Association for Computing Machinery Names 38 Fellows for
Computing and IT Innovations in Industry, Education, Entertainment
AScribe Newswire (12/03/07)
ACM has announced its 2007 ACM Fellows recipients, recognizing 38 of its
members for their contributions to computing technology that lead to
advances in how people live and work. The recipients created innovations
in a variety of computing disciplines that contribute to theory and
practice, education and entertainment, and industry and commerce.
Corporate recipients include researchers from Microsoft Research and
Microsoft China for their contributions ranging from computer graphics to
video and image content analysis and retrieval. Intel, Yahoo! and Bell
Labs Research, and Alcatel-Lucent were awarded for their respective
contributions to mathematical foundations for optimizing compilers,
algorithms and Web technology, and data semantics for Web services.
University recipients include five fellows from Stanford University for
their achievements in artificial intelligence, compilers and program
analysis, computational biology, complexity theory, and computer science
education. Carnegie Mellon University produced three Fellows who worked on
learning theory and algorithms, using programming environments in education
and entertainment, and computer-aided design of integrated circuits and
systems. Other academic recipients include researchers at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, New York University's Courant Institute of
Mathematical Sciences, the University of Southern California, the
University of Chicago, and Cornell University, among many others. "These
men and women are the inventors of technology that impacts our society in
profound and tangible ways every day," says ACM President Stuart Feldman.
For more information, and a list of the recipients, visit
http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/fellows-2007/view
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The Next Generation of Security Threats
CNet (12/05/07) Fried, Ina
Security experts warn that hackers are focusing on areas outside of
operating systems, with software applications and Web-connected mobile
devices emerging as new areas for exploitation. At the most recent Blue
Hat security conference, Microsoft security engineer Robert Hensing
reported that a decline in operating system vulnerabilities is being
accompanied by an increase in application vulnerabilities. Experts predict
that malware will adopt even more evasive methods, while IronPort Systems
executive Tom Gillis says new malware attack techniques are so complex that
they could only have been borne out of refined research and development.
IronPort suggests that contemporary malware borrows many traits from social
networking sites, such as adaptability and reliance on collaboration, while
Trojans and malicious software are likely to become "increasingly targeted
and short-lived." The emphasis on resilience and redundancy in the
Internet's fundamental design makes securing software a challenge for
Microsoft and other companies, according to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
Trends that have supported the growth of the "shadow" economy include a
significant increase in economic opportunity concurrent with a decline in
the risk of getting caught, especially since the Internet is not restricted
by geography and physical jurisdictions, which makes prosecuting hackers
very difficult. "You have evolved financial models that are insanely
low-risk with shockingly high return," notes security researcher Dan
Kaminsky. MessageLabs security analyst Paul Wood observes a trend of
segmentation in the hacking world, in which attacks are the work of
multiple parties instead of just one.
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Association for Computing Machinery to Improve
Opportunities for Quality Computer Science Education
AScribe Newswire (12/04/07)
ACM has created the Education Policy Committee (EPC), a high-level
committee of computer scientists and educators dedicated to improving
opportunities for quality education in computing and computer science.
Indiana University School of Informatics Dean Bobby Schnabel will chair the
EPC, which will strive to develop initiatives to shape national educational
policies that affect computing as a whole. Initially, the EPC will focus
on ensuring that computer science education is considered a critical
component of education policy in the United States at the federal and state
level. The ACM announcement coincided with the newest report on worldwide
student performance in key subject areas. "As today's announcement of the
results of the 2006 Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA)
study make clear, students can benefit significantly by expanded
opportunities for quality computer science education," Schnabel says. "The
industries that comprise the computing field are global, and the
implications for national investment in computer science education on a
country's competitive edge are significant. In the long run, national
education policy that leads to a first-rate computing and information
technology workforce may be the most significant factor in defining a
country's ability to compete in a knowledge economy underpinned by IT."
For more information about EPC, visit
http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/education-policy-committee/view<
/A>
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U.S. Teens Trail Peers Around World on Math-Science
Test
Washington Post (12/05/07) P. A7; Glod, Maria
The 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) found that
15-year-olds in the United States are significantly less educated in
science and math than their peers in many other industrialized countries.
