Gary Smith to Receive ACM Award
EE Times (09/12/07) Moretti, Gabe
ACM's Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) will honor
Gary Smith for his contributions to the electronic design automation (EDA)
community during the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computing
Aided-Design (ICCAD) in San Jose, Calif., in November. During the opening
session on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007, SIGDA will present Smith with a 2007
ACM/SIGDA Distinguished Service Award. For the past two decades, Smith was
the chief EDA analyst for Gartner Dataquest, and he led a team of analysts
that was responsible for the Gartner Dataquest Annual Report at ACM's
Design Automation Conference. The team reported on electronic system level
(ESL), EDA, and embedded systems, and identified trends in the industries.
The founder of Gary Smith EDA (GSEDA), Smith is a member of the Design TWG
for the International Semiconductor Road Map (ITRS), editorial chair of the
IEEE Design Automation Technical Committee (DATC), and serves on the DAC
Strategic Committee.
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Presidential Advisors Report on NITRD Program
HPC Wire (09/10/07)
The federal government and the private sector should look broadly at the
issue of increasing the number of skilled IT workers, according to a new
report by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
(PCAST). In "Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a
Competitive World," PCAST says the United States should consider strategies
such as updating the curricula, offering more fellowships, and simplifying
the visa process to maintain its lead in competitiveness in networking and
IT. The report also takes a look at the Networking and Information
Technology R&D (NITRD) program, and says its focus should be more on larger
and multidisciplinary, higher-risk projects, and a priority should be given
to R&D involving IT systems that are connected and embedded in the physical
world, software, digital data, and advanced Internet capabilities.
Assessment and planning for NITRD, which receives more than $3 billion in
funding from the federal government, can be improved by overhauling the
program's interagency process, the report adds. "The Council concludes
that while the U.S. is still in a leadership position, other nations are
challenging that lead in a number of areas," says Dr. Dan Reed, a PCAST
member who is the director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI).
"The NITRD Program must focus on visionary research and work with
universities to keep the United States at the cutting edge."
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UM Software Tools May Key Successful Antiterrorism,
Military and Diplomatic Actions
University of Maryland (09/13/07) Tune, Lee
The University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
(UMIACS) has developed computer analysis software to provide rapid
information on terrorists and the cultural and political climate on the
ground in areas of critical interest. The new computer models and
databases could help policymakers and military leaders predict the behavior
of political, economic, and social groups. UMIACS director and professor
of computer science V.S. Subrahmanian says U.S. commanders probably knew
where Osama bin Laden was, but were unable to capture him because troops on
the group did not have enough cultural knowledge to successfully negotiate
with the locals. Subrahmanian says such failures can be avoided if
decision makers have access to pertinent data and accurate models of
behavior. The software tools developed by Subrahmanian and his colleagues
track information on foreign groups in a variety of sources, including news
sources, blogs, and online video libraries. The software can almost
instantly search the entire Internet for information and links on a
terrorist suspect or other particular person, group, or other topic of
interest. Additionally, with help from social scientists at the University
of Maryland, UMIACS computer scientists developed methods to obtain rules
governing the behaviors of different groups in foreign areas, including
about 14,000 rules on Hezbollah alone.
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Software Turns Photos From Bad to Good
MSNBC (09/12/07) Nelson, Bryn
A photo-fixing program developed by Carnegie Mellon University was
presented at ACM's International Conference on Computer Graphics and
Interactive Techniques in early September. The program uses an algorithm
to search through digital photos for images that match the subject photo.
The program then tries to match general properties such as shapes,
textures, and orientations to pick out photos that match, such as two
photos with a curved bay or a river running through a city. Next, the
program looks for sections in the photos that would match well with the
target photo, including the ability to create boundaries that would be
least noticeable to people. The program then blends the photos together,
making it possible to remove obstructions or unwanted people from photos.
Graduate student James Hays and assistant professor of robotics and
computer science Alexei Efros point out that the program is not intended to
accurately restore lost information that once was in the picture, but to
fill in missing pixels with images that could have been there in an ideal
situation. Efros says getting a computer to create a composite scene that
is seamless and contextually valid is a major challenge in artificial
intelligence research. Humans are quite good at picking up visual clues
for such problem solving, Efros says, but artificial intelligence is
"nowhere near" a solution that would allow a computer to interpret complex
scenes such as an alleyway, beach, or airport check-in counter. Hays and
Efros say the program occasionally created geographically accurate results,
but that the final appearance of the photo needs input from the user to
look right.
