America Already Is in a Cyber War, Analyst Says
National Journal's Technology Daily (11/27/07) Posner, Michael
The U.S. government has started to implement its plan for securing
government and private networks against cyberattacks, former CIA official
Andrew Palowitch said Tuesday during a talk at Georgetown University's
Center for Peace and Security Studies. However, Palowitch said that
specific details of the program are likely to remain secret. The Defense
and Homeland Security departments are responsible for the national
cyber-security initiative, which is tied to the establishment of a U.S. Air
Force cyber command in September and the reallocation of $115 million to
Homeland Security's cyber division in November. Palowitch said that he
agrees with the assessment of Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the country is already at war in cyberspace,
considering there have been about 13,000 direct attacks on federal agencies
and 80,000 attempts on Defense systems. Some of the attacks "reduced the
U.S. military operational capabilities," Palowitch said.
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Team Led by Argonne National Laboratory, Virginia Tech
Wins Storage Challenge Competition
Virginia Tech News (11/27/07) Trulove, Susan
At ACM's SC07, researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, Virginia
Tech, and North Carolina State University were awarded a top prize in the
storage challenge competition for their ParaMEDIC software framework. The
framework was used to search the sequences of all completed microbial
genomes against each other in an effort to discover missing genes and
accelerate future searches by generating a complete genome similarity tree.
With its semantics-based approach, the ParaMEDIC software created a
metadata representation that was four times smaller than the actual output
data. "Using ParaMEDIC, the entire genome similarity tree, corresponding
to a petabyte of data, can fit into a four-gigabyte iPod nano," says Pavan
Balaji of Argonne National Laboratory. The team used eight supercomputers
to access more than 12,000 processors for the task, which took millions of
CPU-hours of computational capability and produced a petabyte of
uncompressed output. "The ParaMEDIC framework then improved compute
utilization from 10 percent to nearly 100 percent for the compute resources
and storage bandwidth utilization from 0.04 percent to 90 percent for the
storage resources," says Virginia Tech's Wu Feng.
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Future of the Web Coming Fast and Furious
CNet (11/27/07) Ogg, Erica
Tim Berners-Lee says the Internet will look drastically different five
years from now and that it should be scientifically studied to track that
evolution and development. Along with colleagues from the Web Science
Research Initiative, Berners-Lee has been touring universities to encourage
the adoption of Web science courses, emphasizing the challenges that the
increasingly social Web presents. The growing amount of personal
information on the Web creates several issues regarding where it comes
from, who is allowed to access it, and who owns it. These questions are
even more important when examining the possibility of online medical
records and how to allow doctors to access the information while keeping it
protected and hidden from employers and identity thieves. "It's about
building systems and understanding where data is coming from," Berners-Lee
says. He says that in the future people will no longer be entering
personal information into individual social networks, but everyone will
have a single profile that compiles all of the information related to them
in one social network. "You will have something which is an application
which is consistent for looking at different aspects of people," he says.
"It [will use] your role as their friend for putting together a very
powerful, all-encompassing view of them" online.
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Your Robotic Personal Assistant
Technology Review (11/28/07) Greene, Kate
Stanford University researchers have developed software that teaches a
robot how to pick up an object it has never encountered before. Stanford
computer science professor Andrew Ng says the robotic hardware needed to
create a robot that can perform complex tasks are available, but that
insufficient software prevents robots from doing these things autonomously.
A dexterous robot with sufficient software to pick up new objects without
specific programming could be used for complex tasks such as feeding pets
or washing dishes. Instead of using preprogrammed models to help robots
pick up objects, Ng and other roboticists are building perception systems
that robots can use to detect certain features on objects that are good for
grabbing. The Stanford project used previously developed technologies,
including computer vision, machine learning, speech recognition, and
grasping hardware, to create the STAIR robot. STAIR's hardware includes a
mobile robotic arm with a microphone, speaker, sensors, and cameras to help
the robot pick up objects. The robot's software is built on
machine-learning algorithms that can be taught to execute certain tasks.
