Imagine Cup Challenges Students to Save Earth With
Technology
Agence France Presse (04/24/08)
Six teams, chosen from a field of 16,000 competitors, this week displayed
their software programs designed to help preserve the environment at the
Imagine Cup, Microsoft's annual innovation challenge. Worldwide, 185,000
university students from 100 countries registered to participate in this
year's Imagine Cup. One team from each country will participate in the
challenge in Paris in July. "It is our competition to generate passion in
teens to use technology to change the world," says Microsoft's Chris
Weber. Rochester Institute of Technology students took the U.S.
championship with their low-cost combination of sensors and software that
essentially allows home owners to monitor themselves and alerts them to
energy waste. The RIT team says their invention is an affordable and
advanced form of the "smart home" technology that could allow people to
control their household systems through the Internet. RIT student Adam
Risi says their device adds another layer to the smart home by allowing it
to tell owners when there is a problem that could be fixed to conserve
energy. This year Imagine Cup included categories for video games and
photography. The winning video game was "Ecocism," in which players
maneuver animated hovercrafts in a quest to reforest a barren Earth and
fight off spider-like robots trying to destroy the trees. "The raw
potential and creativity that these students show in their projects help me
to feel extremely optimistic about our future," says Microsoft's Scott
Davidson.
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'Revolutionary' Collective Intelligence of Users Touted
at Web 2.0 Expo
Computerworld (04/23/08) Havenstein, Heather
O'Reilly Media President Tim O'Reilly said at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo
that the advent of the Internet as a platform represents an "amazing
revolution in human augmentation" comparable to the emergence of literacy.
The expo's theme was Web 2.0's ability to tap the collective intelligence
of many users. "The real heart of Web 2.0 is collective intelligence,
which I have defined as harnessing the network effect to build applications
that get better the more people use them," O'Reilly said. "Applications
that are built on open, decentralized networks actually lead to new
concentrations of power." O'Reilly encouraged enterprises to realize that
enterprise data contains hidden meaning and useful information that can be
harnessed with Web 2.0 tools. New York University professor Clay Shirky
argued that people have a vast "cognitive surplus" that Web 2.0
technologies can draw upon. He calculated, for instance, that all of
Wikipedia's constituent parts--lines of code, page edits, etc.--encompass
100 million hours of human cognition, and that the cognitive surplus
typically consumed by the 200 billion hours of television Americans watch
annually could potentially yield thousands of new Wikipedia projects a
year.
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A CluE in the Search for Data-Intensive Computing
National Science Foundation (04/23/08) Cruikshank, Dana W.
The National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and
Engineering (CISE) directorate has released a solicitation for proposals
for the new Cluster Exploratory (CluE) initiative, which was announced as
part of an arrangement between Google, IBM, and NSF. NSF hopes the
initiative will lead to innovations in data-intensive computing and also
serve as an example for future collaborative efforts between the private
sector and academic computing researchers. CluE will give NSF-funded
researchers access to software and services running on a Google-IBM cluster
and allocate cluster computing resources for a broad range of proposals
that will explore the potential of data-intensive computing to contribute
to science and engineering research. "The software and services that run
on these data clusters provide a brand new paradigm for highly parallel,
highly reliable distributed computing, especially for processing massive
amounts of data," says CISE assistant director Jeannette Wing. NSF will
select proposals from academic researchers who will be able to access the
cluster, with the NSF providing support to the researchers to conduct their
work. Google and IBM will also provide support as well as cover the costs
associated with operating the cluster.
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Earnings Gap Narrower for Women in IT
CRA Bulletin (04/25/08) Vegso, Jay
The difference in what men earn and what women earn is lower in several
professional-level IT occupations than it is in the overall workforce,
according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median weekly
earnings for women in all occupations last year was $614, or 80 percent of
men's median weekly earnings. But women who were computer software
engineers fared better, with median weekly earnings that were 87 percent of
men's median weekly earnings. Meanwhile, female computer and information
systems managers' median weekly earnings of $1,363 amounted to 85 percent
of the $1,596 men in the same position earned. Conversely, the biggest pay
gap between men and women in professional-level IT professions was in the
network systems and data communications analyst position. The median
weekly earnings for women in that position amounted to just 72 percent of
men's median weekly earnings.
