'Robot Arms Race' Underway, Expert Warns
New Scientist (02/27/08) Simonite, Tom
Governments worldwide are racing to develop military robots capable of
killing autonomously, but they are not considering the technology's legal
and moral implications, says Sheffield University robotics expert Noel
Sharkey. Over 4,000 semi-autonomous robots are currently deployed by the
United States in Iraq, and other countries are developing similar
technologies. In December 2007, the U.S. Department of Defense published
an "unmanned systems roadmap" in which the DOD proposed spending about $4
billion by 2010 on robotic weapons. Sharkey says he is most concerned by
the prospect of robots having to decide when to use lethal force. The
Pentagon is nearly two years into a research program that is focused on
having robots identify potential threats without human assistance. Sharkey
says such research programs are based on a mythical view of artificial
intelligence, and he believes robotic systems will never have the
discriminative power to make such decisions. Governments and robotics
engineers should re-examine current plans, Sharkey suggests, and consider a
temporary international ban on autonomous weapons. Georgia Tech University
robotics researcher Ronald Arkin shares Sharkey's concerns, but he believes
robotic warriors could ultimately become a more ethical fighting force.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Design Automation Conference Partners With Global STC
Conference
Business Wire (02/25/08)
The Design Automation Conference (DAC) and the Global STC Conference (GSC)
have formed a conference alliance partnership to make their events adjunct
conferences. They also plan to work together on promotional activities and
technical program synergies to make the gatherings more beneficial for
attendees. "We are excited to make GSC an adjunct conference of DAC, and
expect that our complementary events will draw an expanded audience by
being timed and located conveniently," says Limor Fix, general chair of the
45th DAC Executive Committee. "This strategic collaboration reflects the
overall trajectory of the semiconductor industry as manufacturers realize
the necessity of considering test requirements during the design phase, and
it reinforces DAC's commitment to being the epicenter of electronic
design." The Semiconductor Test Consortium conference is scheduled a week
before DAC at the Hilton Hotel, San Diego Mission Valley in San Diego,
Calif., June 4-6, 2008. DAC will take place in nearby Anaheim at the
Anaheim Convention Center, June 8-13. ACM's Special Interest Group on
Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) is one of the sponsors of DAC.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
STOP Terrorism Software
University of Maryland (02/25/08) Tune, Lee
Researchers at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer
Studies (UMIACS) have developed the SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP),
which enables analysts to query automatically learned rules on terrorist
organization behavior, predict potential behavior based on these rules, and
to network with other analysts examining the same material. Stochastic
Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA) is a formal, logical-statistical reasoning
framework that uses data on the past behavior of terror groups in order to
learn rules about the probable actions of an organization, community, or
person in different situations. SOMA has generated tens of thousands of
rules about the likely behavior of about 30 groups, including major
terrorist organizations. "SOMA is a significant joint computer science and
social science achievement that will facilitate learning about and
forecasting terrorist group behavior based on rigorous mathematical and
computational models," says computer science professor and UMIACS director
V.S. Subrahmanian. "In addition to accurate behavioral models and
forecasting algorithms, the SOMA Terror Organization Portal acts as a
virtual roundtable that terrorism experts can gather around and form a rich
community that transcends artificial boundaries." Four defense agencies
use STOP, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, to perform
queries and run a prediction engine, mark rules as useful or not useful,
and leave comments about the rules.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Tech Group: Increase US Gov't Research Funding
IDG News Service (02/26/08) Gross, Grant
The Technology CEO Council wants Congress to make good on its promise to
double funding at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of
Energy's Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) over the next 10 years. Congress made the promise last
August when it passed the America Competes Act, but the 2008 budgets of the
agencies are a combined $918 million short of the targets. The American
Physical Society says research funding is short 91 percent for the Office
of Science, 77 percent for NSF, and 70 percent for NIST. The group of tech
CEOs urged Congress to keep its promise in a letter sent to congressional
leaders on Monday. The letter says the failure to restore funding for the
agencies will lead to hundreds of layoffs of scientists, engineers,
technologists, and support staff at universities and research labs, limit
scholarships and research grant programs, and curb the training of math and
science teachers. "Federally funded research at labs and universities is
the ultimate seed corn that leads to the innovations, that develops the
infrastructure, and that creates the talent that's powered our economy for
the last 60 years," says Technology CEO Council executive director Bruce
Mehlman.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Kurzweil: 'Exponential' Change Ahead for Games,
People
CNet (02/22/08) Sinclair, Brendan
As microprocessors are progressively able to perform more calculations for
less money, we can expect to see the price-to-performance ratio of
computers improve a billionfold over the next 25 years, predicted Ray
Kurzeil during his keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference.
