certainly
the danger that information technology is not liberating but becomes
totalitarian. If you monitor everything that everyone's doing on the
Internet, if you get to the point where things are perfectly tracked, that
obviously has potential for tremendous abuse." Thiel said there are not
enough people working on artificial intelligence and if more people took a
greater interest in the technology and the concept of singularity they
would understand that science and technology is at the very core of what
our civilization is fundamentally about.
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DHS Head: Cybersecurity Remains a Concern
IDG News Service (09/05/07) Gross, Grant
Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,
spoke before the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee and
testified that DHS will continue to give the "very big issue" of
cybersecurity high priority. Because the department's cybersecurity
endeavors are confidential, Chertoff simply made a short statement to
assure committee members that DHS is collaborating with other parts of the
government to develop an improved strategy for cybersecurity. Chertoff
also acknowledged that threats to cybersecurity have great potential to
harm the United States in the future. Though cybersecurity problems
continue to plague the federal government, the legislators primarily
focused on other issues during the meeting, urging DHS to improve in other
ways, such as by filling open positions at DHS.
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Lecture to Explore Future Uses of Synthetic Voices
University at Buffalo News (09/04/07) Donovan, Patricia
University at Buffalo associate professor of media studies Marc Bohlen is
developing ways to make electronic voices such as those found at customer
help numbers more useful and interesting. The effort, known as "Make
Language," is part of Bohlen's ongoing attempt to diversify machine culture
and find new uses for what he describes as "the infinitely patient
synthetic characters who make our plane reservations, guide us through the
options offered by telephone answering systems, offer computer support,
give us stock quotes, and take our fast food orders." Bohlen says the
synthetic language system used in these situations are often better at
reproducing human speech than people are, and they could be used to perform
tasks far more useful than their current applications. As a demonstration,
Bohlen created synthetic-voice characters who spoke English, one without an
accent, one with a German accent, and one with a Spanish accent, and
assigned them language tasks. The characters displayed a range of emotions
and intellectual comments. Bohlen says such characters may one day be used
to help people sleep or prevent exotic human dialects from being lost
forever. "Maybe they will archive endangered phonemes in elaborate
databases or invent new figures of speech particular to being machines,"
Bohlen says.
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Cyber Crime Tool Kits Go on Sale
BBC News (09/04/07)
Novice cyber criminals can now develop their own cyber attacks with the
help of automated, easy-to-use tools and kits developed by malicious
hackers. There are at least 68,000 downloadable hacking aids currently
circulating, says Secure Computing's Paul Henry. Although most are free
and targeted toward those with expertise, a growing number are for sale and
aimed at unskilled individuals. Some hacking groups offer virus-writing
services that generate individual malicious programs, while others have
created expensive kits that even come with technical support to keep the
software updated with the latest vulnerabilities. One such product, Mpack,
was used in June to subvert over 10,000 Web sites in one attack. The tools
are effective because it takes a substantial amount of time for security
professionals to patch the increasing number of vulnerabilities being
discovered. Hacking groups are drawn to selling such products because
doing so confers little risk upon them, as each tool comes with a
disclaimer stating that the user assumes responsibility for any abuse.
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CSI Could Benefit From Computer Sidekick
New Scientist (08/31/07) Simonite, Tom
A team from Birmingham University in the United Kingdom has developed a
new computerized sidekick that will enable crime scene investigators to
produce faster and more detailed reports. The prototype system makes use
of a thin computer about the size of a small book, GPS, a digital camera,
and a RFID tag reader. The CSI wears the computer and uses a headset to
provide voice commands to the system, such as to snap a picture or record a
verbal description of evidence. The GPS is used to mark location, a RFID
tag is used to label (time, location, and type) evidence, and images can
also be annotated to focus on a particular feature. In tests, the system
cut the amount of time in half that it takes to put together a standard CSI
report. "Writing is both time-consuming and interruptive," says Chris
Baber, a computer scientist at Birmingham. "We've attempted to remove the
need to explicitly report what you are doing." The team is now working on
a version that would make it easier for different teams of investigators at
the scene of a crime to share data.
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Prof Receives NSF Grant for Supercomputer
Calvin College (08/30/07) Anderson, Myrna
Calvin College computer science professor Joel Adams has received a
$205,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to build a new
supercomputer. Adams notes that although desktop computers continue to get
faster, the school's supercomputer, which was built six years ago with
funding from the NSF, stays the same, and while it is useful for teaching,
it becomes less and less useful for research. Adams says the new
supercomputer could be anywhere between 40 to 80 times faster than the old
computer, but that they will not know until they build the machine.