The researchers trained the software using 2,500 pictures of objects with
identified graspable areas. STAIR uses the cameras to build a 3D model of
an object and an algorithm identifies the midpoint of a graspable area,
such as a handle, by calculating the edges of an object and comparing it to
the edges of statistically similar objects in the database. Still, it
could be years before robots are capable of performing household tasks
because even STAIR is only designed to pick up an object, not perform more
complex tasks such as pouring from a pitcher or detecting if an object is
solid or soft.
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Online Library Gives Readers Access to 1.5 Million
Books
Carnegie Mellon News (11/27/07) Spice, Byron; Watzman, Anne
The Million Book Project, an international effort led by Carnegie Mellon
University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian
Institute of Science in India, and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt has
recently completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books.
"Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books
the size of a large university library," says Carnegie Mellon computer
science professor Raj Reddy. "This project brings us closer to the ideal
of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone,
anytime, in any language." While Google, Microsoft, and the Internet
Archive have all launched major book digitization projects, the Million
Book Project is the world's largest, university-based, free-access digital
library. At least half of the digital books are out of copyright, or were
digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete
text are available for free or soon will be. Many of the books,
particularly those in Chinese and English, have had their text converted by
optical character recognition methods into computer readable text, meaning
the books can be searched and eventually reformatted for access by PDAs and
other devices. "Digital libraries constitute an essential part of the
future of the developing world," says Bibliotheca Alexandrina director
Ismail Serageldin. "This requires that we approach conditions governing
copyright, digital archiving, and scientific databases with a view to
creating two-tier systems of access to information that would allow access
to such data from developing countries for a nominal fee or for free."
About half of the current collection is still under copyright, and only 10
percent or less of those books can be accessed for free until the copyright
holders give permission or copyright laws are amended.
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Scientist Reveals Research Side of Microsoft
College of New Jersey Signal (11/28/07) Prince, Cameron
Microsoft Research computer scientist Yan Xu, speaking at the College of
New Jersey, described Microsoft Research as an environment for research and
collaboration between some of the best minds both in and out of the
industry, and emphasized that interns are particularly important in the
formation of ideas. Xu specifically works in the External Research
Programs department, where the development process operates much like a
pyramid scheme similar to the food pyramid, Xu says. All projects start at
the base in workshops before receiving permission for further development.
The second stage is the project stage where ideas are fleshed out. The
final stage involves the addition of higher institutions that work to
guarantee the project's success. Xu says she is especially proud of the
Phoenix Academic Program, a software optimization and analysis framework
that can be used by professors and students to write code and build
programs. "There is a missing link between research and the teaching of
students," Xu says. Another project designed to bridge that gap is the
Computational Education for Scientists program, which is intended to make
computational thinking a natural skill for scientists and teach students
how to efficiently and successfully blend scientific research with
computational science.
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The Future of Communications
InfoWorld (11/27/07) Schwartz, Ephraim
The future of communications will include some far-out ideas such as
telepresence and hyperconnectivity, predicts Andy Lippman, co-director of
MIT's Communications Futures Program and associate director of the MIT
Media Lab from 1983 to 2001. Lippman says one day there will be real-world
mashups between people, between people and machines, and machines
communicating with machines, all in an environment in which everything will
be connected and people will feel as if they are present for things that
actually happen remotely. With hyperconnectivity, we will be able to
control things on another planet and perform surgery 3,000 miles away, he
says. His Media Lab students are working on hyperconnectivity technology
in the form of a phone system that acts as a big party line and allows
users to listen in on other people in a group. For example, firefighters
would be able to push a button to tune into a police emergency or tune out
an ambulance driver. Lippman is also a big believer in viral
communications, in which a system expands as the number of users
increase.
