ACM Opens Branch Office in China
AScribe Newswire (01/10/08)
ACM has opened a branch office in China as part of a partnership with
Tsinghua University in Beijing to meet the growing needs of its
professional and student members there. The new office strengthens ACM's
legacy of providing valuable resources to the global computing community,
and offers added convenience to ACM members in China by granting access to
ACM's broad array of products and services. ACM CEO John R. White says
China's information technology profile in the global economy is growing.
"China's investment in science and technology is focused on creating an
innovative nation that is driven by both basic and applied research as well
as commercialization of science and technology," White says. "ACM has the
educational and career resources to help Chinese-based researchers,
practitioners, and students achieve their professional goals in this
emerging environment." ACM offers a variety of resources to help computing
and IT professionals and students, including the ACM Digital Library,
hundreds of online books and courses available to ACM members for no
charge, individualized mentoring programs, Special Interest Groups on
critical aspects and applications of computing, global networking
opportunities, and recognition awards.
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Digital Tools Help Users Save Energy, Study Finds
New York Times (01/10/08) P. C1; Lohr, Steve
Giving people the ability to closely monitor and adjust their electricity
use lowers their monthly bill and could significantly reduce the need to
build new power plants, concludes a new Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory study. The study found that if households have digital tools to
set temperature and cost preferences, peak loads on utility grids could be
reduced by up to 15 percent a year, which over a 20-year period could save
$70 billion in spending for power plants and infrastructure and prevent the
need to build the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants. For the study
researchers outfitted 112 homes with digital thermostats and computer
controllers on water heaters and clothes dryers, which were connected to
the Internet. Homeowners could then visit a Web site where they could set
their ideal temperature, how far above and below that ideal the temperature
could vary, and their level of tolerance for fluctuating electricity
prices. The live marketplace for the project used software and analytics
designed by IBM Research. Every five minutes, households and local
utilities were buying and selling electricity, with prices constantly
fluctuating by minute amounts every time demand on the grid changed. IBM
Watson Research Center senior researcher Ron Ambrosio says the transaction
that took place was essentially the house's thermostat and water heater
acting as day-traders for electricity, waiting for the right price. The
households saved an average of 10 percent on their monthly utilities. IDC
analyst Rick Nicholson says the project was a great proof of concept, but
it is unlike consumers will see such technology in their homes anytime
soon.
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Google Fellows Reveal Parallel Processing Model
InfoWorld (01/09/08) Snyder, Jason
Google Fellows Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat published a paper in the
January issue of Communications of the ACM that details the programming
model Google leverages to process more than 20 petabytes of data every day
on commodity-based clusters. The method, known as MapReduce, lets users
break computations into a map and a reduce function, which the runtime
system automatically parallelizes across large clusters while navigating
machine failures and honing the efficiency of network and disk use in the
process. The methodology abstracts parallelization, fault tolerance, data
distribution, and load balancing into a library. Over 10 thousand programs
have been implemented at Google using MapReduce, which can also parallelize
computations for multicore processing on a single machine. MapReduce has
been used for large-scale graph processing, text processing, data mining,
machine learner, statistical machine translation, and other algorithms.
Computations are submitted to a scheduler that maps tasks to available
machines. Dean and Ghemawat write that the most significant use of
MapReduce has been rewriting the indexing system used in Google search.
The paper, "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters," is
available at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1327492">portal.acm.org/citation.c
fm?id=1327492.