The average science score for U.S. students was lower than those in 16 of
the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, and in math U.S. students trailed behind 23 countries. The
PISA test, which is given every three years, measures the ability of
15-year-olds to apply math and science to real-world situations. About
400,000 students worldwide took the test, including 5,600 in the United
States. The PISA test results support concerns that too few U.S. students
are prepared to become engineers, scientists, and physicians, and that the
United States might lose ground to its competitors. On the science
portion, U.S. students, mostly 10th graders, had an average score of 289
points out of a possible 1,000 points, 11 points below the average of the
30 countries. Canada, Japan, and Korea are among the countries that scored
better than the United States. In math, only four countries had average
scores lower than the United States, with 23 countries scoring higher, and
two countries having approximately equal scores. Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings says the PISA results are disappointing, but notes that
the National Math Advisory Panel and other initiatives are working to
improve math and science education.
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A Supercomputer for Africa
Forbes (12/04/07) Greenberg, Andy
IBM is donating one of its BlueGene/P supercomputers to the Center for
High Performance Computing in Cape Town, South Africa. The computer will
be hosted at the Meraka Institute and will be available to universities and
governments in need of supercomputing processing capabilities. The
BlueGene/P, which is capable of 14 trillion individual calculations per
second, is five times more powerful than the fastest computer currently on
the African continent. The Meraka Institute will use the supercomputer to
solve some of Africa's most difficult problems, including modeling the
local effects of climate change, finding more efficient ways of processing
local minerals such as platinum and manganese, and predicting the mutation
and spread of infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and HIV.
Meraka Institute manager of technology Johan Eksteen hopes the
supercomputer will spark innovation within the region's IT researchers.
"We've made very clear that the machine is only oiling the gears," Eksteen
says. "It's a catalyst. If we only focus on the notion of the machine
itself and nothing beyond it, it wouldn't allow the full impact to be
realized." The BlueGene/P is the second-fastest computer that IBM uses;
the BlueGene/L system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is
capable of about 34 times more calculations per second than the BlueGene/P.
"Hopefully this will spur future develop and raise the high-performance
computing expertise in the continent," says Berkeley Lab computer scientist
Horst Simon, editor of the Top500 supercomputer list. However, he notes
that "A computer like this requires additional software development and
training before scientists can actually use it."
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Computer Servers 'as Bad' for Climate as SUVs
New Scientist (12/03/07) Brahic, Catherine
Computer servers are just as damaging to the environment as SUVs or the
global aviation industry, reveals a new report from U.K.-based Global
Action Plan. "Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your
desk," says Global Action Plan director Trewin Restorick. "But, for
instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon
footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon." The report,
"An Inefficient Truth," says the global IT sector, with more than 1 billion
computers on the planet, is responsible for about 2 percent of human carbon
dioxide emissions, about the same as the global airline industry. The
study also looked at how aware companies are of their IT carbon footprint.
A survey of some of the U.K.'s largest businesses show that more than half
of IT professionals believe their environmental impact is significant,
though 88 percent do not know the carbon footprint of their activities.
The survey also found that a considerable amount of energy could be saved
with more efficient data storage, with 60 percent of departments reporting
they use less than half of their storage capacity and 37 percent saying
they store data indefinitely. Restorick says that simply increasing the
efficiency of energy use and data storage could cut 30 percent of the power
used by businesses.
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Data Mining Humming Along at DHS
Washington Technology (12/03/07) Lipowicz, Alice
The Department of Homeland Security's Amy Kudwa recently confirmed that
although the DHS terminated a controversial visual analytics data mining
program this summer, the department continues to explore visual analytics
research through a different program. The visual analytics research at the
Science and Technology Directorate is working to identify terrorists by
using data collected from video surveillance footage, cell phone calls,
photos, bank records, chat rooms, and emails. Kudwa says that no
real-world, operational data is being used in the research. "It relies on
synthetic data," Kudwa says. "It is purely research on ways to interact
with data." Kudwa says because the research does not use actual data it is
not considered data mining, though it could potentially be used to identify
and stop terrorists, according to a DHS newsletter. "Today, researchers at
the DHS Science and Technology Directorate are creating ways to see fuzzy
data as a three-dimensional picture where threat clues can jump out," the
newsletter says. "Mathematicians, logicians, and linguists make the
collective universe of data assume a meaningful shape." The newsletter
also says the program could possibly even be used to predict behavior.
Although Kudwa says the research has been ongoing since 2004, an August
2006 survey by the DHS Inspector General did not list it as one of the
department's 12 data-mining programs.
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DAC Student Design Contest Seeks Industry Support
Business Wire (12/03/07)
Today is the last day for full-time graduate and undergraduate students to
sign up for the 2008 Design Automation Conference Student Design Contest.
