ACM Honors Pioneers of Software Engineering Tool That
Speeds Development of Complex Computer Systems
AScribe Newswire (02/28/08)
ACM has given the 2007 ACM Software System Award to the developers of
Statemate, a software engineering tool that supports visual, graphical
specifications that represent the intended functions and behaviors of a
system. The system was developed by a team at AdCad, which became part of
I-Logix and later Telelogic, and includes David Harel, Hagi Lachover, Amnon
Naamad, Amir Pnueli, Michal Politi, Rivi Sherman, Aron Trauring, and Mark
Trakhtenbrot. Statemate enables designers to specify, test, and execute
the required interactions among system elements, helping detect costly
errors early in the design process. Statemate was conceived and built
between 1984 and 1986, and was the first commercial computer-aided software
engineering tool to successfully overcome the challenges of complex
interactive, real-time computer systems, known as reactive systems. The
concepts used in Statemate can be seen in many of today's most powerful and
widely used tools in software and systems engineering. The Software System
Award will be presented at ACM's annual Awards Banquet on June 21, 2008, in
San Francisco.
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House Lawmakers Question Privacy in Cyber-Security
Plan
Washington Post (02/29/08) P. D3; Krebs, Brian
The Bush administration's "cyber initiative" was the subject of a hearing
Thursday before the House Homeland Security Committee. The initiative is
largely classified, but unclassified portions of the project reveal that
the federal government is focusing on limiting the number of connections
between federal agency networks and the Internet, and closely monitoring
networks for potential attacks by hackers and foreign adversaries.
However, there are questions about the degree of monitoring and whether it
would include networks operated by state and local governments, or the
private sector, including government defense contractors. Some Democrats
on the oversight panel expressed concern about privacy. "It looks a little
like the fox is guarding the hen house," said Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.).
Department of Homeland Security undersecretary Robert Jamison said his
agency is drafting a privacy impact assessment, and will make it available
to the public for review when it is completed. "There's a big difference
between intercepting and reading email and reacting to suspicious traffic
going across your network," said Jim Lewis, director of the technology arm
of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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Ohio 'Paper' Vote System to Debut With Flaws
University of Maryland (02/27/08) Tickner, Neil
A new paper/optical scan voting system that Cleveland and its suburbs will
employ in the March 4 primary is burdened by major flaws that could
increase the risk of voter error, say members of a research team from the
universities of Maryland, Rochester, and Michigan. The system boasts
centralized ballot counting, and the researchers say one potential problem
is that voters will not have an opportunity to run their ballots through a
scanner before submission. The researchers discovered that the computer
could disqualify legitimate ballots as overvotes if there are erasures or
stray marks on the ballots. "[Voters] should be very careful to avoid
stray marks and to review their ballots closely," advises University of
Maryland political scientist and team leader Paul Herrnson. "If they want
to make changes, they should ask for a new form instead of erasing."
Herrnson also finds fault with the central count approach, noting its
potential for insecurity. Herrnson's team compared the usability of
several electronic voting and verification systems over a five-year period,
and the results and recommendations are detailed in the book "Voting
Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot."
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Semantic Web Is Open for
Business
ZDNet (02/26/08) Miller, Paul
World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee says the release of
the SPARQL specifications ensures that the core pieces are in place for
developers to start building robust Semantic Web applications. Berners-Lee
says that "we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability
using what we've got. So, people are realizing it's time to just go do
it." He also says it's not true that taking advantage of the Semantic Web
requires extensive recoding, since much of the necessary data is already
available in databases. The W3C supported Linked Data project is an
example of a community effort to make data more visible to the rest of the
Semantic Web, and projects such as DBpedia, MusicBrainz, and Revyu.com are
enriching existing content and providing tools to create new content.
"Some is scraped from HTML pages, some is pulled out of databases, some of
it comes from projects which have been in XML," Berners-Lee says. "And
once they're exported, as you browse around the RDF graph, as you write
mash-ups to reuse that data, you really don't have to be aware of how it
was produced." Still, he says greater clarity with respect to the proper
use of data is needed if there is going to be similar growth in the
availability of data from less philanthropic sources. Berners-Lee says two
upcoming events will be of particular interest to those looking to make
data available to the Semantic Web. The first is the Linked Open Data
Workshop at this year's World Wide Web conference in Beijing in April, and
the second is the Linked Data Planet in New York in June.
