Computer Scientists to Congress: Don't Tell Colleges to
Install Filters on Networks
Chronicle of Higher Education (04/15/08) Foster, Andrea L.
ACM has sent a letter to the chairman and ranking minority members of the
Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and of the House
Committee on Education and Labor, expressing its opposition to having
colleges install network filters in order to prevent illegal sharing of
music and video files. Filters are costly, ineffective, and have a
negative impact on network security and the rights of researchers, ACM's
letter said. "There are known counters to filtering technology," the
letter said. "Motivated content thieves can encrypt their Internet traffic
or use other obfuscation methods to bypass filters that are looking for
some specific known signature of the copyrighted work." House and Senate
negotiators are working to renew the Higher Education Act, which includes
provisions on file sharing. For more information about ACM's
correspondence to the Senate Committee, see
http://usacm.acm.org/usacm/
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Researchers: Microsoft's CAPTCHAs Easy to Solve
InfoWorld (04/15/08) Kirk, Jeremy
Newcastle University School of Computing researchers Jeff Yan and Salah El
Ahmad say they have developed a low-cost way of breaking Microsoft's
CAPTCHA system for thwarting automatic registrations of email accounts that
works about 60 percent of the time. CAPTCHAs have recently become
increasingly ineffective, but details are scarce on how hackers are solving
the CAPTCHAs so efficiently. Some suspect that low-wage CATPCHA solvers
are being employed to provide a steady stream of new email accounts. In
February, it was discovered that hackers were using a method that appeared
to be successful about 30 percent to 35 percent of the time when trying to
solve the CAPTCHA used for Windows live Hotmail. Yan's and El Ahmad's
seven-step method is capable of removing the "arcs" or squiggly lines that
link letters and make them difficult for computers to isolate and
recognize. The program was able to isolate each character used in the
CAPTCHA 90 percent of the time. Those isolated letters were then run
through character recognition techniques, which could solve the CAPTCHA 61
percent of the time. The method also works against the latest CAPTCHA
deployed by Yahoo last month, though it is not as successful. Google's
CAPTCHA is harder to beat, primarily because automated programs have more
difficulty isolating the characters.
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Despite Silicon Valley Optimism, A Disease Resists
Cure
New York Times (04/14/08) Fost, Dan
Many in Silicon Valley believe that the right combination of money,
brains, and computing power can solve any problem, but researchers are
learning that technology does have some limits. Medical researchers at the
University of California, San Francisco are using the school's powerful
computers to try and solve some of medicine's most difficult mysteries.
Mike Homer, an executive at Netscape Communications in the 1990s, and his
friends have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars and powerful
computers to the school to aid in the medical research. Last May, Homer
learned he has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare disorder with no known
cure. Similar lessons on the limits of technology were learned last year
when search-and-rescue efforts using advanced computing technologies failed
to find Microsoft researcher James Gray, who was lost at sea, and
adventurer Steve Fossett, whose plane went missing in the desert. However,
instead of discouraging those involved, these efforts have nourished an
even stronger belief that developing and refining the technology further
could help others. "You cannot be an innovator or an entrepreneur unless
you're an optimist," says futurist Paul Saffo. "You have to be an optimist
in the face of logic and experience." Ron Conway, one of the leaders of
the "Fight for Mike" campaign at UC San Francisco, admits that a cure is
unlikely to be found to save Homer, but doctors say the campaign, which has
raised more than $7 million, could help discover cures for other
neurological diseases. The computerized searches Gray and Fossett also
could benefit others. "It's not that futile," says Joseph M. Hellerstein,
a UC Berkeley computer science professor who helped lead the search for
Gray. "In science and medicine, you try a second, third, and fourth time,
and progress is made," Hellerstein says. "You need doggedness and
insight."