Sponsored by DAC and the International Solid State Circuits Conference
(ISSCC), the competition is seeking designs for analog, digital, or
programmable circuits and systems, with submissions of integrated circuits,
reconfigurable processors, systems on chips, platform-based, or embedded
systems designs. Ten winners will share more than $20,000 in prize money
and will be recognized in an award ceremony at DAC. "The Student Design
Contest encourages innovative research that integrates all aspects of
design, from system level design to tools, methodologies, and
implementation," says Limor Fix, general chair of the 45th DAC executive
committee. Byunghoo Jung, an assistant professor of electrical and
computer engineering at Purdue University who co-chairs the contest, says
"the contest presents the EDA industry with the opportunity to see what the
future leaders of the industry are doing." Jung is still seeking $2,000
contributions from electronics companies to support the contest, which
counted IBM, Intel, and Mentor Graphics among its corporate sponsors last
year. ACM's Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) is a
sponsor of DAC, which is scheduled for June 8-13, 2008, at the Anaheim
Convention Center in Anaheim, Calif. For more information about DAC 2008,
visit
http://www.dac.com/45th/index.aspx
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In the Future, Smart People Will Let Cars Take
Control
New York Times (12/04/07) P. D1; Tierney, John
World Fair predictions of personal dirigibles and autogyros have fallen
drastically short, but one prediction, the autonomous, self-driving car, is
close to reality. Already, cars are available that use radar or lasers to
detect the distance between cars to automatically adjust cruise control
speed, parallel park, or warn a driver when they are straying across lane
markings. "Within five years it's totally feasible to build an autonomous
car that will work reliably in several limited domains," says Stanford
University computer scientist Sebastian Thrun. Thrun believes that in five
years commercial cars will be available that can automatically drive on an
expressway, creep along in stop-and-go traffic, and park at a mall or
airport. While experts such as Thrun believe that self-driving cars are
inevitable, whether people accept and use them is debatable. Some people
will be hesitant to relinquish control while others will worry that the
first smart cars will have the same bugs as early computers. However,
cars, unlike humans, will keep getting smarter, learn from their mistakes,
and never get distracted by a cell phone or drive drunk. Autonomous cars
will never be perfect, but they can certainly be better than humans, who
cause more than 90 percent of accidents, which kill a million people per
year. Smart cars would also make better use of the road and alleviate
traffic problems. Thrun notes that when a highway is at full capacity the
cars actually occupy less than 10 percent of the road's surface, with the
rest being empty space between cars. Smart cars could travel closer
together, doubling or tripling the road's capacity.
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First Computer Programmers Inspire Documentary
ABC News (12/04/07) James, Susan Donaldson
The lack of acknowledgement for the six women who programmed the
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) and helped pioneer
computer programming highlights the kind of biases today's women must
contend with in the male-dominated field of computer science. The story of
these women is being related through a new documentary, which comes at a
time when the ranks of female computer scientists and programmers are
eroding, threatening the global competitiveness of the United States. "The
documentary isn't just about the history, but how these programmers
provided role models to really inspire women to believe that computer
careers were within their reach," says ENIAC Programmers historian Kathy
Kleiman, who is financing the multimedia film. The National Science
Foundation estimates that women earn more than 50 percent of all bachelor's
degrees in science, but less than 25 percent major in computer science.
One of the women who worked on ENIAC recalls that after her groundbreaking
contribution, she encountered discrimination in her later career as a
programmer and consultant for commercial computing interests. The makers
of the documentary hope the story will help counter the image women harbor
of computer scientists being nerdy and socially isolated, which can
discourage them from pursuing computing careers. Director of education for
the American Association for the Advancement of Science Shirley Malcom says
getting women interested in computer science involves focusing on not just
technology, but how they can impact socially relevant issues such as global
warming and monitoring nuclear arsenals.
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MIT Digitizes Its Courses, Throws Them Online, and Asks
'What Now?'
