House Panel Chief Demands Details of Cybersecurity
Plan
Baltimore Sun (10/24/07) P. 1A; Gorman, Siobhan
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.)
on Tuesday called upon the Bush administration to postpone the rollout of
its cybersecurity initiative so that a congressional evaluation of the
plan's legality could be performed. The program seeks to leverage the
surveillance resources of the National Security Agency and other entities
to shield government and private communications networks from hackers and
terrorists. Thompson submitted a letter to Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff in which he demanded that a briefing on the plan's details
be sent to his committee, and that "significant questions" concerning the
program's "centralization of power" should be addressed prior to launch.
Thompson said issues of privacy and domestic surveillance would be of
particular interest to his committee, given the NSA's and similar agencies'
involvement in the plan. "What's the legal framework about which civil
rights and civil liberties, as well as constitutional issues, will be
protected?" Thompson queried. Current and former government officials
familiar with the program say the plan calls for a seven-year,
multi-billion-dollar initiative with up to 1,000 or more employees from
Homeland Security and other agencies. The plan's first phase would involve
the establishment of a system to guard government networks from
cyberattacks, while a later phase would augment the security of private
networks that control communications, nuclear power plants, electric-power
grids, and other vital systems. Thompson was upset that the administration
kept the plan under wraps and said further silence on the matter would
prompt him to consider issuing a congressional subpoena.
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CoNEXT Rising Star Award
CoNEXT 2007 (10/22/07)
The CoNEXT Award Committee has awarded the 2007 Rising Star Award to
University of California, Berkeley assistant professor of computer science
Ion Stoica. The award committee chose Stoica because of the advances in
research he made earlier in his career involving Internet architecture,
overlay networks, and practical distributed systems. Stoica was chosen
from a field of 17 nominations, which were made in response to CoNEXT's
open call. Rising Star is an annual award given to a young researcher who
has completed a Ph.D. within the last seven years and has already made
significant research contributions. CoNEXT 2007, the 3rd International
Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, is
sponsored by ACM Sigcomm and takes place Dec. 10-13 at Columbia University
in New York.
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UD Computer Security Campaigns Win Awards
University of Delaware (10/23/07) Rhodes, Jerry
The University of Delaware was awarded two major honors for its efforts to
promote computer security at the 35th annual ACM Special Interest Group on
University and College Computing Services Conference (ACM-SIGUCCS), held
Oct. 7-10 in Orlando, Fla. Its "National Cybersecurity Awareness Month"
received the Award of Excellence in the General Service Campaign category,
which includes publications that boost the visibility of computing efforts
at institutions of higher learning. The campaign included a weekly video
tip, each 65-90 seconds long, that revolved around the central theme
"Protect Your Computer." The purpose of the videos "was to raise public
awareness and to lead people to information to help them protect
themselves, their information, and their computers," says Richard Gordon, a
project participant and member of UD's IT-User Services. The videos were
accompanied by promotional articles in UD's daily paper and a calendar of
cybersecurity awareness activities posted on the school's IT-Help Center
Web site. Also getting recognition at the conference was UD's "Connecting
Your Computer to UDelNet: Your UDelNet ID and Security," which won an Award
of Excellence in the Electronic How-to Guides category. "Last year, these
episodes of connecting videos were by far the most downloaded and viewed of
the 'Consulting on Demand' series," says Larry Larraga, also of IT-User
Services. "We were pleased to have its success affirmed by our academic
community peers."
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Scientists Draw on New Technology to Improve Password
Protection
Newcastle University (10/24/07)
Newcastle University researchers are developing a new password protection
system that uses pictures instead of letters and numbers, creating what
they believe is a simpler, safer, and more memorable password system. The
technology can currently be used on devices such as iPhones, BlackBerrys,
and smart phones, but could also be adapted to help people with language
difficulties such as dyslexia. Newcastle University lecturer Jeff Yan and
PhD student Paul Dunphy say their work improves upon the emerging graphical
password technology called Draw a Secret (DAS). DAS allows users to draw
an image as a substitute for a password, which is then encoded as an
ordered sequence of cells. The researchers superimposed a background over
the DAS grid to create the Background Draw a Secret system (BDAS). BDAS
helps users remember where they started the drawing and creates graphical
passwords that have more stroke counts, making passwords that are less
predictable, longer, and more complex. During a trial of the BDAS system
users were asked to select a background and draw a password image. One
week later, the participants were asked to re-create the image and were
able to do so with 95 percent success within three attempts. "The recalled
BDAS passwords were, on average, more complicated than their DAS
counterparts by more than 10 bits," says Yan. "This means that the
memorable BDAS passwords improved security by a factor of more than 1024."