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SIGGRAPH Animation Fest Grows
Animation Magazine (01/09/08) Ball, Ryan
SIGGRAPH's 2008 Computer Animation Festival will look more like a
full-scale film festival and will be more accessible to the general public
than in past events. The festival will offer a number of discussion panels
with filmmakers, artists, and producers. Curated content from around the
globe is being sought for the first time, and screenings will also include
full-length animated works. The awards program is being expanded to
include an interactive audience voting mechanism, and major awards will be
announced throughout the week of the conference. "These enhancements are a
direct reflection of the importance of computer graphics in many aspects of
everyday life--from entertainment to science," says SIGGRAPH conference
entertainment director Jill Smolin. "Plus, from cell phones to laptops,
the general public has never had as much access to really great animated
content as they do today." The deadline for online entries is Jan. 31 and
Feb. 27 for materials. Submission details are available at
http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/submissions. ACM SIGGRAPH is sponsoring
the 35th annual SIGGRAPH conference and exhibition, which is scheduled for
Aug. 11-15 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
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Young IT Workers Disillusioned, Hard to Hold, Survey
Says
Network World (01/10/08) Dubie, Denise
IT managers say employees between the ages of 18 and 31 hold employers to
unrealistic expectations and make unreasonable demands for their services,
concludes an IT staffing survey by Atlantic Associates. More than 100
Massachusetts executives were surveyed on the challenges they face, and
more than 50 percent responded that teens and 20-something employees are
the "toughest generation to manage." Employees between the ages of 32 and
42 years old were considered the second most difficult to manage, with 17
percent saying they pose a management challenge. "The issue managers are
facing is with retention, not hiring," says Atlantic Associates' Jack
Harrington. "That means the work environment is not living up to the
employee's expectation." Many younger workers expect to be given an office
and a high salary at an entry-level position, for example. Harrington says
that younger workers have to change there expectations, but that the work
environment also has to change to keep high-demand, skilled, IT employees.
The survey also found that 23 percent of executives say retaining existing
staff is the top concern and 22 percent say they struggle to find new
qualified candidates. "There is a shrinking talent pool of qualified IT
professionals and some managers are talking about the graying of their
current staff," Harrington says. "They want to get young workers in here
before those older staff members retire so they can retain that
knowledge."
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As Primary Season Ramps Up, an E-Voting Snapshot
Computerworld (01/08/09) Weiss, Todd R.
There is not enough confidence in electronic touch-screen voting machines
to warrant their use by the 450,000 to 500,000 voters that are expected to
participate in the country's first presidential primary this year,
according to New Hampshire deputy secretary of state David Scanlan. Such
devices face major trust issues from voters and election officials, in view
of security problems and other woes that have plagued the machines. An
EVEREST study on Ohio's e-voting systems was so critical of the devices'
security that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner instructed all state
election officials to supply paper ballots to every voter who requests one
as an alternative to touch-screen machines. Optical-scanning machines that
read and count votes from paper ballots will collect votes from
approximately three-quarters of New Hampshire's voters, while another
quarter of the voters will use paper ballots that are counted by hand. "We
like to go with something simple and reliable that maintains the confidence
of the voters," says Scanlan. Concerns about the security, accuracy, and
reliability of touch-screen machines led to the decertification of an array
of devices from various vendors for use in California, although some were
later recertified under new rules. The new regulations dictate that just
one touch-screen machine will be allowed for use in each polling place,
specifically for disabled voters.
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Core Economics
HPC Wire (01/11/08) Vol. 17, No. 2, Feldman, Michael
A unique marketing model for manycore processors is proposed by University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers Joseph Sloan and Rakesh Kumar.
The current economic model has customers purchasing systems containing
processors that meet the average or worst-case computation needs of their
applications, and the researchers contend that the increasing number of
cores complicates the matching of performance needs and applications and
makes the cost of buying idle computing power increasingly prohibitive.
Sloan and Kumar speculate that the customer will typically require fewer
cores than are physically on the chip, but may want to use more of them in
certain instances, and they suggest that chips be developed in a manner
that allows users to pay only for the computing power they need rather than
the peak computing power that is physically present. By incorporating
small pieces of logic into the processor, the vendor can enable and disable
individual cores, and Sloan and Kumar offer four models that allow dynamic
adjustment of the chip's available processing power. In the UpgradesOnly
model, users initially buy enough cores to meet their current processing
requirements, while extra cores can be enabled at any point during the
processor lifetime, making a system upgrade unnecessary until the user
requires more processing power than is physically available on the chip.
Via the Limited Up/Downgrade model, the user can scale up and down as
dictated by computational needs, while in the CoresOnRent model the user
contacts the vendor to access a specific number of cores for a specific
lease period. The least restrictive model is the PayPerUse model, in which
the user is billed for actual core usage over a specified lease period.
The connection the memory system has with the processor's peak performance
is an issue, and Sloan and Kumar suggest that system balance should be
supported by making the memory architecture composable.