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SDSC, UCSD Mark Earth Day With Panel Discussion on
'Green' Computing Technologies
University of California, San Diego (04/22/08) Zverina, Jan
The San Diego Supercomputer Center and UC San Diego's Rady School of
Management hosted a panel of academic and industry experts on Earth Day to
discuss ways to make the world's rapidly expanding computer infrastructure
more environmentally friendly. The discussion focused on promising
research and techniques that could improve the energy efficiency of
computing systems. A recent EPA study found that electricity use by
servers and data centers in the U.S. was 1.5 percent of total energy
consumption in 2006, and that usage would double in five years. Panelists
at the UCSD event included UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering professor
Tajana Simunic Rosing, who discussed her research on power and thermal
management of computer systems. Rosing said that intelligent power
management of computer systems, such as monitoring and taking advantage of
variations in workloads, can lead to large energy savings. Sun
Microsystems distinguished engineer Kenny Gross highlighted software
innovations at Sun that have overcome many challenges associated with
traditional hardware-based instrumentation approaches. Lastly, IBM Almaden
Research Center program director Winfried Wilcke discussed energy-related
trends in computer technology and systems architecture, including the
importance of efficient cooling in data centers and some of the
opportunities to boost power efficiency through technology improvements at
the system and chip levels.
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FBI Releases Details of Expansive Data-Sharing
Program
CongressDaily (04/23/08) Noyes, Andrew
The FBI has released more information about an initiative that promises to
create a powerful high-tech clearinghouse for conducting nationwide
criminal searches. The FBI disclosed that the Law Enforcement National
Data Exchange (N-DEx) will serve as a secure Web site for searching and
analyzing crime data from the various agencies. Agents will be able to use
N-DEx to conduct criminal searches by "modus operandi," and to concentrate
on identifying factors such as clothing, tattoos, associates, and cars, all
from a single access point. The software for the information-sharing
project will be able to analyze data to determine criminal activity
hotspots and crime trends, assess the level of threat for individuals and
addresses, and offer visualization and mapping capabilities. N-DEx is
expected to be fully operational in 2010. N-DEx will offer capabilities
similar to CopLink and the U.S. Navy's LiNX program, both of which have
been "growing organically," according to the Center for Democracy and
Technology's Jim Dempsey, who says the FBI is taking a "big bang" approach
with N-DEx. Christopher Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union
says the massive database could be an attractive target.
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Interview With Donald Knuth
InformIT (04/25/08) Binstock, Andrew
Computer scientist Donald E. Knuth, winner of ACM's A.M. Turing Award in
1974, says in an interview that open-source code has yet to reach its full
potential, and he anticipates that open-source programs will start to be
totally dominant as the economy makes a migration from products to
services, and as increasing numbers of volunteers come forward to tweak the
code. Knuth admits that he is unhappy about the current movement toward
multicore architecture, complaining that "it looks more or less like the
hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they're trying to pass
the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by
giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!" He
acknowledges the existence of important parallelism applications but
cautions that they need dedicated code and special-purpose methods that
will have to be significantly revised every several years. Knuth maintains
that software produced via literate programming was "significantly better"
than software whose development followed more traditional methodologies,
and he speculates that "if people do discover nice ways to use the
newfangled multithreaded machines, I would expect the discovery to come
from people who routinely use literate programming." Knuth cautions that
software developers should be careful when it comes to adopting trendy
methods, and expresses strong reservations about extreme programming and
reusable code. He says the only truly valuable thing he gets out of
extreme programming is the concept of working in teams and reviewing each
other's code. Knuth deems reusable code to be "mostly a menace," and says
that "to me, 're-editable code' is much, much better than an untouchable
black box or toolkit."
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Google Taps Morgan Stanley Vet for CIO
Washington Post (04/24/08) Weisenthal, Joseph
Benjamin Fried, a programmer who rose through the ranks to run much of
Morgan Stanley's computing infrastructure, will join Google as its chief
information officer. Google's previous CIO, Doug Merrill, announced plans
in March to depart the search giant for a new position at record label EMI.