Yan will present the BDAS research during the opening lecture at the ACM
Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Washington, D.C. on
Oct. 30th.
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U.S. IT Talent Shortage Should Spur Policy Changes,
Report Advises
InformationWeek (10/19/07) Jones, K.C.
Enrollment in bachelor's programs in computer science dropped 40 percent
from 2001 to 2006, reports the Commission on Professionals in Science and
Technology (CPST), with many students avoiding the field because of
offshoring and other job stability problems. The nonprofit commission
wants policy makers to improve conditions for science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics professionals, citing a report that highlights
the United States' inability to compete with India, China, and similar
countries. The "STEM Workforce Data Project," the result of nearly three
years of data analysis on the trends in the U.S. STEM workforce, concludes
that Americans have fewer incentives to continue education in STEM fields
as more employers move toward "on-demand" employment and students foresee
shorter job tenures. However, the report says there are several policies
that could be enacted that would help the STEM workforce, including
government procurement, increasing federal research funding and
scholarships, promoting continuing education, implementing sound
immigration policies, improving labor market signals, and supporting
re-entry into STEM careers. The report also says the government is not
doing enough to encourage women and underrepresented minorities to enter
STEM fields, while older workers report underemployment and unemployment
while employers complain about a lack of STEM talent. "When employers
issue dire cautions about a lack of human supply, we intuitively expect the
field in question to become more attractive, with degree production,
employment levels, and salaries rising accordingly," says CPST executive
director Lisa Frehill. "But that hasn't happened with many STEM
occupations, so we need to start looking at where the disconnects are."
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She's Geeky Conference Takes Aim at Silicon Valley's
Male-Skewed Culture
San Jose Mercury News (CA) (10/22/07) Swift, Mike
Mary Hodder was once told by a venture capitalist that he would not fund
her startup partially because she did not have a male co-founder and he
thought she would quit because she was a woman. Hodder did not quit and
now her video search and social networking site doubles its registered
users every two-and-a-half months. The She's Geeky conference, partially
organized by Hodder, focuses on gender stereotypes similar to Hodder's
experience and the male-skewed culture of Silicon Valley. "When you fall
into a business that is so male-dominated, as a woman you think somehow
there's something that everybody else knows that you don't know," says
Hodder. The all-women, two-day conference, which attracted about 200
women, focuses on business networking, hard-edged technical brainstorming,
and polishing individual business skills such as public speaking. One
session in particular, "Owning Your Power," was particularly energetic as
it addressed the struggle between being assertive and still being liked by
co-workers. More women are receiving doctoral degrees in computer science
and math, according to research from Stanford University's Michelle R.
Clayman Institute for Gender Research, but conference organizers say
Silicon Valley's business culture is not keeping pace. "Things are
shifting from where they were five or 10 years ago," says Yahoo senior
product developer Susan Mernit. "Maybe you're not the one woman in a room
with 15 men--maybe there are two of you. But many of us are functioning in
what we consider very unbalanced environments."
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UBC, UVic Create Their Own Collaboration Software
Computerworld Canada (10/23/07) Lau, Kathleen
The University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria, with
funding from IBM and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
of Canada, are developing tools for IBM's Jazz community, which aims to
build a team collaboration platform for the integration of tasks throughout
the software development cycle. The University of British Columbia is
working on a technology called Emergent Expertise Locator that is capable
of assigning a developer to a project based on working behavior, the types
of files and technologies used in the project, and the people with which
that individual normally works. "When we need to collaborate with somebody
the tool can actually recommend who they should collaborate with," says UBC
computer science professor Gail Murphy. The University of Victoria will
continue its work on developing tools that improve coordination in software
development, specifically for globally-distributed teams. Victoria
computer science professor Daniela Damian says dispersed teams usually
"experience significant challenges in communication, coordination, and
collaboration." The first prototype developed by the University of
Victoria, called Feature Team Explorer, helps a developer connect with
others based on program features, while the second, called Related
Contributors Plug-in, matches a developer with other relevant developers.
The technology is important for knowledge dissemination as well as for
staying updated on changes others may have made to the code. Both groups
will demonstrate the early work on their projects at ACM SIGPLAN's
International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages
and Applications, which takes place Oct. 21-25 in in Montreal.