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Computer Science Fog Machine Improves Computer
Graphics
UCSD News (04/15/08) Kane, Daniel
University of California, San Diego computer scientists have developed a
method for gathering light for computer graphics through "photon-mapping"
algorithms that yield smoother, more realistic, and less computationally
heavy foggy and smoky 3D images. Their work, which is aiding the
penetration of such methods into movies, video games, animation, and other
venues, will be detailed at the Eurographics 2008 conference. "Instead of
computing the light at thousands of discrete points along the ray between
the camera and the object, which is the conventional approach, we compute
the lighting along the whole length of the ray all at once," says Wojciech
Jarosz of UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. The approach improves on a
method first developed by UCSD professor Henrik Wann Jensen during his
doctoral studies, which earned an Academy Award. The use of ray-tracing
algorithms has been limited in video games and other areas where speed and
lightweight computation are essential, because of computational
restrictions. Precise accounting for the amount of light in a setting and
the location of that light is critical to the richness of images generated
via photon-mapping algorithms, which offer a way to follow the light around
the setting as well as determine how light will interact with
"participating media" that absorb, reflect, and scatter some portion of the
light. "Most natural materials behave like really dense fog because light
penetrates them to a limited extent, so this work has a lot of potential
future applications," Jensen says.
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Peer-to-Peer Virtual Worlds
Technology Review (04/16/08) Naone, Erica
The National ICT Australia (NICTA) research institute has developed
technology that uses peer-to-peer networks to reduce the load of sudden
crowds in virtual worlds by accessing bandwidth and processing resources
from each new user who makes a demand on the network. NICTA's Santosh
Kulkarni says peer-to-peer networks also reduce the cost of infrastructure
for companies that use it in their virtual worlds as it allows more users
to sign up for each world without requiring more servers. Kulkarni says
the typical network architecture for virtual worlds involves central
servers that control all the information flowing to and from the clients
installed on users' computers. Some virtual-world architectures stream all
the information about the world from those central servers, including
information on 3D content and the position of the user's avatar. Other
architectures separate information about the look of the world from how
avatars are interacting. Display information is sent with client software
and stored on users' computers, reducing the amount of information that
needs to be sent through the central server. Kulkarni says the NICTA
system reduces the infrastructure required by the hosting company because
the peer-to-peer networks can handle information on avatar positions and
character interactions. Kulkarni says that once you determine a few nearby
peers, "then you can learn more and more and find out about all the other
objects, and this way, you can scale to an unlimited number of users."
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Needed: A 'Turing Machine' for Security
Government Computer News (04/11/08) Jackson, William
The spread of wireless access, mobile computing, peer-to-peer
communications, and Web-based applications has made the shortcomings of
informational security all the more pronounced, while information
management and security is being impeded by the massive amount of data IT
systems are being flooded with. RSA CEO Art Coviello suggested at this
year's RSA Security conference that the problem of informational security
might be approached from the perspective of famed British mathematician
Alan Turing, and he offered the concept of a Turing machine for security.
The notion involves embedding within the enterprise infrastructure
functionality that could assume the responsibility of intelligent risk
management, which would give security managers more freedom to focus on
promoting innovation. Though an intelligent security system would still
depend on high-level policy produced by people, the system would be capable
of comprehending and anticipating human behavior, and understanding what
content is valuable to which people and achieving a familiarity with how it
is accessed and employed. This knowledge could be utilized to identify
patterns and anomalies that could constitute risks. Coviello said that
security managers need to encourage more innovation based on a mindset that
seeks ways to permit activities rather than deny them because they may be
risky, comprehensive knowledge of an organization's mission and
requirements so risk can be assessed, the construction of repeatable
processes, and the establishment of relationships with other teams within
the organization so needs can be predicted, among other things. Coviello
also wants Congress to support greater investment in education to nurture a
larger and better talent pool of security professionals and place a higher
priority on research and development for cutting-edge security methods and
technologies.
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Making the World a Billion Times Better
Washington Post (04/13/08) P. B4; Kurzweil, Ray
Computation capability is 1 billion times what it was in 1965, and
computer scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil forecasts that another
billion-fold increase will transpire over the next quarter century due to
the exponential growth of computer speed and power. "Thanks to its
exponential power, only technology possesses the scale to address the major
challenges--such as energy and the environment, disease and
poverty--confronting society," he writes, adding that he participated in a
panel organized by the National Science Foundation and the National Academy
of Engineering that made that very conclusion. Information technologies
such as nanotechnology are facilitating upgrades in solar power technology,
which will be able to generate enough energy to fulfill everyone's
requirements within two decades because IT is subject to what Kurzweil has
termed the "law of accelerating returns," in which capability doubles every
12 months or so. He says the law of accelerating returns will become
applicable to biology now that it can be modeled, simulated, and
reprogrammed through IT advancements. "We are now adding three months
every year to human life expectancy, but given the exponential growth of
our ability to reprogram biology, this will soon go into high gear," he
writes. Kurzweil also argues that economic prosperity is being driven by
the exponential growth of IT, noting that poverty in Asia has been reduced
by 50 percent in the last 10 years thanks to information technologies.