Network World (11/29/07) Cox, John
MIT recently announced the completion of its OpenCourseWare project, a
pioneering effort launched in 2002 to digitize classroom material for all
of MIT's 1,800 academic courses. The course material is available for free
online for anyone to use. At the completion celebration on the MIT campus
in Cambridge, Mass., university President Susan Hockfield announced a new
portal for OCW, one specifically designed for high school teachers and
students, called "Highlights for High School." The portal's home page
provides MIT's introductory science, engineering, technology, and math
courses, with lecturer's notes, reading lists, exams, and other classroom
information. The OCW resources, including video-taped labs, simulations,
assignments, and hands-on material, have been specifically tailored to
match the requirements of high school Advanced Placement studies. Since
its launch five years ago, the data on usage has been impressive. On a
50-course pilot site, an estimated 35 million users logged in, with about
15 percent being educators, 30 percent students, and the rest being what
MIT calls "self learners" with no education affiliation, says OCW's Steve
Carson. The recently formed OCW Consortium has 160 member institutions
creating and sharing their own course materials sites based on MIT's model.
One of the most surprising findings is that two of MIT's course videos,
"classical mechanics" and "differential equations," ranked in iTunes top 10
videos, at number three and number seven, respectively. "This expresses,
to me, the hunger in this world for learning, and for good learning
materials," says Hockfield.
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Robotics Lab Helps Stroke Patients With Recovery
Rice University Press Release (11/29/07) Boyd, Jade
Robotics engineers at Rice University will work with a local
rehabilitation hospital over the next two years to study the effectiveness
of a PC-based system in assisting stroke patients with their recovery.
Experts at Rice's Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces Laboratory (MAHI)
developed the prototype rehabilitation system, which uses force-feedback
technology to enable patients to "feel" their environment in virtual
reality. Patients can use the joystick to move objects on a computer
screen in a smooth and precise manner, and their hands will be guided by
the stick's ability to resist movements in the wrong direction. "The
computer can precisely measure how a patient responds to every single
exercise," says Marcia O'Malley, an assistant professor of mechanical
engineering and materials science who also serves as the director of MAHI.
"We hope to refine our system to allow patients to recover faster and to
allow therapists to more precisely monitor patients' recovery." Cost will
no longer limit the use of computer-controlled robots to small-scale
physical rehabilitation efforts in a few years, O'Malley says. Also,
patients have embraced the technology.
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Getting Women Back Into IT
CIO Insight (12/03/07) Perelman, Deborah
The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that
28 percent of mothers in the United States with children under the age of
18 do not work. Much research has been conducted on mothers who leave the
workforce to raise children, but little research has been done on women who
try to re-enter the workforce. In an industry such as IT, where there is
intense pressure to update and maintain skills, trying to re-enter the
workforce can be quite challenging and intimidating. Chicago-based
software consultancy ThoughtWorks has launched a four-week training class
for women looking to get back into IT. The re-training class will focus on
updating women's programming skills and could possibly lead to a job offer.
"Someone who has been out for 10 years is going to have rusty programming
skills, so we are going to teach them the basics of Java and other
fundamentals the first two weeks," says ThoughtWorks' Jackie Kinsey.
Through ads and word-of-mouth, 60 women have expressed interest in the
class, 12 of which will be in the first pilot class in Britain. However,
not all of the women interested in the program left to have children, with
about 30 percent of the group leaving IT for other reasons. "A couple
women said they'd had bad experiences in organizations and had left IT
disillusioned," Kinsey says. "We found that there is a definite gap in the
market in training for women who have left the job market."
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New Millennium, Same Old Media?
ICT Results (11/29/07)
The New Millennium, New Media (NM2) project is developing tools that would
allow for a new kind of storytelling with an interactive, non-linear,
multimedia, and personalized approach. NM2 calls this type of storytelling
ShapeShifted narratives, where stories can evolve to satisfy the curiosity
of millions of viewers with different interests. "Imagine someone with 10
spare minutes plugging into the news for the first time in three
weeks--they want all the relevant updates quickly," says NM2 technical
director Doug Williams. One pilot program for NM2, called Accidental
Lovers, tells the love story of two individuals but allows the viewers to
decide how the story develops. While the premise may seem simple, the
execution of Accidental Lovers required massive forethought, with writers
to develop multiple plotlines that can be switched on demand and capable of
being mixed and matched by a machine. To accomplish this, NM2 developed a
toolbox that producers can use to create ShapeShifted media products. A
Script Logging tool annotates scripts and raw film with relevant,
structured descriptions, an Authoring tool can be used by people with
little or no technical background to describe the narrative structure of
ShapeShifted programs, a Description tool tags media objects, and a Preview
tool can be used to test the effects of user input to make sure all
elements work.
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If You Like U2, You'll Love...Metallica?