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Scientist Uses High Tech to Recover Low-Tech Data
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (01/11/08) Pitz, Marylynne
Carnegie Mellon senior computer scientist Yang Cai is using
high-resolution, three-dimensional scans to discover names, ages, dates,
epitaphs, and other valuable information on historic gravestones that have
been erased by harsh weather, acid rain, and pollution. In addition to
recovering lost information, Cai is using the digital scans to create a
virtual tour of the cemetery at Old St. Luke's Church in Scott, Pa., where
he is studying the gravestones. The potential for discovering lost
information with new technology is exciting to many historians and
genealogists. "I think that this is going to interest a lot of people,"
says Marilyn Cocchiola Holt, the program chair for the Western Pennsylvania
Genealogical Society. "The fact that we can take a completely illegible
gravestone and utilize this cutting edge technology to make it readable
again and to give that information back to people, I think, is amazing."
Cai uses digital lighting and filtering that delineates the curved and
linear features on a tombstone's surface. Computer software then strips
the image of any color, which improves the clarity and quality of the
image. "The software is good at filtering and rendering the massive data,
but human experts are good at reasoning, finding the errors, and connecting
the dots," Cai says. Cai believes the technology could be available for
amateur use in about two years, and that the software he developed has
potential uses in medicine, geography, and security checkpoints.
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Reality TV: When the Tube Talks Back
Globe and Mail (CAN) (01/11/08) Hartley, Matt
At the International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, consumer
electronics manufacturers displayed wall-sized TVs that recognize who is in
front of them, car stereo systems that are controlled by voice, and
portable devices that can tell a user what movies are playing at a theater
by pointing the device at the marquee. "We'll see things that are
different, and novel interfaces that use computer vision to basically allow
computers to see the environment like we humans can," says University of
Toronto engineering professor Parham Aarabi. While most of these
technologies are still in development and years away from the consumer
market, revolutionary products on the market now, such as the iPhone and
Nintendo Wii, show that technology is rapidly changing and consumers are
ready for new, innovative products. Some of the technology, like speech
recognition, is relatively old technology but is only now being refined to
the point where it can be useful in consumer electronics. During his
keynote address, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated software that
can recognize people or places, and predicted that it will eventually be
available on Windows Mobile devices. "We're not too far away from that
right now, there are a variety of technologies where cameras on the street
can recognize people," Aarabi says. "The technology is there now; for
better or worse that's something we might see within one or two
decades."
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Design Patterns Hold Key to Better Software, Says
Expert
Computer Weekly (01/07/08) Richards, Justin
IBM fellow Grady Booch believes the opportunity to study design patterns
will be beneficial in the development of complex software systems. Booch
considers the observation of design patterns to be one of the key advances
in software design over the past decade. He has been cataloging several
thousand design patterns as a founding member of the Hillside Group. The
ability to describe significant or architectural patterns would help
improve the efficiency of delivering complex software systems, Booch says.
Software engineers do not have the same luxury as civil engineers, who can
study the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, Christopher Wren, or Frank Gehry.
What is more, programmers often work with other stakeholders, who can be
geographically and temporally dispersed, and the code is not all the truth.
"There is entropy, a loss of information, from vision to construction, so
even though I may stare at some code, I do not have access to the rationale
or the patterns that sweep across the individual lines of code," Booch
says. Collaborative developing environments would offer a way to weave
together a number of things from social networking sites to improve the
developer experience, he adds.
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Researchers Are Partnering the Development of a Computer
System to Prevent the Depletion of World Fishery Resources
Innovations Report (01/09/08) Martinez, Eduardo
A world fishery stock depletion assessment and early warning system is
being devised by researchers from the Ontology Engineering Group at the
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid's School of Computing for the purpose of
preventing stock depletion and overfishing. The system would rely on the
application of ontology networks for the expedient and effective extraction
of information from amongst a massive amount of fishery resources data.