Students will participate in building the machine, a valuable learning
experience according to Adams, and will also learn to work with parallel
processing, a crucial approach to programming as computers continue to have
more and more processors. Adams says the school will be able to use the
new supercomputer for several years, and that any such piece of technology
needs to be built for the future.
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Internet Pipes Can't Keep Up in YouTube Age
Network World (08/30/07) Mullins, Robert
The Internet needs a significant investment to handle the strains put on
it by video uploads and downloads, billions of emails, and wireless access,
concludes a new University of California, San Diego study. In the report,
"Point of Disconnect," UCSD professor Michael Kleeman says that even with a
massive expansion of network capacity by network operators, there still may
not be enough bandwidth to match demand. The report also says compression
technology should become a more common practice, particularly for large
video files. Kleeman points out that the number of new videos uploaded
daily to YouTube more than tripled from 20,000 at the beginning of 2006 to
65,000 at the beginning of 2007, a significant strain on the network
considering one minute of video requires 10 times as much bandwidth as a
voice phone call. The report suggests "triaging" network traffic and
assigning priority to certain types of traffic. For example, a VoIP
connection would receive priority over email packets because a phone call
cannot be interrupted without delays while an email can arrive a few
seconds later with little or no difference. "Unless we ensure an adequate
supply of quality bandwidth at reasonable prices, many current and future
business models will be stranded, which will have serious implications for
economic growth and national competitiveness in the Internet sector,"
Kleeman says.
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Future Looks Bright for Supercomputers
Washington Technology (09/03/07) Vol. 22, No. 15, P. 42; Wakeman, Nick
Executive director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center and co-chairman of the
Ohio Broadband Council Stan Ahalt believes that the gap between
supercomputing and mainstream computing will continue to narrow, giving
everyday users a better idea of how to build and use advanced systems.
Ahalt says that people are becoming more aware that they can use computers
as if they were a laboratory, to run experiments, and help guide their
thinking. Additionally, desktops and laptops continue to become more like
supercomputers as multiple cores become a more common feature, bringing
parallel computing closer to the personal computer. Demand for more
advanced computing comes from the fact that everyone, in all sectors, are
actively thinking about innovation. Ahalt says one of the reasons the U.S.
economy has flourished is that the United States deployed desktop computing
very rapidly, giving the nation an advantage. Now, however, everyone has
that advantage, so if the U.S. can deploy supercomputing for such tasks as
supply chain, service delivery, and manufacture, it could put the United
States ahead of the rest of the world. Widespread use of supercomputers
will require employees to learn new skills, but the same was true when the
Internet and email first made its way into public use, and now people are
more used to the idea of changing technology and have the foundation for
more advanced computer skills. Supercomputing also needs to be made easier
to use. Ohio has set aside some money to make computer languages simpler
and is trying to establish a curriculum for advanced computing and
simulation that can be taught in high schools, two-year colleges, and
certificate programs to retrain the workforce.
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Is It Live or Is It AR?
IEEE Spectrum (08/07) Vol. 44, No. 8, Bolter, Jay David; Macintyre, Blair
Education and entertainment could be transformed with the implementation
of augmented reality (AR), the merging of digital sights and sounds with
physical reality, according to Georgia Institute of Technology professors
Jay David Bolter and Blair Macintyre. "A decade from now--if the technical
problems can be solved--we will be able to use marked objects in our
physical environment to guide us through rich, vivid, and gripping worlds
of historical information and experience," the authors contend. Bolter and
Macintyre have been holding classes in AR design to support a project to
enhance Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery with a tour to famous graves, using
actors and sound effects to portray the deceased and their historical
background; the plan is to add visual effects later on. Important AR
elements include a display system for viewing digital objects laid over the
physical worlds, and a means for determining the user's viewpoint. Rapid
3D modeling of graphics objects is improving because of the enormous demand
for such capabilities in the consumer gaming arena, while making sure the
graphics are correctly merged with images of the real world is a challenge
being explored through devices such as the virtual retina display, in which
a laser draws images on the user's retina. Tracking position and
orientation remains the most formidable technical challenge. Bolter and
Macintyre also write that AR tools must boast ease of use as a way to
encourage designers to enter the field. Concurrent with the advancement of
AR technology will be the emergence of historic tours, games, and AR social
experiences of increasing sophistication.
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