Philadelphia Inquirer (11/18/07) Avril, Tom
Most music-selling Web sites recommend tunes consumers might enjoy based
on their purchasing history, but Drexel University's Youngmoo Kim and other
researchers are working on systems in which computers "listen" to the music
to make more accurate recommendations. Kim's lab has developed software
that adjusts itself to mimic the way humans hear, deconstructs a song into
20 component wave-forms, and measures the presence of each wave-form in the
music. The program's next step is to calculate how much each of the values
varies when compared to the others, which results in a distribution of 230
numbers for each song. The theory goes that consumers will like
statistically similar songs. Kim says the optimal solution may ultimately
be an analysis of the music in combination with sales patterns and other
kinds of data. "The computer has no biases built in," he notes.
Computer-aided music recommendation might become the industry norm, reasons
DJ Robert Drake.
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Response to Internet Demand Study Stuns Author
Network World Canada (11/28/07) Solomon, Howard
The response to a small Illinois IT research firm study has shocked the
author of the study. "I had no idea it would get spun this way, twisted
this way," says co-author Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes
Research. "I've read all sorts of interesting stuff that bears little
relation to the truth, but people seem to be basing it on the study." The
study concluded that a mismatch between demand and access capacity will be
reached in three to five years, which will require billions of dollars in
spending to correct, but headlines about the study painted a much more dire
situation. Johnson is baffled by the extremist interpretation and says,
"We explicitly are not saying the Internet's going to break." The report,
which concludes, "Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North
America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the
next three to five years," estimates that access providers will need to
spend between $42 billion and $55 billion to close the possible gap. "It's
important to stress that failing to make the investment will not cause the
Internet to collapse," the report says, but the shortage will make it
difficult to access the Internet and could "throttle innovation." Johnson
says the aging infrastructure in North America will make it more
susceptible to the crunch, and that other parts of the world are more
willing to invest in broadband wireless access. Some industry observers do
not believe that an Internet shortage will occur, arguing that while
consumers are demanding more from the Internet, they are also demanding
more from Internet service providers.
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Supercomputers Bulk Up on Power While Shedding Price
Pounds
Computerworld (12/03/07) Vol. 41, No. 49, P. 14; Thibodeau, Patrick
The development of multicore processors is the primary reason that
high-performance computing has seen such a drastic increase in
capabilities. In November 2003, when single-core chips were still the most
common, there was a total of about 267,000 processing units in the systems
on the biannual Top500 supercomputer list. By 2005 the number of
processing units jumped to 732,500, and the most recent list had a total of
1,648,095 cores. IDC says that more than a quarter of all server
processors being shipped by hardware vendors in 2006 were part of
supercomputers. This year the percentage is expected to rise to nearly 30
percent, IDC predicts. While the increasing number of processors continues
to make supercomputers more powerful, it is the decreasing cost of
supercomputers that has made them more accessible. At ACM's SC07
supercomputer conference, there were $20,000 systems that are equal to
systems that cost $100,000 only three years ago. Hewlett-Packard displayed
an eight-blade server system capable of running off of a standard wall
socket that runs at almost 1 teraflop, roughly equaling the ASCI Red system
that was the most powerful supercomputer in the world nine years ago. HP's
new system costs between $25,000 and $50,000, whereas the ASCI Red system
cost $55 million. By 2015, all of the Top500 supercomputers are expected
to be capable of petaflop computing, says Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
researcher Erich Strohmaier.
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Social Networking for Zebras
Science News (12/01/07) Vol. 172, No. 22, Rehmeyer, Julie J.
There is considerable variation in social structures between different
species, and theoretical tools that are being developed to help understand
this variation could also help track terrorists, recommend products to
consumers, and control disease epidemics. Princeton University ecologist
Dan Rubenstein graphed the social interactions of Grevy's zebras and
onagers, and found substantial differences between the two species through
his application of network theory. But a key problem for Rubenstein was
figuring a way to analyze changing networks, so he turned to University of
Illinois in Chicago computer scientist Tanya Berger-Wolf, who took on the
challenge of devising the necessary computational methods with the help of
a $900,000 National Science Foundation grant. The first step of the
project involved reworking the most fundamental network theory concepts so
that they can operate in a graph that shows changes over time, and
Berger-Wolf detailed her new techniques at the International Conference on
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. She says that as she and others
create new computational techniques, their research will enable biologists
to make completely novel inquiries. "This is a beautiful example of
computer science, because there are some questions biologists cannot even
ask before we do the computational analysis," Berger-Wolf notes.
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