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Fran Allen Fellowship Award Founded
Dr. Dobb's Journal (10/22/07) Blake, Deirdre
IBM has announced the creation of the Fran Allen Fellowship Award, named
in honor of Fran Allen, a computer science pioneer and the first woman to
win the ACM A.M. Turing Award. Allen received the Turing Award in 2006 for
her work on computer problem solving and high-performance computing. Allen
is also the first woman to be made an IBM Fellow, IBM's highest technical
honor. Allen has made mentoring students and colleagues in science and
engineering a career-long priority. "Fran is a tremendous inspiration to
all scientists, engineers, and mathematicians around the world," says IBM
executive vice president of innovation and technology Nick Donofrio, who
announced the award at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
2007 on Oct. 18. "Her dedication to developing the next generation of
technology leaders, and in particular to serving as a role model for female
students, sets a new standard for mentors. We can all learn from her
experience and her actions." The Fran Allen Fellowship Award will be given
annually to a female Ph.D. student, who will receive mentoring from IBM and
be invited to present their research at an IBM Research site. The
recipient's school will also receive an award to encourage female
participation in computer science and engineering.
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House Democrats Pushing to Revisit H-1B Visa, Green Card
Reform This Year
InformationWeek (10/23/07) McGee, Marianne Kolbasuk
The New Democrat Coalition, a 59-member group of Democratic members of
Congress, is urging Congress to reopen debate on H-1B visa reform and says
Congress "must act to alleviate the talent crisis before we adjourn this
year." Some of the requested reforms include matching the supply of H-1B
visas and employment-based green cards with the needs of employers and
modernizing the student visa program. The New Democrat Coalition says the
House must take action this year to resolve the immediate talent crisis.
Hope for H-1B visa reform was squashed in the spring when Congress'
comprehensive immigration reform bill died, but in the past few months
pressure has been mounting for Congress to revisit tech industry-related
immigration issues. In addition to a letter sent by the New Democrat
Coalition to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other House
committee leaders, several tech lobbying groups have also been pressuring
House and Senate leaders to revisit visa and green card reforms. Despite
increased pressure, a government source says new debate on raising the H-1B
visa cap is unlikely to take place in the House anytime soon unless the
Senate revisits the issues first.
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Summit Spotlights Biomedical High Performance
Computing
HPC Wire (10/19/07) Vol. 16, No. 42, Coleman, Charles; Doninger, Cheryl
The application of high-performance computing and grid computing to
biomedicine was the theme of the first annual Biomedical High Performance
Computing Leadership Summit hosted by Harvard Medical School on Oct. 1-2.
Presentations covered such diverse subjects as unanswered questions about
the roles open source, open standards, and open architecture play in
biomedical applications; the overwhelming importance of the HPC
infrastructure's users and customers; the transition from 1U computer
resources to blades; IDC's estimate that digital data will increase 100
percent every 11 hours; the crucial part distributed and parallel file
systems play in successful HPC architecture and applications; anticipation
of growing demand for refined data management and analytics tools; and the
rapid acceleration of interest and research into the employment of
virtualization technology and "in silico" simulations. Four private-sector
presenters--Dr. John Hurley of Boeing, Bioteam's Chris Dagdigian, the SAS
Institute's Cheryl Doninger, and HP's Dr. Mark Linesch--offered varying
perspectives of their corporations' adoption and deployment of HPC and
grids for either internal use or product development, and highlighted
several common implementation objectives, such as the need for data and
information management, infrastructure sharing across multiple applications
and users, and collaboration with suppliers and partners to meet common
challenges. Doninger and Texas Tech University's Dr. Peter Westfall made a
joint presentation on a clinical trial simulation application that takes
advantage of a HPC environment to process large data sets and sophisticated
algorithms to save time while cutting trial costs by millions of dollars.
Dr. Jay Boisseau of the University of Texas Austin's Texas Advanced
Computing Center, BIRN founder Dr. Mark Ellisman, Mary Kratz of the
University of Michigan, and Dr. Rick Stevens of the University of Chicago
spotlighted themes and best practices for managing shared computing
infrastructure to generate flexible grids and clusters for the sciences.
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Tiny Chips Flash Memory Advance
BBC News (10/23/07)
Samsung has developed a new chip that could enable an MP3 player to hold
the equivalent of 80 DVDs. The 64 GB chip has circuits that are 30
billionths of a meter, or a nanometer, and is designed for use with NAND
flash, a type of memory that is capable of offering greater storage and
speeds. An MP3 player featuring a single chip could hold 18,000 songs,
while multiple chips could allow Flash to challenge hard drives used in
most laptops. "This has the biggest storage capacity of a single memory
chip ever developed in the world," says Samsung's Kwon Hyosun. Earlier
this month Toshiba announced its 30 nm technology. Both firms plan to
release 30 nm-based products in 2009.