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Get Out Your Pencils: Paper Ballots Make a Return
USA Today (02/29/08) P. 2A; Wolf, Richard
Ohio's Cuyahoga County may have had more election troubles than any other
area in the nation. The switch from the punch cards used in 2004 to touch
screens in 2006 led to crashed servers, printer jams, vanishing memory
cards, and overwhelmed poll workers. This year, Ohio expects to simplify
and solidify its system by switching back to paper ballots. Voters will
fill in ovals the same way students do when taking standardized tests.
Although the new voting system may be simple, switching back to it is not.
Cuyahoga County had just 74 days to make the switch after Ohio Secretary of
State Jennifer Brunner decided to ban touch-screen machines. Since then,
the county has retrofitted 6,300 old punch-card voting stations, installed
15 high-speed scanners, and rewired the warehouse. The county has also
printed 4,317 different ballots for use in different precincts, with
appropriate choices for the 668 candidates and 47 issues that will be voted
on. A total of 1,043,930 ballots were printed, 95,470 absentee ballots
were mailed, and 7,000 poll workers have been hired. Although the system
is low-tech, it could still be problematic. Running out of ballots is a
possibility, and because the ballots will be scanned in a centralized
location instead of where the votes are cast, voters will not get the
chance to correct any errors on their ballot, such as partially filled
circles. In the general election in November, ballots will be scanned in
the precincts, enabling voters to correct any mistakes on their ballot.
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Vanderbilt Engineers Part of $2.8 Million Grant to Link
War Fighters to Global Information Grid
Vanderbilt University (02/27/08) Johnston, Jennifer
Vanderbilt University professor Doug Schmidt is leading a group effort to
develop a system that can seamlessly link war fighters to the Global
Information Grid. The project, backed by a $2.8 million grant from the
U.S. Air Force Research Effort, also includes BBN Technologies, Boeing, and
the Institute for Human Machine Cognition. The Air Force is seeking
technological improvements that, for example, could allow a convoy
traveling through a hostile city to immediately access information such as
historical data or up-to-the-minute traffic. The prototype system being
developed is called the Quality of Service Enabled Dissemination (QED),
which is designed to improve the quality of complex systems and increase
tolerance for disruptions to ensure that troops in tactical situations get
the information they need on time. Schmidt says the system will allow
pilots, fighters, and commanders to communicate with each other seamlessly
by harnessing the powers of the Global Information Grid, which includes all
communications networks, including the Internet, cell phones, satellite
communications, and land lines. "One of the great things about complexity
is that we can now build things that are so big, we can't test them using
conventional techniques and tools," Schmidt says. "But the more we become
reliant on these systems, the more we need to become more certain they're
going to work."
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Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Academy Develops Programming
Language for Robots
Carnegie Mellon News (02/27/08) Spice, Byron; Watzman, Anne
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Academy educators have developed
ROBOTC, a cross-platform programming environment designed for use with
educational robots at the high school and college levels. ROBOTC works
with LEGO Mindstorms RCX & NXT, and with the Innovation First VEX and FRC
controllers. "Students interested in robotics migrate to a new robot
platform every year or two as they progress from middle school through
college," says Robotics Academy director Robin Shoop. "Prior to ROBOTC,
each time the robot 'brain' changed, the student needed to learn a
completely different programming solution." Shoop says ROBOTC makes that
unnecessary. ROBOTC includes a full-featured debugger that enables
programmers to find and eliminate programming errors. Shoop says the
integrated debugger can significantly reduce correction time, and works
with the robot in wireless mode without slowing the execution of the
program being debugged. Unlike other programming platforms for educational
robots, ROBOTC is a full-featured implementation of the industry-standard C
programming language and not a "reduced" feature or proprietary
platform-specific solution. ROBOTC has a "power user" mode for gifted or
experienced students, as well as a "novice" mode that hides advanced
features and concepts from beginning students.
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Stock Exchange for 'Grid' Computing?
ICT Results (02/25/08)
The EU-funded CATNETS project has devised a free-market approach to grid
computing, and project coordinator Torsten Eymann of the University of
Bayreuth says such a strategy may be the best tactic for large-scale
trading of computing resources. He says the use of a centralized system
for existing grids to match "sellers" to "buyers" works well for small
grids but lacks scalability, and adds that quick and inexpensive
administration is a necessity because each transaction takes up only a
short interval of computer time. The core challenge of the three-year
CATNETS project, which involves the participation of researchers in
Germany, Britain, Spain, and Italy, was to build models that can
accommodate thousands of transactions simultaneously without suffering an
unreasonable downgrade in speed. The first step was the creation of a
simulator for modeling complex grids, and the second was the construction
of a prototype network to confirm the simulator's output. The
decentralization of administration dovetailed with the finding that more
messages have to be transmitted in a free-market system to arrange the same
number of transactions as in more traditional systems. CATNETS
demonstrated that a free-market network can boast a bigger scale than a
centrally-administered network so that administrative overheads do not
affect performance. A follow-up project will consider other factors that
will probably play a prominent role in real-world grid computing, including
the impact of trust and reputation, service-level agreements, and different
pricing levels for different services.