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LIKES Project Awarded Grant From National Science
Foundation
Collegiate Times (09/14/07) Woods, Andrea
Virginia Tech's Living in the KnowlEdge Society Community Building Project
(LIKES) was awarded a $289,999 grant from the National Science Foundation's
Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education program. LIKES
is intended to globally educate students and teachers on the importance of
including computer education in various disciplines as well as teach
teachers about various computer-related concepts that can be used in the
classroom. Virginia Tech professor of computer science and LIKES founder
Edward A. Fox says the goal is to build a global community. Villanova
University, North Carolina A&T, and Santa Clara University are also
involved in LIKES and have been awarded an additional $208,958 grant.
Virginia Tech's grant will be used to fund a series of four workshops at
the other participating universities. Fox says the workshops will help
discover goals and the best ways to teach the fundamentals of computer
science. Virginia Tech assistant professor of professional writing Carlos
Evia says LIKES will also work on incorporating LIKES ideas and concepts
into the core curriculum to give students not in computing majors or minors
exposure on how computers can help in different disciplines.
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IBM and Association for Computing Machinery Announce
Global 'Battle of the Brains' Software Competition
Market Wire (09/12/07)
Regional competitions for the 32nd annual ACM International Collegiate
Programming Contest (ICPC) are scheduled to begin this month and continue
through December. The "Battle of the Brains" pits three-person teams from
colleges and universities around the world against each other to solve
real-world computer programming problems. The information technology
students will use the latest versions of open source technologies, and will
have five hours to solve the problems. The competition, sponsored by IBM,
is expected to draw tens of thousands of participants from 82 countries on
six continents. "This competition demands that competitors master their
intellect, creativity, and skills," says Dr. Bill Poucher, ICPC executive
director and a professor at Baylor University. "With the support of IBM,
ACM, and the UPE Honor Society, we're challenging students to unleash their
natural talents to become master thinkers who can innovate solutions to
make a difference in people's lives, solving the problems people face today
and will face tomorrow." Ninety teams will advance to the World Finals,
which are scheduled for April 6-10, 2008, in Banff Springs, Alberta,
Canada.
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Patenting The Co-ed Code
Forbes (09/13/07) Miller, Claire Cain
The findings of a National Center for Women and Information Technology
(NCWIT) survey on the value of patents suggests that having both men and
women on a development team is more likely to create a truly useful
invention. The survey examined the prestige and importance of patents
awarded for information technology inventions over the past 25 years,
measured by the number of subsequent patents that cite a patent, and found
that inventions developed by mixed-gender teams received 42 percent more
citations than single-gender patents. "Our data show that diversity of
thought matters to innovation," says NCWIT chief executive Lucinda Sanders.
"We can say involving women is important because women are half the
population and have good ideas, but our study shows the impact for
companies." The number of women named in patents for information
technology has increased since the 1980s, but is still only a small
portion. In 1980, women accounted for 1.7 percent of information
technology patents, which increased to 6.1 percent by 2005. Women
accounted for 10.9 percent of all patents in 2002, and hold more patents in
computer software than any other technology category. The survey found
that some technology companies have no patents involving women, while other
companies obtained as much as 70 percent of their patents from mixed-gender
development teams. The importance of female participation in the
development process only highlights the importance of strengthening the
dwindling numbers of women choosing to earn degrees in computer science,
which decreased by 70 percent between 2000 and 2005.
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Image-Search Tool Speaks Hundreds of Languages
University of Washington News and Information (09/12/07) Hickey, Hannah
University of Washington's Turing Center has developed PanImages, a
multilingual search tool that enables Internet users to search for images
in hundreds of languages. "Images are universal, but image search is not,"
says University of Washington professor of computer science and engineering
Oren Etzioni. "We've created a collaborative tool that solves this
problem." Search engines look for images by searching the captions and
other nearby text, which limits the search to the user's native language.