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Getting Wired for Terahertz
University of Utah (04/15/08) Siegel, Lee J.
University of Utah engineers say they have made a significant advancement
toward building computers that run on far-infrared light instead of
electricity. The engineers have developed the equivalent of wires capable
of carrying and bending far-infrared light, also known as terahertz
radiation. Terahertz radiation, or T-rays, are located on the spectrum
between mid-infrared and microwaves. Professor Ajay Nahata says they have
taken a first step toward making circuits capable of harnessing and guiding
terahertz radiation, an achievement he says could lead to the development
of super-fast circuits, computers, and communications, but not for at least
10 years. Nahata and colleagues designed stainless steel foil sheets with
patterns of perforations that successfully served as wire-like waveguides
to transmit, bend, split, or combine terahertz radiation. Nahata says for
terahertz radiation to be used in computing and communication it needs to
be transmitted from one device to another and processed as well. "This is
where terahertz circuits are important," Nahata says. "The long-term goal
is to develop capabilities to create circuits that run faster than
modern-day electronic circuits so we can have faster computers and faster
data transfer via the Internet."
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New Tool Aims to Revolutionise Scheduling Meetings
University of Leicester (04/10/08)
University of Leicester researchers are developing inContext, a European
Union-funded initiative designed to create new work-based communications
systems for international collaborators. The goal is to develop technology
that goes beyond current Internet-based collaboration techniques to meet
the demands of dynamic, multiform teamwork environments. "The inContext
project is developing a platform and techniques that make use of
service-oriented computing to integrate existing tools [such as email
systems, calendars, and project schedulers] into a coherent system that can
be used on any device, anywhere in the world, to make collaborative work
more productive," says InContext site leader and University of Leicester
lecturer Stephan Reiff-Marganiec. The project has primarily focused on a
Pervasive Collaboration Service Architecture that allows users to connect
from anywhere using any device to receive services based on the context of
the requesting user and other workers involved in the activity. Leicester
computer scientists are working with other universities, businesses, and
corporate research centers from six countries on the project.
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'Big Brother' Buildings Offer Less Invasive
Security
New Scientist (04/09/08) Iman, Mason
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories researchers say buildings filled
with motion sensors capable of tracking people's movements are more
effective and less invasive to privacy than closed-circuit TV systems.
MERL researchers Yuri Ivanov and Christopher Wren say in addition to
privacy concerns, CCTV footage is difficult to search through or interpret
quickly. To test their system, the researchers fitted their
3,000-square-metre office building with 215 detectors placed along hallways
at 2-metre intervals. The detectors record when someone walks by but do
not record specific actions. The system includes software capable of
detecting unusual or interesting patterns in the data collected by the
sensors and displaying the movements of people around the building on a map
in real time. The system does includes a handful of cameras positions at
specific spots in the building, and that footage can be used to identify
people detected by the motion sensors. Certain paths on the map can be
selected to call up the motion and video data from that path at a
particular moment to reveal who used the route. The system can also
improve safety procedures. For example, it discovered a traffic pattern
during a fire drill that showed almost everyone in the building left
through one exit while two other doors nearby were largely unused. The
system could also lead to energy savings by monitoring how late people stay
at work, helping management decide when to turn off heating or air
conditioning.
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Seven "Grand Challenges" Face IT in Next Quarter-Century,
Gartner Says
Network World (04/09/08) Brodkin, Jon
Gartner has identified seven technologies that will "completely transform"
the business world over the next 25 years. The technologies include
parallel programming, wireless power sources for mobile devices, automated
speech translation, and computing interfaces that detect human gestures.
"Many of the emerging technologies that will be entering the market in 2033
are already known in some form in 2008," Gartner says. Gartner predicts
more natural computing interfaces that can detect gestures and compare
those gestures in real time against a gesture "dictionary" that tells the
computer what action to take. Mobile devices will no longer have to be
charged as power will be transferred by a remote source, eliminating the
need for batteries. Researchers will develop persistent and reliable
long-term storage that will store the world's digital information on
digital media permanently. To create reliable storage that can last 20 to
100 years, researchers need to overcome challenges related to data format,
hardware, software, metadata, and information retrieval. Programmer
productivity will increase 100-fold, with the output of each programmer
increasing to meet future demands fueled by an increasing reliance on
software development products. The reuse of code will help, but optimizing
the reuse of code is a challenge in itself. Gartner also predicts that IT
workers will be able to provide exact financial outcomes for IT
investments.