The project was financed by the European Community under the Sixth
Framework Program, and the research has been developed within the Lifecycle
Support for Networked Ontologies (NeOn) integrated partnership in
collaboration with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The
research was detailed in a paper presented at the Conference of the Spanish
Association for Artificial Intelligence, explaining how ontology networks
can aid in the collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of
nutrition and fishery information. The management of world fisheries
requires obtaining the best and fullest information, and correlating all
the myriad variables that can impact fisheries. It is the goal of the NeOn
project partners to generate a new open infrastructure designed to support
the creation of scalable semantic applications at geographically dispersed
institutions, while the FAO will make its world fisheries databases
accessible. Through the implementation of the system, the FAO could employ
ontologies and semantic technologies to help nations keep an eye on
fisheries and the level of critical reserves, and deploy strategies to
augment information about the status and trends of capture fisheries.
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Intelligent Software to Help Build Perfect Robotic
Hand
MTB Europe (01/08/08)
University of Portsmouth senior lecturer Honghai Liu and Jiao Tong
University Robotics Institute professor Xiangyang Zhu are developing
intelligent software that could help build the perfect robotic hand. The
researchers will record how the human hand moves and use artificial
intelligence to copy the movements and replicate them in a robotic device.
"A robotic hand which can perform tasks with the dexterity of a human hand
is one of the holy grails of science," Liu says. "We are talking about
having super high level control of a robotic device." Liu used a
cyberglove with tiny sensors to record data on how the human hand moved,
capturing motion with eight high-resolution CCD cameras with infrared
illumination and measurement accuracy within a few millimeters. Zhu says
the research partnership will strengthen the interface between artificial
intelligence techniques and robotics and create a new chapter in robotics
technology.
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Crash Warning for Connected Cars?
ICT Results (01/04/08)
European researchers have developed a laboratory demonstration of a
collision warning system for cars that could alert the driver several
seconds before an accident takes place. The Collision Warning System,
developed by the Reposit project, allows a vehicle to know its own location
and to communicate with other cars to predict possible accidents. The
prototype uses GPS to find its position, and can find the position, speed,
and trajectory of neighboring and oncoming traffic using an emerging car
communication protocol called Vehicle2Vehicle (V2V). The system uses that
information to calculate the relative position of other cars and to
extrapolate where the cars will be in a few seconds' time. "So far, we've
got predictions about one to three seconds ahead of a collision," says
project coordinator Jose Ignacio Herrero Zarzosa. "But anything from two
seconds up gives drivers time to react." While creating a third-party
technology for the automotive industry is difficult, as there is no
standard for integrating new functions into existing car systems, the
popularity of GPS and the emergence of V2V as a standard are expected to
make the system more attractive over time.
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Virtual Worlds Will Soon Be as Important as Web
Companies
Computerworld (01/09/08) Havernstein, Heather
A Forrester Research report argues that within five years the 3D Internet
will become as important to companies as the Web is today. The report,
"Getting Work Done in Virtual Worlds," concludes that executives should
begin investigating and experimenting with virtual worlds because of their
promise for remote collaboration, training, and building and sharing 3D
models. The report says that modern collaboration tools are far less
beneficial to companies. For example, the inability to see gestures during
teleconferences causes problems for some attendees. It would be easy to
tell who was speaking during a virtual world meeting, and avatars can even
be directed to express gestures and emotions. "In a virtual meeting room,
you can see who is present, and more importantly, who is multi-tasking, who
has raised a hand or who has been away from their keyboard so long that
their avatar has fallen asleep," the report says. Virtual meetings could
be particularly important for professionals such as surgeons, architects,
engineers, and product designers, who use CAD or visualization systems to
create projects, which could be imported to the virtual meeting and viewed
first hand by everyone involved. Princeton University has a project to
manage distributed teams working on a large-scale astrophysics project, the
University of Maryland worked with the I-95 Corridor Coalition to build a
virtual world simulation of highway emergencies, and Duke University and
Virtual Heroes are collaborating to create a high-fidelity 3D virtual
environment to help train health care professionals in teamwork and
communication skills.