PanImages automatically translates search terms into about 300 other
languages, suggests a few terms that might also work, and returns images
from Google and Flickr. Etzioni says, for example, someone searching for
pictures of a refrigerator using the Zulu word (ifriji) would only receive
two results in a normal search engine, but the same search through
PanImages returns 472,000 hits. In a test of lesser-used languages,
PanImages was able to find an average of 57 times more results than a
Google image search. "We want to serve the vast number of people who don't
speak one of the major languages," Etzioni says. Even people who speak
major languages may benefit, as some single words have multiple meanings.
The word "spring," for example, may return images of a grassy meadow and a
metal coil. PanImages allows users to search using a more precise word in
another language. PanImages scans more than 350 machine-readable online
dictionaries, uses an algorithm to check the accuracy of the results, and
compiles the results in a matrix that allows translation to occur. Etzioni
presented PanImages at this week's Machine Translation Summit in
Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Web Users Could Slash Cost of Putting Video Online
New Scientist (09/11/07) Simonite, Tom
Microsoft researchers studying the use of peer-to-peer networks and how
they could be used to lower costs for sites such as YouTube have determined
that Internet users may have to help distribute online video clips to
counteract the growing costs of delivering such content. Microsoft
researchers Cheng Huang and Jin Li and Keith Ross from Polytechnic
University used nine months' worth of records from MSN's video site servers
to find ways of reducing the costs of meeting 60 million requests for video
clips every month. "The current model is not really sustainable," Ross
says. "Microsoft is certainly interested in the possibility of using
peer-to-peer technologies, where users distribute video amongst
themselves." Video-sharing sites pay for bandwidth by the bit, so the more
popular a site is the more they pay. To reduce costs, the researchers
suggest developing a system such as a plug-in for Web browsers that allows
users to receive videos from other users who are already watching it,
instead of downloading a video to each individual viewer. Each user would
only need to donate a small part of their upload capacity for the network
to perform as well as current systems. Switching to a peer-to-peer system
could cut costs by more than 95 percent. The researchers also suggested
sharing only between people with the same Internet service provider, which
would require video-hosting servers to do more work but could cut cost by
more than half.
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Scientists Use the "Dark Web" to Snag Extremists and
Terrorists Online
National Science Foundation (09/10/07)
University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab researchers have created
the Dark Web project with the intention of systematically collecting and
analyzing all terrorist-generated content on the Web. Some estimates place
the number of Web sites created and maintained by known international
terrorist groups at over 5,000, and many of the sites are developed in
multiple languages and can be hidden in innocent-looking Web sites. To
tackle the massive challenge of finding, cataloging, and analyzing
extremist activities online, the Dark Web project will use a variety of
techniques including Web spidering, and link, content, authorship,
sentiment, and multimedia analysis. One of the tools developed by Dark Web
is a technique known as Writeprint, which automatically collects thousands
of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is
creating 'anonymous' content online. For example, Writeprint can examine a
posting on an online bulletin board and compare it to writings found
elsewhere on the Internet, and through analysis, determine if the author
has produced other content with 95 percent accuracy. Dark Web also uses
Web spiders to search discussion threads and other content to find
terrorist activities, but the terrorist can fight back by infecting the
spiders with viruses that infect Dark Web computers. The project recently
completed a study of online stories and videos intended to teach terrorists
how to build improvised explosive devices.
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Computer Models Help Raise the Bar for Sporting
Achievement
Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (09/13/07)
Loughborough University researchers from the Sports Technology Research
Group and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
are developing computer models that could improve the sports equipment
design process by producing unprecedented, realistic simulations of how
potential equipment will actually behave when in use. "The UK is at the
forefront of sports-related engineering," says lead researcher Andy
Harland. "Our computer models can provide invaluable technical input to
the sports equipment design process. The modeling program is based on
commercially available software, to which the researchers add complex
algorithms to enhance the software's ability to simulate mathematically the
characteristics of a piece of sports equipment, different playing surfaces,
and other factors that may impact the equipment's use. The model can then
show exactly what will happen to the equipment during play. The project is
currently working on models to help with the next generation of running
shoes to reduce the risk of injury, and could possibly be used to adjust
sports equipment to better suit the needs of the user, which may result in
increased participation in sports and overall better health in the general
population.