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Design of Patient Tracking Tools May Have Unintended
Consequences
University at Buffalo News (11/26/07) Goldbaum, Ellen
A new field study by researchers at the University at Buffalo, the
University of Rochester, and the University of Florida, Jacksonville found
that properly designing computational tools is critical for the successful
use of such tools in patient-care applications, particularly in hospital
emergency rooms. The study examined the use and efficiency of new
electronic patient-status boards in the emergency departments of two busy,
university-affiliated hospitals. Overall, the researchers found that
computational tracking systems affect how health care providers communicate
information and track activities regarding patient care, which can change
how providers work. The results provide an important example of what can
happen when new technologies are not developed by designers with a
sufficient understanding of how the technology will be used, says UB
professor Ann Bisantz. "Research in human factors, the study of the
interactions between humans and technology, has shown that in complex
workplaces where safety is critical, such mismatches between the way
practitioners work and the technologies that are supposed to support them
can have unintended consequences, including inefficiencies and workarounds,
where the technology demands that people change their work method," Bisantz
says. During observations, focus groups, and interviews with nurses,
physicians, secretaries, IT specialists, and administrators, the
researchers found that the computerized systems are unable to match the
functionality of the manual, erasable whiteboards traditionally used in
emergency departments. "If you don't understand the underlying structure
of the work that is being done in a particular setting, then you cannot
design the technology that will best support it," Bisantz says.
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Cheap Sensors Could Capture Your Every Move
New Scientist (11/26/07) Inman, Mason
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology researcher Rolf Adelsberger along
with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratories have developed a cheaper, more
versatile motion capture system that can be used outside of a lab or
studio. For example, the system can be used when someone is driving or
skiing, to make computer animation or movie effects more life-like, and
possibly even to help doctors analyze patients undergoing physical therapy.
The sensors, about 2.5 centimeters in size, attach to a person's legs and
arms and use accelerometers, gyroscopes, and ultrasonic beeps to detect
movement. Tiny microphones on the user's torso detect the beeps, which
allows a laptop computer in a backpack to calculate the distance to the
sensor. In tests, the system was able to calculate the body's joints and
movements almost exactly, but did create some "drift" when the system
mistakenly thought the body shifted its orientation as a whole. The system
does not work for sudden movements because the sensors are not accurate
enough, but Adelsberger says they are quickly improving. "I think the
biggest impact of this system is in easier data collection in everyday
situations," says New York University motion capture expert Christopher
Bregler. Details of the system were presented at ACM's recent SIGGRAPH
conference.
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Organic Transistors: Researchers Produce High Performance
Field-Effect Transistors With Thin Films of Carbon 60
Georgia Institute of Technology (11/26/07) Toon, John
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have demonstrated the ability
to fabricate high-performance field effect transistors with thin films of
Carbon 60, or fullerene, using room-temperature processing techniques. The
researchers say that the ability to produce devices using an organic
semiconductor is another step toward practical applications for large-area,
low-cost electronic circuits on flexible organic substrates. The new
transistors have higher electron-mobility values than amorphous silicon,
low threshold voltages, large on-off ratios, and high operational
stability, all of which could encourage more designers to use the circuitry
for displays, active electronic billboards, RFID tags, and other
applications that require flexible substrates. "If you open a textbook and
look at what a thin-film transistor should do, we are pretty close now,"
says Georgia Tech professor Bernard Kippelen. "Now that we have shown very
nice single transistors, we want to demonstrate functional devices that are
combinations of multiple components." The transistors can be produced at
room temperature and can work on numerous substrates, including flexible
plastic, an essential aspect for low-cost, large-area electronics. The
lower processing speeds are not expected to become a problem because
Kippelen intends for the transistors to be used in applications that do not
require high performance. "There are a lot of applications where you don't
necessarily need millions of fast transistors," Kippelen says. "There is
no point in trying to use organic materials for high-speed processing
because silicon is already very advanced and has much higher carrier
mobility."