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New Digital Projects Teach English in India, Monitor Air
Pollution
University of California, Berkeley (02/25/08) Maclay, Kathleen
University of California, Berkeley computer science professor John Canny
will lead a project that uses cell phones to teach English to children in
India, while UC Berkeley professor Greg Niemeyer has designed a project
involving an online mystery game in which student sleuths monitor air
pollution in Los Angeles and in Cairo, Egypt. The two projects are among
17 projects recently chosen by the Digital Media and Learning Competition
to receive funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Each project is expected to produce innovations in the use of digital media
for learning. Niemeyer says his "Black Cloud" game originated from a
discussion he had in Cairo about climate change, in which he learned about
the "Black Cloud" of pollution that hits Cairo during the fall rice
harvest. Students will search their neighborhoods for hidden wireless air
quality sensors that send out real-time information about local pollution,
helping students learn to read graphs, associate air quality data with
human activities, and understand the local pollution landscape. Canny's
project, called Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging
Economies, will use an educational game to improve literacy among children
in rural India. Canny says the project's goal is to develop digital
learning games that are culturally appropriate and inspired by traditional
games played in rural villages.
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First Humanoid Robot That Will Develop Language
University of Hertfordshire (02/28/08)
An international consortium led by the University of Plymouth is launching
ITALK (Integration and Transfer of Action and Language Knowledge in
Robots), a project to teach a humanoid robot how to talk. ITALK
researchers plan to take the same approach used by a parent to teach a
child how to speak. They will make use of a number of activities such as
inserting objects of various shapes into the correct holes in a box,
serializing nested cups and stacking wooden blocks, and asking the robot to
name objects and actions so that it can pick up basic phrases. ITALK will
use the one-meter high robot iCub during its experiments. "ICub will take
us a stage forward in developing robots as social companions," says Kerstin
Dautenhahn, a specialist in artificial intelligence and human robot
interaction at the University of Hertfordshire's School of Computer
Science. "We have studied issues such as how robots should look and how
close people will want them to approach and now, within a year, we will
have the first humanoid robot capable to developing language skills."
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Robots Set to Overhaul Service Industry, Jobs
Christian Science Monitor (02/25/08) P. 1; Peter, Tom A.
As robotics continues to advance, robots are expected to increasingly
replace humans in performing low-level service industry jobs. "The service
sector, which is a gigantic part of the employment landscape in the United
States, is inevitably going to a place where you can replace millions of
people with robots that work 24/7 for less money," says futurist Marshall
Brain. The first robots to make a serious impact on the service industry
will probably carry out low-level tasks, though experts say it will take a
decade or more for such robots to become pervasive in everyday life.
"Dealing with humans is a very complex task. It takes us as humans many
years to grow up and learn all the social etiquette and cues," says
California Institute of Technology professor and robotics specialist Joel
Burdick, adding that it will take time to perfect robots capable of
understanding human emotions well enough to serve people effectively.
Service industry robots could evolve similarly to the way personal
computers were adopted by businesses, gradually eliminating the need for
many basic bookkeeping and accounting jobs, says Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute Center for Automation Technologies and Systems director John
Wren. Although Burdick expects robots will have a significant impact of
the service industry, he says there will be cases where humans will always
want to interact with other humans.