Previous interviews with Merrill noted the challenges he found running the
tech department at Google, where most employees don't want to follow
instructions from a centralized technology group. Fried, who serves on the
editorial advisory board of the ACM's Queue magazine, will leave his post
as Morgan Stanley's Managing Director of Information Technology as of May
2.
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Multicore Code Booster
HPC Wire (04/25/08)
A paper that investigates the issue of how to optimize multicore
supercomputer utilization using the lattice Bolzmann code has earned a Best
Paper Award in the application track at the IEEE International Parallel and
Distributed Processing Symposium. "The computing revolution towards
massive on-chip parallelism is moving forward with relatively little
concrete evidence on how to best to use these technologies for real
applications," wrote CRD researcher Samuel Williams in the paper. Williams
and the other researchers devised a code generator that could efficiently
and productively optimize a lattice Bolzmann code to support augmented
performance on multicore supercomputers. They opted for the lattice
Bolzmann code employed to model turbulence in magnetohydrodynamics
simulations that play an important role in physics research. The code's
performance on traditional multicore systems was usually poor, and the
improvement yielded by the optimization research was significantly higher
than any published to date. Insight into the construction of effective
multicore applications, compilers, and other tools was another benefit of
the research.
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IT Labor Shortage or Not, Gaps Remain
Baseline (04/23/08) Chickowski, Ericka
One in four CIOs say finding skilled IT professionals is their greatest
staffing challenge, reveals a recent Robert Half International survey.
Leaders of major companies have urged the government to increase the number
of H-1B visas to help fill the gap, but others say that H-1B visas take
jobs away from American workers and lower industry salaries. However,
hiring managers looking for specific qualifications say it does not really
matter if there are copious amounts of technology workers in the workforce,
it only matters if their organizations can find the right workers for
available positions. Many technology recruiters and industry insiders say
there may be enough IT workers applying for jobs, but there are gaps in
select skill sets that employers require to keep their IT department
running. Many of the missing skills are nontechnical skills related to
management. "What we're finding and what we're hearing is that companies
no longer want people just with strong technical skills," says the Computer
Technology Industry Association's Steven Ostrowski. "They need to have a
combination of technical and business knowledge in that understanding how
it fits into the business interests or the business operations of the
organization they work for." Beyond management skills, security skills
also are in high demand, according to a recent CompTIA survey, which found
that 74 percent of 3,500 IT professionals and employers cited security
skills as the top qualification needed. Moreover, just 57 percent of those
surveyed said their existing employees had sufficient security skills.
Other skills in demand include knowledge of Web 2.0 applications and Java 2
Platform and Enterprise Edition (J2EE).
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Evolution of Internet Powers Massive Particle Physics
Grid
Network World (04/22/08) Brodkin, Jon
Uncovering clues about the universe's origins is one of the purposes of
the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and distributing the massive volume of
data generated by particle collisions to the thousands of researchers
around the world is the job of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which will
be composed of approximately 20,000 servers. "It's using some advanced
features and new technologies within the Internet to distribute the data,"
says Open Science Grid executive director Ruth Pordes. "It's advancing the
technologies, it's advancing the [data transfer] rates, and it's advancing
the usability and reliability of the infrastructure." Raw data produced by
the collisions is relayed over dedicated 10 Gbps optical-fiber connections
to the CERN Computer Center, and from there routed to tape storage as well
as to a CPU farm that processes information and generates "event summary
data." Eleven Tier-1 sites around the world are then sent subsets of both
the raw data and summaries; each site is linked to CERN though a dedicated
10 Gbps connection, while a general purpose research network is used to
connect Tier-1 facilities to each other. Once reprocessed by the Tier-1
centers, the raw data is circulated to Tier-2 centers for analysis by
physicists via general purpose research networks. Brookhaven National
Laboratory's Michael Ernst says the LHC collisions will generate 10
petabytes to 15 petabytes of data annually. Pordes says Tier-2 researchers
will be able to remotely access the LHC Computing Grid's servers when
running complex experiments based on LHC data.