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Hacker Threat to U.S. Rising
Sacramento Bee (CA) (11/26/07) Montgomery, Dave
In response to the hundreds of assaults against government computer
systems' firewalls on a daily basis, the U.S. military is weaving computer
technology into its standard warfare arsenal. Computer-security operations
are underway in all branches of the military, and the Air Force is
establishing a full-blown cybercommand. The military's blueprint is the
"2006 National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations," which includes
offensive and defensive strategies. The document is classified, but could
include offensive techniques such as immobilizing an enemy's
command-and-control networks. The U.S. military and the U.S. government
rely on computers to a great extent, which makes both agencies susceptible
to everything from network-crippling viruses to illegal intrusions that aim
to steal sensitive data. In the 2007 fiscal year, the Department of
Homeland Security recorded 37,000 reports of attempted breaches on private
and federal systems. Moreover, computer control systems that direct public
infrastructure elements confront "increasing risks," according to the
Government Accountability Office. Thanks to its advanced firewalls and
multilayered systems, the United States has prevented attacks that could
cause extensive disruption to federal and private institutions. However,
many countries have advanced computer operations, and foreign hackers
affiliated with hostile governments are often believed to be behind attacks
on U.S. systems, according to experts.
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Wearing Technology on Your Sleeve
ICT Results (11/21/07)
Researchers are working on mobile computing technology that builds
computers directly into clothes. The wearIT(at)work project, for example,
is exploring a range of applications where wearable technology could
improve productivity and even save lives. WearIT(at)work technical manager
Michael Lawo says traditional computer hardware such as screens, keyboards,
and computing units may soon be replaced by wearable interfaces. "You can
have speech control in one instance, gesture control in another, though the
application should always be the same," Lawo says. WearIT(at)work is
developing the Open Wearable Computing Framework, a system that features a
central, easily wearable and hardware-independent computing unit that
provides access to an ICT environment and also contains wireless
communication, positions systems, speech recognition, interface devices,
and low-level software platforms and toolboxes to allow all of these
features to work together. "Wearable computing is a completely new working
paradigm," Lawo says. "Instead of working at the computer, you are
directly supported by the technology, a bit like when you are driving a car
and you get information from the navigation system supporting you in your
primary tasks." The wearable system is currently being tested in four
different fields, including aircraft maintenance, emergency response, car
production, and health care. Pilot programs have also recently been
launched in bush-fire prevention, e-inclusion, and cultural heritage.
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Colleges Collaborate on Software to Help Capture and
Archive Recordings of Lectures
Chronicle of Higher Education (11/20/07) Young, Jeffrey R.
The University of California, Berkeley is leading a project called
OpenCast that aims to develop free, open source software that would make it
easier for professors to podcast their lectures. Officials from more than
30 colleges and other institutions have joined an email list to discuss
possible paths for the project. OpenCast aims to streamline the process of
recording lectures and allow course audio and PowerPoint slides to be
recorded and unloaded automatically. "I want them to focus on teaching and
not the technical details," says Cole W. Camplese, director of Education
Technology Services at Pennsylvania State University, who has participated
in initial OpenCast discussions. OpenCast will be designed to work with
iTunes U, a free service from Apple that many colleges already use to post
course material, and Sakai, an open source course-management system, and
potentially several other services. There are already several companies
that sell products with features similar to OpenCast's objectives, but UC
Berkeley Learning Systems Group product manager Adam Hochman believes it
will be cheaper in the long run to build a system rather than to pay for
enough copies of existing software to cover the number of lecturers the
school plans to eventually record.
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Hitachi's Robot Closer to Becoming Real-Life
Assistant
Associated Press (11/23/07) Kageyama, Yuri
Hitachi recently demonstrated the EMIEW 2, a small robot designed to be an
office assistant. EMIEW 2 is capable of maneuvering on two wheeled legs or
on four legs for better mobility, can recognize speech, and is small and
light enough to be carried around by a person. The original EMIEW
contained all the computer functions internally but was considered too
heavy to safely coexist with humans in an office situation. EMIEW 2
wirelessly communicates with a computing unit to make the robot lighter,
which caused some problems during a recent demonstration. A surge of
wireless communications during the demonstration caused EMIEW 2 to lose
contact with its computing unit and smash into a desk. Later, the robot
was able to successfully complete the task it was attempting, but there was
also another moment when the robot stood motionless for several moments.
Developers of the robot acknowledge that kinks need to be worked out,
particularly so it can receive wireless communications without
interruption. "We are studying what hurdles need to be overcome to make
robots practical," says Hitachi researcher Takashi Teramoto. Several
Japanese companies have developed similar robots, including human-like
robots developed by Honda and Toyota that are used to give tours at the
automakers' facilities and the Aibo robotic dog developed by Sony.