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Rice, Nanyang Tech Collaborate on Sustainable
Nanoelectronics
Rice University Press Release (09/05/07) Boyd, Jade
Computer researchers from Rice University and Singapore's Nanyang
Technological University (NTU) have formed the Institute for Sustainable
Nanoelectronics (ISNE), a collaborative project intended to reduce design
and production costs for embedded microchips. "A major goal of the
collaboration is to help sustain Moore's Law and exploit the exponential
rate at which electronic components have been shrinking for more than four
decades," says Rice University researcher and architect of the project
Krishna Palem. "The key is tying the cost for design, energy consumption,
and production to the value that the computer information has for the
user." ISNE is funded by and based at NTU and will use an International
Network of Excellence, directed by Palem. The international network
includes experts from NTU, Rice, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
ISNE will work to design methodology that can be applied to current
complementary metal-oxide semiconductors and to emerging computing
platforms based on photonics and nanotechnology. "As information
processing systems become more ubiquitous in consumer-driven applications,
their designs must be tailored to reflect the needs of the end users, and
it is in this area that the new NTU/Rice Institute for Sustainable
Nanoelectronics will make substantial contributions," says Ralph Cavin,
chief scientist at the nonprofit Semiconductor Research Corporation.
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Artificial Intelligence Under the Spotlight at BA
Festival
Electronics and Computer Science (09/10/07) Lewis, Joyce
Artificial intelligence's contribution to computer science in the years to
come is likely to be more toward providing assistive intelligence to
computing systems than a level of self-awareness that would allow robots to
develop a fear of being turned off and become destructive, says Nigel
Shadbolt, a professor of AI at the School of Electronics and Computer
Science at the University of Southampton. Shadbolt, also president of the
British Computer Society, will discuss his views, including the increasing
power and speed of computers, the World Wide Web, and human and animal
intelligence, in a lecture at the British Association Festival of Science
in York on Sept. 11. The trend of assistive intelligence will result in an
immersive environment filled with helpful devices that have
micro-intelligence, says Shadbolt. "Rather than being conscious brains in
a box, as Hollywood would have it, they are in fact small pieces of
adaptive and flexible software that help drive our cars, diagnose disease,
and provide opponents in computer games," he says. Shadbolt, who is also
researching the next-generation Web with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee,
believes assistive intelligence will impact the Web in a similar manner.
"What is emerging now is a digital ecosystem involving lots of simple
systems which connect millions of complex ones--humans!," he says.
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'Wiki City Rome' to Draw a Map Like No Other
MIT News (08/30/07) Frost, Greg
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "Wiki City Rome" project debuted
on Sept. 8 during Rome's "Notte Bianca," or white night, an all-night
festival of events throughout the city. On that night, anyone with an
Internet connection would have been able to see a map of the city that
showed the movement of crowds, even locations, the location of well-known
Roman personalities, and the real-time position of city buses and trains.
The Wiki City Rome project was part of MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, an
initiative that studies the effects of new technology on cities. SENSEable
City Lab researcher Francesco Calabrese says someone could use the map, for
instance, to find the most crowded place in Rome to have a drink, and find
the least congested way to get there. Wiki City Rome offers the ability to
create a map drawn on the basis of dynamic elements of which the map is an
active part. The Wiki City project anonymously gathers data from cell
phones, GPS devices on buses and taxis, and other wireless mobile devices.
"By deploying developments of the Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, Wiki City
can be a significant leap forward towards a pervasive 'internet of things'
to support human action and interaction," says project director Carlo
Ratti.
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Graduate Enrollment in 2005
CRA Bulletin (09/10/07) Vegso, Jay
An 11 percent increase in the enrollment of first-time, full-time foreign
students in master's and doctoral programs helped push the number of
students pursuing graduate level computer science degrees up 6 percent in
2005, according to a NSF InfoBrief. First-time enrollment by U.S. citizens
was relatively unchanged. Computer science enrollment declined in 2004 and
2003, and is still down 13 percent since 2002. In 2005, first-time foreign
students accounted for 56 percent of first-time enrollment in computer
science programs, but the figure is down from 71 percent in 2001.