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UW's Computing Research Prowess Brings Microsoft to
Madison
University of Wisconsin-Madison (04/23/08) Mattmiller, Brian
Microsoft will open the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison later this spring. The advanced development
laboratory will be directed by UW-Madison emeritus computer sciences
professor and Microsoft Technical Fellow David DeWitt. DeWitt says the
development lab will establish an academic partnership with UW-Madison that
directly supports graduate education in computer sciences. "Microsoft is
here because we are doing some of the best database work in the world and
we have produced scores of graduates who have gone on to successful careers
in the industry," Dewitt says. "Our focus will be on continuing the
production of talented graduate students and taking on some of the great
challenges in database systems." Microsoft will support a number of
graduate research assistantships in the department starting this fall, and
DeWitt says the partnership will provide internships to UW-Madison students
and consulting opportunities for UW-Madison faculty. Gurindar Sohi, chair
of the UW-Madison computer sciences department, says the school has a
history of advancing computing, starting when the department shifted from a
mathematical focus to a systems research environment that produced a steady
flow of practical advances in commercial computers.
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Sun Looks to Free Up the Rest of Java
InfoWorld (04/22/08) Krill, Paul
Sun Microsystems is increasing its efforts to spread Java usage by making
it a completely open-source platform that can be packaged with Linux
distributions. Sun is also working with Linux distributors to have them
offer an updated version of OpenJDK, which constitutes the open-source Java
platform. The open sourcing process of the Java platform started in
November 2006, but various components, including some encryption libraries,
graphics libraries, the sound engine, and some SNMP management code could
not be offered under the GNU General Public License. Sun's Rich Sands says
the company has essentially removed most of the encumbrances over the past
year, but there is more work to be done to offer the Java sound engine and
SNMP code as open source. The process is expected to be completed this
year, though developers may be able to proceed without components such as
the sound engine. Sands says once Java is 100 percent open source it can
be shipped as part of Linux. RedMonk analyst Michael Cote says having Java
on Linux will help Sun spread Java as widely as possible.
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High Tech High School Preps Students for IT
Careers
InformationWeek (04/24/08) Jones, K.C.
The Academy of Information Technology and Engineering (AITE) in Stamford,
Conn., is a public high school that focuses on students with a passion for
technology, information systems, engineering, and digital electronics.
AITE students are defying numerous studies that show U.S. students are
falling behind their peers in other countries in science, technology,
engineering, and math. In addition to technology, the students are
interested in current affairs, international politics, travel, and science,
and much of their success is because of the school's architects and
administrators. Unlike other schools, AITE's hallways and classrooms are
filled with natural daylight with floor-to-ceiling windows. Every student
is given a school-issued laptop that can connect to the Internet through
Wi-Fi. The school offers over 600 students more than 30 IT electives,
including architectural design, CAD technology, civil engineering,
geographic information systems, Web production, robotics, pre-engineering,
and digital electronics. Students interested in classes not offered at the
school can take virtual classes online, and AP classes are offered by the
University of Connecticut, Norwalk Community College, and the University of
New Haven. Students apply through a lottery system, and AITE accepts
students at all performance levels as long as they commit to the school's
high standards. "These children now and, in future generations, are going
to be digital masters," says AITE principal Paul Gross.
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What Can I, Robot, Do With That?
ICT Results (04/21/08)
The MACS (multi-sensory autonomous cognitive system) project is using the
cognitive theory of "affordances," developed by psychologist James J.
Gibson, to teach robots how to use objects they encounter in their
environment instead of focusing on identifying what they are. Computer
vision and knowledge techniques may identify an object as a chair, but a
system of affordances will tell the robot that the object can be used for
sitting. An affordance system will allow a robot to view an object of a
certain height and width and know if it is acceptable for sitting, but the
system will also allow the robot to make decisions such as if the object is
light enough to carrying or if it needs to be pushed, or if it could be
used for other purposes such as holding a door open. The goal of
affordance-based machine cognition is to create a robot capable of using
whatever it finds in its environment to complete a specific task.
"Affordance-based perception would look at whether something is graspable,
or if there is an opening, rather than worrying about what an object is
called," says MACS project coordinator Erich Rome. The European
Union-funded project successfully created an integrated affordance-inspired
robot control system, which includes the implementation of a perception
module, a behavior system, an execution control module, a planner, a
learning module, and an affordance representation repository.