Kurzweil says that modern electronics are so powerful that the other fields
that rely on them will be subject to advancements at the same rate as the
chips that power them, and that software will ultimately become the
limiting factor. "You can't ignore the exponential projections," Kurzweil
says. "If you're programming a game or any type of information-based
technology two or three years from now, the world's going to be completely
different." Kurzweil says that previously unrelated fields will
essentially become information technology fields due to the growth in the
power of computer devices. For example, he says artificial red blood cells
could eventually duplicate the work of the real thing, only 1,000 more
efficiently. "Biology is very capable and intricate and clever," Kurzweil
says, "but it's also very suboptimal, compared to what we ultimately can
build with information technology and nanotechnology."
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
IBM's Big Iron Looks to Multithreading, Hybrid
CPUs
EE Times (02/26/08) Merritt, Rick
IBM has introduced the System z10, its first mainframe to use a quad-core
processor, which runs at 4.4 GHz. IBM says the z10 offers two times the
performance of z9-class systems on some workloads and is as powerful as
1,500 x86 servers while using 85 percent less power and space. The z10
runs IBM's proprietary z/OS operating system, but the company is working to
make it compatible with open source software such as Sun's OpenSolaris
operating system. "We have it running internally, but there's more work to
be done to clean it up and optimize its use of the underlying hardware
before we are ready for an end-user beta program," says IBM distinguished
engineer Jim Porell. "We're also looking at what will be the middleware
and applications for the rest of the stack." The mainframe uses up to 64
four-core processors, compared with the previous system that has a maximum
of 54 CPUs running at 2 GHz each. The chips have a new core design and are
still single threaded, but IBM is working on multithreaded mainframe
technology.
Click Here to View Full Article
- Web Link May Require Free Registration
to the top
NSF Partners With Google and IBM to Enhance Academic
Research Opportunities
National Science Foundation (02/25/08) Cruikshank, Dana W.
The National Science Foundation's computer and Information Science and
Engineering (CISE) Directorate has announced the Cluster Exploratory
(CluE), a strategic partnership with Google and IBM that will enable the
academic research community to conduct experiments and test new theories
and ideas using a large-scale, massively distributed computing cluster.
"Access to the Google-IBM academic cluster via the CluE program will
provide the academic community with the opportunity to do research in
data-intensive computing and to explore powerful new applications," says
NSF CISE assistant director Jeannette Wing. "It can also serve as a tool
for educating the next generation of scientists and engineers." Google
vice president of engineering (and ACM President) Stuart Feldman says the
company hopes the computing cluster "will allow researchers across many
fields to take advantage of large-scale, distributed computing." IBM's
Willy Chiu says the combined effort should accelerate research on
Internet-scale computing and drive innovation to support applications of
the future. Last October, IBM and Google created a large-scale computer
cluster of approximately 1,600 processors to provide the academic community
with access to otherwise unobtainable resources.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
The E-Voting Paradox
Government Computer News (02/25/08) Jackson, William
Computer scientists and researchers are extremely concerned over the
accuracy and security of electronic voting machines, but voters are more
concerned over usability, says University of Maryland professor Paul
Herrnson, director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship. In
his new book, "Voting Technology: The Not-so-Simple Act of Casting a
Ballot," Herrnson says that field tests of different types of equipment and
ballots found that usability was a more pressing concern to voters than
security. He says the type of ballot used and other factors, such as
squishy membrane keyboards or screen glare, are a major concern for voters.
Since the Help America Vote Act was passed there has been a reduction in
the residual vote, or the number of votes not cast for certain races during
an election, but Herrnson says that is not necessarily a good measure of
errors. People are more likely to vote for the wrong candidate by mistake
than to intentionally skip a race or forget to vote, he says. Michael
Shamos, who runs the eBusiness Technologies program at Carnegie Mellon
University's School of Computer Science and has been certifying voting
systems for 27 years, calls the election voting system "the least reliable
product in the U.S." He says the process suffers from a lack of standards,
inadequate election worker training, and proprietary software. "There
should be no trade secrets in voting technology," Shamos says.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
MacArthur Grant Supports Princeton Laptop Orchestra
Initiatives
Princeton University (02/21/08) Altmann, Jennifer Greenstein
The Princeton Laptop Orchestra program (PLOrk), one of 17 winners of the
Digital Media and Learning Competition, will receive a $238,000 grant from
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The PLOrk program will
use the award to support a mobile musical laboratory that students can use
to explore new ways of making music on laptops and local area networks.