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Programmers, DIY Types Embrace Soft, Hackable
Chumby
Wired News (04/15/08) Gardiner, Bryan
The Chumby is a small, inexpensive, leather-clad Wi-Fi Internet appliance
with a hackable operating system that has become a popular device with
software and hardware hackers. "The key part of the Chumby's appeal is
that it's an embedded-hardware device that's open," says Linux programmer
Andrew Walton, a Chumby software hacker who moderates his own
Chumby-hacking forum. "Everyone's used to open source software, but with
open source hardware it's a whole new game. When you combine them both,
Chumby hackers can literally do anything they want." The Chumby can
deliver whatever channels of Internet-based content a user wants, and also
comes with Adobe's Flash, enabling developers to construct their own
widgets. So far more than 600 developers have built Flash widgets for the
Chumby, and about 200 developers have shared those widgets on the Chumby
Network. The physical device is designed in such a way that its core
electronics can be easily separated from its outer shell, allowing owners
to make the device look anyway they want. Chumby Industries founder Duane
Maxwell says the whole business model for the Chumby was developed around a
device that was made to be hacked. "We found that if you open up your
device, people will be in the business of enhancing it," Maxwell says.
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Web Site Lets Users Test Out New Looks
San Diego Union-Tribune (04/13/08) LaFee, Scott
University of California San Diego professor Daniel Kriegman and recent
Ph.D. recipient Satya Mallick have developed an algorithm that separates
gloss from nongloss in digital images. The researchers have created a free
Web site called Taaz.com that allows users to realistically refashion their
faces, digitally apply thousands of cosmetic products, and change
everything, including mascara, blush, hairstyle, and eye color. Kriegman's
interest in computer vision and imaging lies in developing and improving
how computers understand and interact with real-world imagery. Mallick and
Kriegman were inspired to develop the algorithm while they were studying
endoscopic video of a human sinus, when they noticed that nasal membranes
are excessively shiny. Light reflecting off moist tissues was obscuring
valuable information in the pictures, so Kriegman, Mallick, and colleagues
from Harvard and Columbia universities worked to find a way to enhance
digital photos by removing unwanted superficial gloss. After developing
the algorithm, the researchers realized that it was similar to powdering a
nose, and the reverse of the algorithm would be to put on lip gloss.
Kriegman says the algorithm works by giving different colors mathematical
values. The algorithm separates the actual color of an object from the
color of the light striking it, which can produce a different color
combination or gloss. The researchers eventually found out that their
algorithm was not applicable to medical pictures, but that it could be used
for cosmetics.
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Tourist Information Wherever You Are
European Space Agency (04/11/08)
The regional winner in the European Satellite Navigation Competition,
sponsored by the European Space Agency's Technology Transfer Programme, was
eye-Phone, a mobile phone program that can provide instant access to
information on the buildings and scenery surrounding the user. Created by
Ernst Pechtl and Hans Geiger, the system combines satellite navigation
localization services, advanced object recognition, and relevant Internet
retrieved information. The eye-Phone works when a user takes a photograph
with their mobile phone. The user then chooses an item of interest with
the cursor, which allows the system to send information on the selected
object to the phone. "It could be a building, a mountain, a tree, plant or
a special event such as a local festival," Pechtl says. "The amount of
information you receive depends on you, if you want to know more you just
click the 'more' button and you trigger a more detailed search responding
to your profile of interest. Frank Salzgeber, head of the ESA's Technology
Transfer Programme Office, says the eye-Phone is a good example of the
potential satellite navigation systems have when combined with other
communication and information technology.