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Collaboration: The $588 Billion Problem
CIO Insight (01/03/08) Boulton, Clint
While emails, instant messaging, blogs, and other computer-based forms of
communication have revolutionized how workers collaborate, interruptions
and duplications caused by digital communication are overwhelming workers
to the point of distraction and may cost the U.S. economy as much as $588
billion a year, according to a new Basex report. The report, "Information
Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us," written by Basex analysts
Jonathan B. Spira and David M. Goldes, calls information overload the
"Problem of the Year" for 2008 and claims that interruptions from emails,
phone calls, and instant messages consume 28 percent of a knowledge
worker's work day, resulting in 28 billion hours of lost productivity a
year. For example, a worker who relies on instant messaging may miss
important emails, and while wikis may improve communication between
coworkers, they also distract employees from their individual tasks. The
increasing number of collaboration methods also create more and more
locations where users may store information, making it harder for other
users to find that information and often leading to employees repeating
work. The report proposes several steps to alleviate information overload,
such as not phoning recipients to confirm that they received an email and
avoiding combining multiple subjects, messages, or request into a single
email. The report also recommends that workers be as explicit as possible
in all forms of communication so readers can quickly and thoroughly
understand the purpose of a piece of communication.
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Intelligent Foam Could Keep Shop Shelves Stacked
New Scientist (01/09/08) Inman, Mason
Researchers at Johannes Kepler University, in Linz, Austria, have
developed a sensing foam that can be used to monitor store stock and
automatically alert employees when an item is sold out. The foam is made
of layers of polyolefin, each a quarter of a millimeter thick, with air
gaps to make the material light and flexible. The sensing is done by
applying strips of silver-containing paint to either side of the sheet.
The strips act as capacitors, storing a small amount of electricity. When
an item is on top of the foam, the foam is compressed slightly, changing
the capacitors' ability to store a charge. The sensors can detect
differences of at least 10 grams or more per square inch, which is not
extremely sensitive, but is enough to detect consumer goods. By making
criss-crossing grids of silver strips, the foam could detect cereal or a
can of soup by weight, and replacing the silver with copper would reduce
the cost to about one dollar per meter. The foam could also be built into
floors to monitor people's movements, or make a portable keyboard for
computers or cell phones that could be rolled up for travel.
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Open Source Code Contains Security Holes
InformationWeek (01/08/08) Babcock, Charles
Numerous security exposures have been discovered in Samba, the PHP, Perl,
and other popular open source projects, according to a review by the
Department of Homeland Security. Like its commercial equivalent, open
source code typically includes one security hole for every 1,000 lines of
code. Some projects, such as Samba, have fixed the majority of the
vulnerabilities identified by the Homeland Security review. Other
projects, such as FreeBSD and Firebird, have been slow to respond to the
scans' findings. Overall, roughly 116 of the 180 projects being examined
are utilizing the scans and are correcting their security defects. Samba
and Linux, along with some other projects, were found to have a
substantially lower rate of defects than average, according to David
Maxwell of Coverity, manufacturer of the source code checking system used
in the review. Since the review was launched in 2006, a total of 7,826
open source project vulnerabilities have been resolved.
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Visualizing Electronic Health Records With 'Google-Earth
for the Body'
IEEE Spectrum (01/08) Charette, Robert N.
A prototype 3D visualization tool for electronic health records (eHRs)
that maps the information in the records to an image of the human body has
been developed by IBM researchers. By clicking a mouse on a specific area
of the image, a doctor calls up information corresponding to that segment.
"The 3D coordinates in the model are mapped to anatomical concepts, which
serve as an index onto the electronic health record," notes IBM researcher
Andre Elisseeff. The displayed images link not only to a patient's eHR,
but also to the 300,000 medical terms defined by the Systematized
Nomenclature of Medicine international standard. The mapper engine project
was inspired by discussions the IBM research team had with physicians
working at IBM about the problems with using eHR systems, and one doctor
said that when presented with the graphical representation of medical data,
many doctors seem to recognize what is happening with a patient and uncover
the underlying proof faster. Further investigation convinced the
researchers "that we needed ... an unstructured, flexible representation of
human anatomy, browsing-style navigation with shortcuts, bookmarks, et
cetera," Elisseeff recalls. He says the project's chief goal is to shift
eHR systems away from an administrative work mode toward a clinician's
natural work style, enabling both the physician and the patient to engage
as easily as possible with the eHR system. Elisseeff insists that the
mapper engine was not created to support diagnosis, which makes practical
sense, as studies have demonstrated that doctors are less accepting of IT
than other professionals, even when the advantages have been clearly
presented.
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