PLOrk is an ensemble of computer-based musical meta-instruments that grew
out of a freshman seminar taught by computer science and music professor
Perry Cook and assistant professor of music Dan Trueman. The students who
participate in the ensemble act as performers, researchers, composers, and
software developers while exploring how the computer can be integrated into
conventional music-making contexts, such as chamber ensembles or jam
sessions, while transforming those contexts. Each "instrument" currently
consists of a laptop, a multi-channel hemispherical speaker, and a variety
of control devices, including keyboards, graphics tablets, and sensors. To
create a mobile music laboratory, students will design new technologies and
learn about various subjects, including musical acoustics, networking,
instrument design, human-computer interfacing, procedural programming,
signal processing, and musical aesthetics.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Teaching a Computer to Appreciate Art
MSNBC (02/25/08) Nelson, Bryn
A mathematical program that started as a lark for University of Haifa
computer science professor Daniel Keren has evolved into a serious effort
to match some of the world's greatest painters with their masterpieces. If
the project succeeds, it could help spot poor copies and eventually
distinguish forgeries from authentic paintings. Keren says he was
contacted by an Italian collector looking to validate some of his acquired
paintings, and by aficionados dealing with a controversy over the
legitimacy of pieces allegedly painted by Vincent van Gogh. Keren breaks
masterpieces into sets of mathematical formulas. The program captures the
distinctive styles of different artists by dividing their paintings into
discrete blocks and converting each block into formulas that can be
combined and compared. So far, Keren has applied the test to five
artists--van Gogh, Rembrandt, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, and Wassily
Kandinsky. In tests, the model correctly matched 86 percent of paintings.
Keren says the current version is not ready for use by art experts, but he
believes it can be improved for use to detect forgeries. "It will be good
to have a database of 20 van Gogh forgeries," he says.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Analogue Logic for Quantum Computing
ICT Results (02/21/07)
For the last two decades, quantum scientists have been trying to replicate
the digital computer at the microscale through the employment of particles
to carry information as quantum bits (qubits), but the Covaqial project is
investigating an analog approach to quantum computing that uses continuous
variables (CV). CV use a retinue of atoms or photons to convey
information, and both digital and analog approaches to quantum information
science apply the unique characteristics of quantum particles as the
"signifier" of the carried data, such as a single electron's spin or the
polarization of a photon for qubits, or the analog traits of a group of
electrons or photons for CV. "It is the collective property of this group
of electrons, or photons, that becomes the information carrier in CV," says
Covaqial project coordinator Nicolas Cerf. "When you have this many
particles you can call it continuous even though there are many very small
steps in the information-encoding variable." CV are more manipulable and
controllable than individual particles, and Covaqial has proven that CV
could yield refined solutions to some of the basic problems of quantum
information processing. The Covaqial team demonstrated memory for a light
pulse carried in an atomic "ensemble" in one millisecond via CV, and also
generated a light pulse that was in two states at the same time, which Cerf
says is an important consideration in the development of a quantum repeater
that will greatly extend the transmission range of quantum communications.
Cerf also says that Covaqial ran a successful experiment in interspecies
quantum teleportation.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Mitch Kapor: 3D Cameras Will Make Virtual Worlds Easier
to Use
CNet (02/15/08) Terdiman, Daniel
Mitch Kapor, speaking at Stanford's Metaverse Roadmap meeting,
acknowledges that virtual worlds can be difficult to use. "I'm obsessed
with what's going to make these things easier to use," Kapor says. "I
think a piece of hardware is involved." He suggests using 3D cameras to
provide a new kind of input that monitors what users are doing at any given
moment. Kapor wants to move beyond using mouse-and-keyboard input systems
and points to the futuristic display used in Steven Spielberg's "Minority
Report" movie that allowed characters to move information on a screen using
their hands. He says that in as little as 12 months 3D cameras will be
built into computers much like regular 2D cameras currently are, allowing
virtual world software to interpret how users are moving in the real world
and translating that movement to the virtual world avatar. While he is
unsure of what the interface will look like, Kapor suggests it could be
based on something like a Segway, which responds to simple body movements.
He says 3D cameras would also allow for better 3D object editing. "It's
going to change how editing is done in 3D worlds," Kapor says. To
demonstrate the value of 3D cameras, Kapor has developed a prototype that
he plans to demonstrate through videos on YouTube within a few months.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Put Trust in Your Pocket: CSIRO's Trust Extension
Device
CSIRO (02/19/08) Finlay, Jo
The Trust Extension Device (TED), a prototype portable device developed by
Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization
(CSIRO), solves the problem of having trust restricted to specific,
well-known computing environments. TED creates its own environment on an
untrusted computer and establishes trust with a remote enterprise server
before running an application. The user and the enterprise that issues a
portable device containing a small operating system, a set of applications,
and encrypted data must establish that they are trustworthy by proving
their identities and that the computing environments are as expected,
before TED accesses the remote server and a transaction takes place. "TED
makes that trust portable, opening the way for secure transactions to be
undertaken anywhere, even in an Internet cafe," says Dr. John Zic of the
CSIRO ICT Center. "Wherever you go, whichever machine you run on, you and
the issuer can be confident both parties are known to each other, cannot
engage in any malicious acts, and that the transactions are trusted."