Moreover, foreigners received 56 percent of doctoral degrees and 44 percent
of master's degrees in 2004. In all science and engineering fields, an
increase in enrollment by U.S. citizens and permanent residents has negated
a decline by foreign students as total enrollment reached a new high of
339,500 in 2005.
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Computer Gaming Requirements Spurring Scientific
Advances
Chicago Tribune (09/10/07) Van, Jon
The need for faster scientific and technological advances is being met by
advances in the computer game industry. Video games often require
computers to be able to display fast-moving, three-dimensional graphics,
which requires massively parallel chips capable of dividing computations
into numerous subparts to be processed individually. Graphics chips run
about 100 times faster than regular microprocessors, and engineers are
adapting graphics processors for scientific applications, such as running
multiple experiments on a computer to find interesting results before
trying the experiment in the real world. Nvidia chief scientist David Kirk
calls this "the democratization of supercomputing," but he says
universities need to start teaching students how to write the software
needed for such powerful scientific research. Some schools are starting to
teach advanced programming and other advanced computing theories, but it
may not be enough to keep the United States from falling behind.
Scientists in other countries are catching up to the United States in
research published, patents issued, and other measurements of progress,
according to former IBM executive and former National Science Foundation
director Erich Bloch. Bloch says the globalization of scientific research
is not necessarily bad, but that Americans will have to adjust and be able
to learn from and build upon research being done in other countries.
"There's no magic bullet," Bloch says. "We could spend five times more
money on research but it's not that simple. We have to adjust to a new
world."
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Everything Must Stay!
Computerworld (09/10/07) Vol. 41, No. 37, P. 40; Anthes, Gary
Users with large storage systems will probably discover that they are on
the cusp of a new dimension in storage and storage applications. "The
emergent property we are seeing is that companies are saving everything,"
comments IDC analyst Richard Villars. "We have this explosion in rich
content, and it's not just consumers with digital phones and videos and
music. It's hospitals moving to electronic records and X-rays and MRIs,
and banks going to video surveillance, and then archiving that for years at
a time." The ability to retain everything thanks to storage being
extremely cheap is important to statistical machine learning, according to
Stanford University computer science professor Kunle Olukotun. "There's
this notion of using large amounts of data to do things that previously
were done by clever algorithms--for example, language translation," he
notes. Microsoft executive Rick Rashid says the management of society
could be enhanced by a vast volume of existing data. "We can think about
analyzing huge amounts of epidemiological data to find solutions to medical
problems, or think about traffic flow and urban planning and energy usage,"
he points out. AdMob executive Kevin Scott believes machine learning
applications will expand as people start to realize that the technique can
change their businesses' value proposition on a fundamental level, adding
that the companies with large amounts of sales transaction data can apply
machine learning toward "collaborative filtering." Unstructured data
expansion is proceeding faster than the expansion of any other kind of
data, which Scott says presents a "huge opportunity" for machine
learning-like data mining methods.
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Toward a World With Quantum Computers
Communications of the ACM (09/07) Vol. 50, No. 9, P. 55; Bacon, Dave;
Leung, Debbie
A global initiative to build large-scale quantum computers is underway,
driven by the amazing theoretical computing power of quantum information
processing devices. Quantum information science grew out of its esoteric
niche in 1994 when Peter Shor discovered a quantum algorithm capable of
effectively factoring and computing the discrete log, and got another boost
with the development of quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum
computation. Evidence indicating the existence of quantum error-correcting
codes and their effectiveness in shielding quantum data from quantum noise
distortion was found, but the construction of a quantum computer depends on
demonstrating that quantum computing itself can be executed when every
element of the computer can possibly fail because of noise.
Experimentation into ways to implement quantum computing is ongoing, and
avenues of investigation include neutral atom trapping, ion trapping,
quantum dots, and superconducting circuits. Solid-state quantum computer
implementations are currently achieving the fundamental manipulations of
one and two quantum bits (qubits) that quantum computation requires, and
there are no apparent theoretical impediments to constructing a large-scale
quantum computer. The emergence of quantum cryptography from theoretical
to practical application is a significant achievement, and unconditionally
secure key distribution up to a distance of around 100 kilometers has been
demonstrated through cutting-edge experimentation.
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