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How Women Can Pick Up the Skills Shortage Slack
Computerworld Canada (02/27/08) Smith, Briony
Women could fill a critical gap in the IT skills shortage, but schools and
teachers are not attracting them to the field. Many women do not take math
and science-related courses during their junior high, high school, and
college years, so even if they are attracted to the field later on they are
often considered ineligible for positions. Stephanie McKendrick, the
executive director of Canadian Women in Communications, says employers
should not punish women for choices they made in middle school. IBM Canada
talent manager Nadine Nichols says this is especially true as IT employers
struggle to fill positions, adding that the networking, communications,
critical thinking, and business skills that women have from other
disciplines can apply to IT quite well, so recruiters should look beyond
computer science graduates. "You should be able to move into IT from any
field," says Microsoft Canada's Ruth Morton. "Recruiters look for very
specific keywords on resumes, but they need to expand what they will look
for when hiring." Presenters at the recent Information and Communications
Technology Council's "Women in ICT National Forum" said that women might be
more attracted to IT by tech jobs that improve the world and society in
some way, such as catching child predators online, disease control
software, and fighting identity theft. Retention of female employees was
also a major focus at the forum, with family-friendliness and a flexible
work schedule offered as some of the most common retention strategies.
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Security Skills of IT Workforce Lacking, Survey
Finds
Network World (02/27/08) Dubie, Denise
Many IT employees are not proficient in the skills that the organizations
they work for feel are important, reveals a Computing Technology Industry
Association survey. The survey found that while 73 percent of IT managers
placed a great deal of importance on security, firewall, and data privacy
skills, only 57 percent said that their IT employees were proficient in
these skills. The report noted that security skills, which IT managers
said was the most important skill, had the largest gap between importance
and proficiency. When asked why they believed IT employees were not
proficient in the skill areas that they believed were important, more than
half of IT managers said the rapidly changing IT security landscape was
making it difficult for employees to keep up with technological advances.
The IT managers who participated in the survey offered a number of
solutions for helping employees become proficient in the skills they
believe are most important, including offering employees external
professional training and developmental career programs and providing them
with financial incentives such as bonuses. Many IT managers also
complained of a lack of qualified candidates.
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Microsoft Gets Another Shot at XML Standard
Reuters (02/26/08) MacInnis, Laura
Delegates from 37 countries recently met in Geneva at a meeting hosted by
the International Organization for Standardisation and the International
Electrotechnical Commission to consider whether to make Microsoft's Office
Open XML (OOXML) document format an international standard. A preliminary
vote on the standard failed six months ago when OOXML received only 53
percent approval. The 86 national standards bodies that previously voted
on the proposal will have until March 29 to reconsider their positions.
Standardization of OOXML would allow other companies to build products
using the file format to simplify file exchanges between different
programs. Opponents of Microsoft's proposal argue that there is no need
for a rival to the Open Document Format, which is already an international
standard. United Nationals University in Maastricht senior researcher
Rishab Ghosh says Microsoft could easily provide full support for ODF and
that Microsoft's drive for a competing standard is part of a broader
strategy to encourage consumers to use only Microsoft products. Microsoft
says that multiple standards are normal in software and other industries,
the competition makes for better products, and that its format is more
useful than ODF.
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'Scolding' Software to Speed Planet Hunt
New Scientist (02/23/08)No. 2644, P. 26; Merali, Zeeya
A new software control system could improve the network of robotic
telescopes that recently helped astronomers discover the first multiplanet
system orbiting another star. Astronomers still have concerns about
automated telescope networks because they can make errors that humans would
not, and because they overestimate their capabilities. The automated
telescopes are designed to alert the network when it spots something, and
then they bid to perform further observation based on assessments of their
equipment, position, and availability. Alasdair Allan at Exeter University
in the United Kingdom and colleagues have developed software that ranks the
telescopes on their data. Telescopes that do not deliver on their bid are
instructed to determine their problem and also to rein in their assessment
of their capabilities. "If the telescope repeatedly doesn't listen and
continues to enter bids that promise too much, the software will punish it
by ignoring it," says Allan, who wants to install the software on the eSTAR
network that connects telescopes in Australia, Hawaii, and La Palma. "The
new software can make sophisticated decisions," says the California
Institute of Technology's George Djorgovski.
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Open Minds, Open Books, Open Source
Inside Higher Ed (02/19/08) Guess, Andy
Dissatisfaction with commercial integrated library system software has
prompted some libraries to build their own open-source solutions that
interoperate with existing systems and are fully customizable, and the
numerous projects in this field could collectively function as a fully
integrated, end-to-end open-source solution for academic libraries. In the
meantime, the growing availability of open-source software is spurring some
libraries to rethink the role of their in-house tech experts and consider
whether hiring of additional developers makes more financial sense in the
long run than continuing to pay for products that they cannot influence.