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Search Gets Serious for CMOS Replacement
EE Times (10/22/07) Mokhoff, Nicolas
Many researchers believe that semiconductors are on their last legs and
that the time is right to find the next "big thing" that will replace them.
"We have reached the opportune moment in the semiconductor-technology
industry when we need to get to work now to stay ahead of Moore's Law in
the next 10 years," says IBM director of research John Kelly. Kelly
believes 2007 is the start of the nanotechnology era, with more than a
billion transistors per chip. However, Kelly believes a breakthrough
cannot be accomplished alone, and points out that materials-technology
breakthroughs have not been a focus of IBM research. "We need a healthy
industry atmosphere of cooperation and competition among industry,
universities, and government laboratories in order to find a new
computational element as the end of CMOS scaling approaches," says
Semiconductor Industry Association President George Scalise. One example
of cooperation and competition is a partnership between the Semiconductor
Research Corp. and the Commerce Department's National Institute of
Standards and Technology. The partnership supports research in
nanoelectronics with the objective of finding a replacement for CMOS. The
partnership expects to provide $18.5 million in grants over five years to a
variety of high-priority research projects.
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'Half-Quantum' Cryptography Promises Total
Security
New Scientist (10/21/07) Marks, Paul
Many cryptographers believed that the only way to achieve complete
security when transmitting information was to use quantum cryptography to
share the key used for encryption. However, researchers say they can
achieve the same level of security even if one party stays in the world of
classical physics. In conventional quantum cryptography, a sender, dubbed
Alice, generates a string of 0s and 1s and encodes them using a photon
polarized in either the computational "basis" in which 0 and 1 are
represented by vertical and horizontal polarizations, or in diagonal bases
in which 1 and 0 are represented by 45 degree and negative 45 degree
polarizations. When the photons arrive at their destination, the receiver,
dubbed Bob, chooses either the computational or diagonal bases to measure
each one, telling Alice which he has chosen. If the chosen basis is wrong,
Alice tells Bob to discard that bit. The bits that are guessed correctly
form the secret key. If an eavesdropper intercepts any photons, the stream
is interrupted and Bob's ability to read a number of the photons he might
have read correctly is destroyed. The increase in unreadable photons tells
Bob the communication channel has been compromised. Researchers at the
Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and the University of Montreal have
demonstrated that only Alice needs to be quantum-equipped. Alice encodes
the bits as usual, though Bob can only use the computational basis. Bob
randomly measures some of the received photons and returns the rest to
Alice untouched. The bits read in the computational basis form the key.
The system is still secure because anyone eavesdropping does not know which
photons will be returned to Alice unmeasured.
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Jens Mache Receives Grant to Advance Computer Science
Education
Lewis & Clark College (10/17/07)
Lewis & Clark College computer science professor Jens Mache and Portland
State University's Nirupama Bulusu have been awarded a National Science
Foundation grant to study how to introduce the promising field of wireless
sensor networks at the undergraduate level. Over the next two years Mache
and Bulusu will develop a lab-based, active learning environment for
undergraduate students. Up until now sensor network education has been
largely limited to graduate students and professionals. "In the future,
sensor networks will enable the Internet to be more closely connected to
the real world of physical objects," Mache says. "This grant is allowing
us to explore emerging technology with the next generation of scientists
and leaders at a much earlier stage of their professional development."
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Pushing the Limits of Chip Miniaturisation
ICT Results (10/18/07)
STMicroelectronics has coordinated two large European Union-funded
projects that would shrink computer chips beyond the limits of today's
semiconductor technology. The NanoCMOS initiative, which ended in June
2006, created the technology to develop 45 nm chips. A follow-up project,
dubbed Pullnano, is currently developing nodes 32nm and even 22nm in size.
Such sizes continue to test Moore's Law. "The work of NanoCMOS and
Pullnano has moved in that direction, although there is probably 12 or 15
more years to go before we hit a practical and economical limit on how
small the nodes can become," says STMicroelectronics R&D Cooperative
Programs director and Pullnano coordinator Gilles Thomas. Thomas believes
the industry will reach the point where it is no longer feasible to make
smaller chips at about the 16nm or 11nm mark. "At that point it would not
be economical or practical to go smaller, even though, in theory, it would
be possible," Thomas says. The 45nm-node semiconductors developed during
the NanoCMOS project are expected to be available in consumer products by
2009.