Banks could use the technology to provide authorized customers and
employees with access to financial data, or to conduct financial
transactions over the Internet.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Sniffing Out Insider Threats
EurekAlert (02/19/08) Ang, Albert
Researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson
Air Force Base are developing technology that could help find insider
threats by analyzing email activity, helping identify malicious individuals
hidden within groups of tens of thousands of employees. The technology
uses data-mining techniques to search email and build a picture of social
network interactions. The technology could be used to prevent security
breaches, sabotage, and even terrorist activity that otherwise could have
damaging results, says researcher Gilbert Peterson. The same technology
can also find individuals who feel alienated within an organization or
identify any worrying changes in an individual's social behavior. Peterson
says security efforts have tended to focus on external electronic threats,
and points out that insiders pose the greatest threat to an organization.
Peterson's defense against insider threats is based on an extended version
of Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing, which can discern employees'
interests from email and create a social network graph showing their
various interactions. The research is reported in the International
Journal of Security and Networks.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Starting Salaries for Most IT Pros Will Climb in
2008
InformationWeek (02/25/08) McGee, Marianne Kolbasuk
Bluewolf says Fortune 1000 companies and fast-growing startups are looking
for open source coders and skills related to Ajax, Flash, PHP, and Ruby on
Rails. "Our phone is ringing off the hook" for such talent, says Michael
Kirven, co-founder and principal of Bluewolf. IT professionals in markets
such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and North Carolina can expect
starting salaries to rise on average of 5.3 percent this year, and
application developers, application architects, and project managers can
expect a bigger increase. Starting salaries are expected to jump 7.6
percent for application developers, ranging from $80,250 to $112,500; 7.5
percent for application architects, ranging from $87,500 to $120,000; and
7.4 percent for project managers, ranging from $85,000 to $150,000
annually. "Architects and project managers are skills that are not easy to
outsource overseas," Kirven says.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
Computer-Science Professor Warns of 'Dot-Bomb' in the
Discipline
Chronicle of Higher Education (02/29/08) Vol. 54, No. 25, P. A15;
Goodall, Hurley
Brown University computer science professor Andries van Dam was recently
selected to lead the Computing Research Association's education committee,
which will focus on changing how computer science is taught in college.
Van Dam warns that the United States is experiencing a "dot-bomb" and that
the field is no longer attracting the best and brightest in the same way it
once was. He says computer science is not considered "hot" and many
students believe that all of the jobs are being outsourced. Van Dam
acknowledges the loss of some jobs to outsourcing, but notes that many
companies establish offices overseas because that is where the talent is.
He says the only way for America to compete with the highly trained
workforces in Europe and Asia is to improve American students and
university programs, which requires modernizing the curriculum by creating
new ways of studying computer science. Van Dam says schools need to
incorporate new subjects such as game design and computer vision to attract
students to the field. CRA's education committee will examine computer
education in "the broad sense," van Dam says, not just in computer science
education, but computing education in other fields as well, such as what
high school students know about computation, and what college students
should know no matter what they are studying.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
RFID Powder
Scientific American (02/08) Vol. 298, No. 2, P. 68; Hornyak, Tim
The use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to track items is
growing, and Hitachi has announced a prototype for a RFID chip that is so
small as to be nearly invisible. The chip, which functions without
batteries or a power supply, could be embedded within high-value vouchers
such as gift certificates, concert tickets, securities, and cash to foil
counterfeiters. Mitsuo Usami of Hitachi's Central Research Laboratory says
the chip can be employed to identify "trillions of trillions" of objects
because an almost limitless number of digit combinations is afforded by the
chip's 128-bit architecture. Usami determined that the use of a 128-bit ID
number would allow the chip's design to remain simple and still provide an
extremely high number of digit combinations, while simultaneously
guaranteeing security since the information stored in the read-only memory
cannot be changed. The commercial version of Hitachi's small RFID chip has
a maximum scanning distance of 30 centimeters with external antennas. An
even smaller version, called a "powder chip," uses 90-nm
silicon-on-insulator technology and electron beam lithography to effect
additional miniaturization. Hitachi is currently at work on
"anticollision" technology that would allow multiple chips to be read
concurrently. The incorporation of ultra-small RFID chips into cash and
other vouchers--and perhaps even onto people themselves--raises concerns
about privacy infringement and intrusive surveillance. However, Usami
notes that many civic groups have devised guidelines for privacy protection
with RFID, and one of the basic guidelines is the non-surreptitious use of
the technology.
Click Here to View Full Article
to the top