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Digital Project to Boost Irish Studies With 'Virtual
Ireland' Website
UC Berkeley News (11/15/07) Maclay, Kathleen
The University of California, Berkeley and the Queen's University of
Belfast have teamed up to better connect Irish studies materials and to
make them easily available around the clock from anywhere via a digital
collaboration project primarily supported by an approximately $350,000
joint National Endowment for the Humanities/Institute of Museum and Library
Services grant. UC Berkeley will be tasked with developing open source
search and retrieval tools and interfaces for investigating contexts and
relationships through names, places, and other words in maps, atlases,
bibliographies, dictionaries, primary texts, and secondary works. "In the
past, one could use reference works in the library's reference collection
to find explanations," says UC Berkeley Information School professor
Michael Buckland. "We intend to show how that valuable service can be made
available online." The effectiveness of the new tools and the cultural,
historical, and linguistic complexities of content will be rated by faculty
and students in UC Berkeley's Celtic Studies Program, while advanced search
tools for exploring content according to eras, geographic regions, and
across various genres and fields will be developed with the assistance of
faculty and students at the Information School. The British government and
JSTOR have financed Queen's University of Belfast's effort to scan,
digitize, and preserve an archive of 100 leading journals designed to
"create a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary digital library of e-resources
relating to Ireland," according to Center for Digitization and Analysis
director Paul Ell. He and others admit their concern that the use of
digital resources by humanities scholars lags significantly behind usage by
scholars in other disciplines.
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Is Computer Language Popularity Important?
CIO (11/25/07) Schindler, Esther
Esther Schindler asks the question of whether the popularity of a computer
language is a key factor in a company's choice of a language to support,
and whether such a variable should matter. "A corporate standard language
(or at least a set of languages) ensures that the entire staff can read any
in-house code, if not adequately maintain it," she notes. "Predictability
is a good thing, even if it's boring." Considerations that can determine
programming language choice include the preferred development environment's
built-in support for one language suite, or affordable hiring of developers
through the option of a popular language, writes Schindler. C, Java, and
Python are currently the most popular languages, according to general Web
searches. However, the Web site posting the results of these searches
acknowledges that "popular languages are used more in industry, and
consequently, people post job listings that seek individuals with
experience in those languages. This is probably something of a lagging
indicator, because a language is likely to gain popularity prior to
companies utilizing it and consequently seeking more people with experience
in it." Schindler argues that popularity is not the only criterion that
should be considered when selecting a language, and concludes that there is
still an unanswered question as to what must happen before support of a
popular language becomes a corporate requirement.
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Making Machines that Make Others of Their Kind
Science (11/16/07) Vol. 318, No. 5853, P. 1084; Cho, Adrian
Several researchers are attempting to realize self-replicating robots, and
are hopeful that their research will at least yield new insights on the
challenges inherent in such a goal. There is currently no practical use
for self-replicating robots, so funding for projects has been light;
however, setting up bases on other worlds is one theoretical application
for such machines. The basic rules of synthetic self-replication were laid
down by mathematician John von Neumann, who figured that a collection of
cell-like automata would each need to possess a set of instructions for
building a device, a unit that reads the instructions, and a unit that
copies the instructions. However, von Neumann's theory avoids the complex
practical difficulties of facilitating such tasks, which modern-day
researchers have been struggling to master. Johns Hopkins University
engineer Gregory Chirikjian has developed robots that can assemble machines
by following a colored stripe to locate components, and he says he is
working to eliminate the track and make the machines more self-sufficient.
Some researchers are designing robots that, rather than foraging for
components, collide randomly to get parts in an effort to emulate
biomolecular commixture in cells. University of Washington, Seattle
engineer Eric Klavins says this stochastic strategy should be an easier,
more efficient approach than step-by-step assembly, particularly in
instances where billions of components are involved. Some believe
researchers will unavoidably be pushed toward biomolecular systems as a
matter of practicality, while others say a rethinking of self-replication
is in order.
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