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Spreading the Agile Practice
SD Times (10/15/07)No. 184, P. 41; Rubinstein, David
By applying agile development to internal projects, organizations are
benefiting from shorter time-to-market, higher team productivity, and
better quality software, and now they want to reap those same rewards
through the application of agile development to distributed teams.
Successfully doing so means abiding by three principles--sharing plans,
accessing code from one repository, and effective communication--and
matching this strategy with highly competent team members who work in a
trust-cultivating environment that also offers a framework for feedback and
keeps business and development initiatives visible. Several experts
suggested at the Agile 2007 conference that the teams or at least team
representatives should be convened prior to a project's commencement in
order that they acclimate themselves to each other. A key starting point
for distributed-team agile development is the establishment of a
collaborative work environment and the infusion of people with project
management skills, while experts emphasized clear communication; one
recommended the elimination of email as a communications medium in agile
development, calling it "a disaster." He also said there should be a
mentor assigned to every project. Organizations must dictate the frequency
of the builds, and some experts call for a single, centralized repository
that offers high visibility. Integration is a sticking point, and resource
management is considered to be the solution. An accurate record of the
builds must be provided, and Stelligent President Andrew Glover said
measurement and accountability is supplied via continuous integration. For
projects that feature many development teams, several of which might be
more geographically scattered than others, Symphony Services executive
Roger Nessier suggested assigning the remote teams to focus on different
aspects of the project.
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Rochester Institute of Technology Researchers Work on
Sensor Network
RFID Journal (10/07) Swedberg, Claire
The Rochester Institute of Technology has embarked on a multiyear project
to create a secure RFID-enabled sensor network that would allow medical
care providers to remotely monitor the cardiac health and medicine
consumption of their patients while reducing costs, according to project
team leader and RIT computer engineering professor Fei Hu. He says current
data-securing technology is too power-consumptive for the heart-monitoring
system he has conceived, and that the RIT researchers' challenge is to
build a platform where network protocols can automatically encrypt data
without making the system so complex that its power requirements are
excessive. "We aim to create a low-overhead, low-complexity, low-power
security scheme for RFID reader-tag communications," says Hu. The system
would enable patients to wear an RFID tag linked to a sensor affixed to
several bodily areas to monitor vital signs. The battery-driven tags would
send data to receivers implemented throughout the hospital or nursing home.
The receivers would then send the data directly to a server, or to another
gateway before being routed to the server. The project will involve
collaboration with University of Alabama professor Yang Xiao; his team will
design the algorithms for securing the data, while Hu says RIT's
contribution will consist of developing the RFID tags and interrogators,
and integrating the readers with back-end databases. The RIT research
group is employing small, inexpensive sensors to interface with
battery-powered tags. The RFID tags would only send a unique ID that could
then be linked to a patient's information in a database, but Hu points to
the need for an additional layer of security so that the ID number is safe
from unauthorized parties.
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Cracking Go
IEEE Spectrum (10/07) Vol. 44, No. 10, P. 50; Hsu, Feng-Hsiung
Microsoft Research Asia's Feng-Hsiung Hsu believes a world-champion-level
computer that plays Go could be realized within a decade, using the same
intensive analysis technique of brute-force computation that the Deep Blue
computer used to play chess. He is putting together a graduate student
project to design such a program's hardware and software, and he writes
that the success of the project "would further vindicate brute force as a
general approach to computing problems." The substitution of search for
judgment is the quintessential element of the brute-force method, and its
primary advantages over selective search are twofold. The program is less
difficult to write, less buggy, and has fewer blind spots, while the other
plus is that the program's playing improves as processing power increases,
once the transition to brute force has been accomplished. Go's tree of
analysis is far larger than for chess because Go offers more potential
moves at every turn, while the assessment of end positions is even more
complicated. Hsu says 45-nm process technology could facilitate the
manufacture of a machine that searches 100 times as fast as Deep Blue and
that can be fitted onto a single chip, and another 100-fold boost in
computing power could be enabled if 480 duplicates of that chip were
fabricated and integrated in a parallel architecture. In addition, another
100-fold increase should become available in 10 years in keeping with
Moore's law, leading Hsu to conclude that a machine that is 1 million times
as fast as Deep Blue--and capable of playing Go as well as Deep Blue played
chess--could be constructed.
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