The University of Rochester's eXtensible Catalog (XC) project is a Web
2.0-oriented library catalog interface that the initiative's Web site
claims will "provide more intuitive access to resources, a customizable
interface to include Web 2.0 functionality, and seamless connections to
other Web applications, such as learning management systems, that a library
may already be using." The project is being partly funded by a $750,000
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, while Villanova University's VuFind
project is developing a customizable library catalog. The project's
open-source nature enables Villanova to collaborate with developers at
other institutions and test the software on diverse platforms. VuFind and
ultimately XC places Web 2.0 functionality atop the traditional interface
so that users can transmit search results via email and save results to
their favorites. Oregon State University's LibraryFind tool allows users
to sort search results according to relevance, save items, modify queries,
and see electronic documents through the combination of a simple interface
and federated search.
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The Erasable Holographic Display
IEEE Spectrum (02/19/08) Savage, Neil
University of Arizona researchers have developed a method to write, erase,
and rewrite holographic images. Professor Nasser Peyhambarian and his
colleagues have found a way to create holograms that can last for hours but
can also be erased and rewritten. Conventional holograms are written using
a laser beam divided into two out-of-phase beams. One beam bounces off of
the object being imaged before recombining with the other beam to create an
interference pattern. When the pattern strikes a holographic medium, the
material goes through chemical changes that alter its index of refraction.
Shinning a light on the finished hologram creates a 3D image of the
original object, but the chemical change causes the effect to be permanent.
The researchers created a new type of holographic material, called a
photorefractive polymer composite, that absorbs light at a particular
wavelength. The interference pattern from the writing laser creates
positive and negative charge carriers--electrons and holes. The positive
holes have a higher mobility than the electrons, so they move away from the
light areas of the image and get trapped in dark areas. The image can last
for up to three hours and can be erased by flooding the material with green
light, allowing it to be rewritten. The researchers say that although
writing speed is slow, it can be improved by developing more photosensitive
materials and increasing the power of the laser.
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Sun SPOTs Promise Pervasive Java
SD Times (02/15/08)No. 192, P. 1; Handy, Alex
Sun Microsystems engineers foresee mobile applications linked to
real-world sensors and programmable devices, and they demonstrated their
commitment to this vision at the recent Java Mobile and Embedded Developer
Days event with Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (SPOT) gadgets.
Sun SPOTs, which are composed of hardware and software that are available
as open-source code and specifications, monitor real-world activity with
Java. SPOTs can be connected in loose networks. Since the devices'
introduction, users have carried out numerous experiments, one of which
involved the use of SPOT technology to control a treat dispenser. The
experimenter wished to monitor his dog through a Web camera, and the SPOT
was set up to open the treat door at his command so that the dog would
enter the room with the dispenser within the camera's range. Sun developer
Arshan Poursohi says SPOTs would be employed to help monitor wetlands
restoration in the San Francisco Bay area, noting that researchers
currently use sensors that must be removed for data download on a weekly
basis. SPOTs would allow data to be read wirelessly and facilitate
communication between sensors. Countries where Sun has made SPOTs
available include the United States, most of the European Union, New
Zealand, Australia, and Japan.
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Monitoring Particulates Against the Range of Light
CITRIS Newsletter (02/08) Slack, Gordy
The stunning Sierra Nevada Mountains are today hazed by smog composed of
particulates churned out by highway traffic and industry in California's
Great Central Valley, and UC Merced professor Shawn Newsam is using a
CITRIS grant to develop a network of cameras to monitor and perhaps analyze
air particulates in the region in the hope of one day facilitating fast and
easily accessible local air quality assessment in real time. The project
will involve the development of various particulate light dispersal effect
models. "We may then be able to automate the application of such analyses
to the images for lots of real-time data about both the concentration of
particulates in the air and the size of the particles themselves," says
Newsam, who adds that data mining may be an effective shortcut for drawing
correlations between the camera record and the particles' size and
concentration. Among the data-mining methods the professor is planning to
apply is Bayesian classifiers, decision-tree classifiers, neural-network
classifiers, and support-vector machines. Modeling the relationship
between the features of the images Newsam compiles and the particulate data
he receives from the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District will
involve the employment of linear and nonlinear regression, while the level
of detail visible on distant objects will be examined and the spectral
signatures of the light dispersed by the particles will be analyzed with
quantifiable image-texture features. Newsam believes the project will
furnish "a far more complete track record of whether visibility is getting
worse or better and by how much," and the value of this record will grow as
the valley's population expands and air quality deteriorates. In addition,
Newsam's images could supply accurate, short-term projections of solar
irradiance over large geographic regions and therefore yield affordable
conjectures of the potential output of photovoltaic systems in the area.
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