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Optimal Online Communication
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) (04/16/08)
Dutch researcher Peter Korteweg has developed algorithms that focus on
optimizing communication to a central point in wireless networks, which is
a critical problem for online networks. Korteweg looked to reduce
communication costs, the time needed to collect data, and the processing
time of messages. He was able to gain a better understanding of the impact
of fast communication on the quality of the algorithm. Also, communication
costs and message delays were in line with the best offline solution.
Eindhoven University of Technology headed the project, which was funded
with a grant from the Free Competition, formerly the Open Competition, of
NWO Physical Sciences.
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USC, Retirement Homes to Collaborate on Technology for
the Aging Population
The State (SC) (04/17/08) Hammond, James T.
The University of South Carolina, the Fraunhofer Institute for Software
Engineering of Kaiserlautern, Germany, and the Palmetto Health System of
Columbia, S.C., are collaborating on a project dedicated to developing
technological solutions to the problems of aging. The Lutheran Homes of
South Carolina and Still Hopes Episcopal Retirement Community have agreed
to participate in the collaborative research, which will focus on three
areas. First, the researchers will work to make homes safer for seniors,
including the development of technological systems that help monitor their
needs and assist with daily activities that often become more difficult
with age. The second objective will focus on examining and promoting
mobility outside the home by improving transportation safety and driving
responses in seniors. Third, the researchers will study brain health to
slow or prevent the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
The products and services will be developed through USC's SeniorSmart
Center, which will eventually comprise 10 to 20 researchers dedicated to
helping seniors remain independent and engaged in their communities.
Dieter Rombach, head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software Engineering,
says improving the quality of life is particularly important for Germany,
which has the oldest average age of any industrialized country.
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To Defeat a Malicious Botnet, Build a Friendly One
New Scientist (04/22/08) Inman, Mason
University of Washington computer scientists want to create swarms of good
computers to neutralize hostile computers, which they say is an inexpensive
way to handle botnets of any size. Current botnet countermeasures are
being overwhelmed by the growing size of botnets, the researchers say, but
creating swarms of good computers could neutralize distributed
denial-of-service attacks. The UW system, called Phalanx, uses its own
large network of computers to shield the protected server. Instead of
accessing the server directly, all information passes through the herd of
"mailbox" computers. The good botnet computers only pass information when
the server requests it, allowing the server to work at its own pace instead
of being flooded by requests. Phalanx also requires computers requesting
information from the server to solve a computational puzzle, which takes a
small amount of time for a normal Web user but significantly slows down a
zombie computer that sends numerous requests. The researchers simulated an
attack by a million-computer botnet on a server protected by a network of
7,200 mailbox computers running Phalanx. Even when the majority of mailbox
computers were under attack, the server was able to run normally.
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Computational Photography
American Scientist (04/08) Vol. 96, No. 2, P. 94; Hayes, Brian
The concept of computational photography is rooted in efforts by imaging
laboratories to develop cameras that can not only digitize images, but
carry out extensive computations on image data. Digital photography has
for the most part been focused on rendering images in a manner that closely
resembles traditional chemical photography, but a computer-equipped camera
could enhance images with details that other cameras miss. Through the
capture of more information about the light field, focus and depth of field
can be corrected after the fact, while motion blur can be eliminated with
other methods. Recording the complete light field requires a sensor
capable of measuring both the intensity and the direction of every incident
light ray, and while such a task is currently impossible for a single
sensor chip, additional hardware can approximate the effect. One strategy
to record a light field involves incorporating an array of "microlenses" in
front of the sensor within a camera, with each individual microlens
focusing an image of the main lens aperture onto a region of the sensor
chip so that the sensor can perceive multiple small images and view the
scene from slightly different angles. A light-field camera can facilitate
shifts in point of view, while software for viewing the stored data set
allows the photographer to move the plane of focus back and forth through
the scene or generate a composite image with high depth of field. One
method for dealing with motion blur involves a "flutter shutter" camera
that opens and closes the shutter repeatedly in a nonuniform pattern so
that the information needed to correct blur can be captured. Giving
photographs a non-photorealistic look is the object of an experiment
involving a camera that emphasizes three-dimensional geometric structures
through the employment of a diagrammatic rendering style that can ease the
distinction of parts against a dynamic background.
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