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One Virtual Step for Man, One Real Leap for
Mankind
ICT Results (04/11/08)
The CyberWalk project at the Max Planck Institute for Biological
Cybernetics in Europe has developed an omni-directional treadmill that will
enable users to walk through virtual worlds. "In the virtual environment
you have flight simulators, car simulators, but the most natural way of
locomotion for humans is walking and this was practically impossible," says
CyberWalk coordinator Marc Ernst. Previous attempts to make
omni-directional treadmills have generally not allowed for a truly natural
walking and immersion experience. "A key feature is that you need a
relatively large treadmill to simulate natural walking," Ernst says. The
project has developed the CyberCarpet, a treadmill that is 6 meters by 6
meters, with an active walking area of 4.5 meters by 4.5 meters, which
Ernst says is the minimum size for natural walking. The CyberCarpet
features a platform with a big chain drive, while the chain elements are
made of conventional treadmills. The chain moves in one direction while
the movement direction of the belts is orthogonal to the movement of the
chain. The two directions of the chain and the belts provide the
omni-directional actuation so the treadmill motion is in opposition to the
motion of the walker no matter what direction the walker moves. The
treadmill uses cameras to track the position and posture of the walker,
which helps control the velocity of the treadmill and interactions with the
virtual environment.
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Has a Robot Revolution Started, or Is It Still 20 Years
Off?
Computerworld (04/10/08) Gaudin, Sharon
A robotic revolution is three to five years off with robotic aides and
companions expected to penetrate households as prices fall and technology
advances, says Microsoft's Tandy Trower. Trower says the absence of a
standard software platform is the reason why the growth of robotics has
been so slow in recent years, and his group is currently updating its
Robotics Studio software, which features a tool set and a series of
programming libraries that sit on top of Windows. James Kuffner of
Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute says the revolution Trower
is predicting is more likely to come in about 20 years' time, which is when
he expects multi-functional humanoid robots that do not require special
programming to be common household appliances. Meanwhile, The
Envisioneering Group's Richard Doherty says people who are afraid of losing
employment to robots could act as an impediment to progress in the robotics
industry. "We need to see robots in a different light," he says. "We need
people to understand that this machine could help care for their
grandmother." British artificial intelligence researcher David Levy has
gone so far as to predict that marriages between humans and robots will be
taking place by 2050 thanks to dramatic technological advances. "In the
last 20 years, we've been moving toward robots that have relationships with
humans, and it will keep growing toward a more emotional relationship," he
said in an interview.
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Roberta Goes Europe
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (04/10/08)
The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems
in Sankt Augustin, Germany, launched the Roberta-Girls Discover Robots
project, and its 22 regional centers in Germany and 12 regional centers in
England, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy are a sign of its success.
Roberta organizers say the project dispels the widely held belief that
girls do not like science and technology. "Our experience with children in
robot courses has shown that girls are not interested in programming
armored vehicles, combat, or football robots," says project manager
Gabriele Thiedig, who adds that they are more likely to program their
robots to dance or to organize a rescue operation. Roberta offers teaching
and learning materials that educators can use to spark an interest in
robots among young girls. Organizers also have designed a "Smart Girls"
course in an effort to get high school girls interested in technical trades
and university programs. The Hannover Messe trade fair, scheduled for
April 21-25, will offer a "Girl's Day," and Roberta's female instructors
will participate in its TectoYou youth initiative.
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Libraries in the Converging Worlds of Open Data,
E-Research, and Web 2.0
Online (04/08) Vol. 32, No. 2, P. 36; Uribe, Luis Martinez; McDonald,
Stuart
New research methodologies facilitated by the latest technologies effect
collaboration between researchers who may be scattered across different
locations, institutions, and even fields, and the primary features of these
new collaborations are the tremendous utilization and generation of data.
This approach to research shows up in concepts that include e-science,
cyberinfrastructure, or e-research, and over the last 10 years there has
been considerable debate about the virtues of open standards, open source
software, open access to scholarly publications, and most open data. Data
management appears likely to assume a more prominent part in the research
cycle, and researchers, librarians, publishers, technologists, and
policymakers will need to adjust their practices to accommodate this trend.
However, awareness of or interest in data management-related issues seems
to be paltry among many researchers, and institutions of higher education
must accept certain roles in the deployment of effective data management
systems for research data outputs. A spectrum of authoritative blogs focus
on the open movement, including the DCC's Digital Curation Blog, Peter
Suber's Open Access News, and Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog. Web 2.0
technologies and interactive mapping products have cleared a path for
research organizations to investigate and disclose their findings in a
novel and interesting manner. The data used and generated in e-research
activities can boast a very high degree of complexity, and can manifest
itself in different forms in accordance with the discipline. How libraries
can engage with e-research is a common topic of discussion among many
groups, and often these discussions reach the conclusion that libraries
could facilitate data curation.
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