ACM Honors Innovator of Automated Tools for
Mathematics
AScribe Newswire (05/13/08)
ACM will award the 2007 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award to
Bruno Buchberger for his efforts in developing the theory of Groebner
Bases. The theory, which is named after his adviser Wolfgang Groebner,
helped lay the foundation for computer algebra. The industry relies
heavily on the theory of Groebner Bases, and Buchberger's efforts has led
to the development of automated tools that help solve problems involving
robotics, computer-aided design, systems design, and modeling biological
systems. Buchberger, a professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz,
Austria, also developed an algorithm for finding these bases, and major
computer algebra software systems such as Mathematica, Macsyma, Magma,
Maple, and Reduce use it to solve mathematical problems. The Kanellakis
Theory and Practice Award was established to honor theoretical
accomplishments that have an enormous impact on computing. Buchberger will
be honored at ACM's annual Awards Banquet on June 21, 2008, in San
Francisco, Calif.
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Two New Ways to Explore the Universe, in Vivid 3-D
New York Times (05/13/08) P. D3; Lohr, Steve
Microsoft researchers have devoted years of work to the WorldWide
Telescope, a project that will allow users to explore highly detailed and
animated 3D astronomical images via a Web site and free downloadable
software that became available on May 13. Meanwhile, the Google Sky
project is Google's attempt to apply its searchable map service to space
images, and both companies have suspended their traditional antagonistic
attitudes in the service of these efforts, which are seen as a benefit to
scientific discovery and public education. The WorldWide Telescope boasts
richer graphics and has generated special software to reduce polar
distortion in the rendering of images of spherical space objects. The
architects of the WorldWide Telescope and Google Sky share a fascination
with astronomy. Computer scientist Jim Gray's interest in tackling the
computing challenges of making the vast corpus of astronomical data
accessible and usable for researchers served as the inspiration for the
WorldWide Telescope. Educators hope that such projects, with their visual
splendor and interactivity, will cultivate an interest in astronomy among
the Net generation. "It's really encouraging that both Microsoft and
Google are there, pushing these powerful tools for science education
forward," says Daniel Atkins, who heads the National Science Foundation's
Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
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Google Begins Blurring Faces in Street View
CNet (05/13/08) Shankland, Stephen
Responding to privacy concerns, Google has started testing face-blurring
technology that it will use on its Street View application. The technology
uses a computer algorithm to find faces in Google's image database, and
then blurs out the faces, says Google's John Hanke. Google has started
testing the technology on images from Manhattan, but Hanke says he expects
the company to deploy the technology more broadly. He says dealing with
privacy issues is a difficult but necessary challenge, and compares the
issues some have with Street View to issues that occurred when Google
introduced its aerial views on Google Maps. Hanke says the face-blurring
technology, which took a year to develop, is based on prior research that
took several years. Face detection is a decades-old computer science
problem that is starting to be used in real-world applications, including
digital cameras that track and properly expose subjects or take a picture
only when subjects are smiling. Computers still struggle to recognize
faces, and with Street View Google must often deal with faces that are
obscured by hair, telephone poles, or oblique views.
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45th Design Automation Conference Panels Cover Industry's
Varied Interests, Challenges, Direction, Future
Business Wire (05/13/08)
The 45th Design Automation Conference (DAC) will offer 29 Technical
Program and Pavilion panels on the latest trends in the design of chips and
embedded software. Nine panels in the Technical Program will address
multicore architectures, electronic system level design, and wireless, the
theme of this year's conference, in addition to verification, thermal,
design for manufacturability, and custom design and synthesis. One panel
will focus on the needs of the industry during the next White House
administration, and how it should approach the upcoming election. There
will be 20 Pavilion Panels over the course of the four-day program. "Gary
Smith on EDA: Trends" and "What's Hot at DAC" will kick of the Pavilion
Panels Program, which will conclude with "Your Functional Verification
Roadmap: OVM, VMM or Roll Your Own?" "The Panel Committee worked
exceptionally hard this year to bring attendees the experts on the latest
trends, the new technologies, and the latest industry debates," says Panel
Chair Sachin Sapatnekar of the University of Minnesota. DAC is scheduled
for June 8-13, 2008, at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, Calif.
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'We Don't Know What We Should Be Teaching'
Software Development Times (05/01/08)No. 197, P. 27; Mullins, Robert
Optimizing the capabilities of multicore processors in all sorts of
products requires bridging the chasm between processors' and software's
capability, and industry sources say the long-term focus should be on
figuring out a way to write code for parallel computing. "We don't even
know for sure what we should be teaching, but we know we should be changing
what we're teaching," says University of California, Berkeley professor
David Patterson, a former president of ACM. UC Berkeley and the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will split $20 million from Intel and
Microsoft to underwrite Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers over
the next five years, with Berkeley's share going toward the enhancement of
research already done by the school's Parallel Computing Laboratory and the
hiring of 50 researchers to focus on the problem of writing software for
parallelism. Patterson says Berkeley has started introducing freshmen to
parallel computing through classes focusing on the "map-reduce" method,
while upperclassmen are being given a grounding in "sticky" parallelism
issues such as load balancing and synchronization. Patterson acknowledges
that an entirely new programming language may need to be invented in order
to tackle the challenge of parallel computing. Brown University professor
Maurice Herlihy says a more likely possibility is the evolution of parallel
programming features by existing languages--a view endorsed by AMD's
Margaret Lewis, who cites the necessity of interim solutions to amend
legacy software written for unicore processors along with software under
development. Lewis says AMD is trying to infuse parallel coding methods
via compilers and code analyzers, noting that with these interim solutions
"programmers aren't getting the full benefits of parallelism ... but it
runs better in a multicore environment."
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New Games Are Designed to Make Computers Smarter
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (05/14/08) Smith, Pohla
Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn and his team have
developed GWAPS (games with a purpose), free online games designed to
improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial intelligence,
and teach computers to see. One GWAP game called Squigl is intended to
teach image recognition by having players trace objects in photographs.
Another image recognition game called Matchn has players judge which of two
images is more appealing. The game Tag a Tune asks players to describe
songs, using descriptions such as happy or sad, so computers can search for
music using more than just the words in the title. The fourth game, called
Verbosity, is intended to help computers collect facts. The GWAP Web site
also has a game previously developed by von Ahn called ESP, in which two
players each try to guess the words the other player uses to describe an
image. Von Ahn says more games will be added to the site, including a game
about language translation and one about classifying words. Von Ahn says
the knowledge collected by the GWAP games will be put on the Web for anyone
to access and learn from.
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What Is It About Girls and IT?
Financial Times Digital Business (05/14/08) P. 1; Twentyman, Jessica
Despite being heavy users of technology, women widely avoid studying IT
even though there is great demand for female skills in the field. "I'm
always urging my human resources department to get me more resumes from
women and encouraging my managers to bring their daughters into work," says
Managed Objects CEO Siki Giunta. "We need to make young women understand
the scope of this business and the excellent pay and promotion
opportunities it has to offer, regardless of gender." Only one in five
members of the IT workforce worldwide is a woman, and research suggests
that statistic has declined in recent years. Research in Motion (RIM) vice
president Charmaine Eggberry says news of the declining participation of
women is troubling because of the increasing influence technology has on
our lives and the fact that women make up half of the working population.
"There's a growing disconnect between who's using technology and who's
delivering it and that needs to be addressed," says Eggberry, who adds that
the situation could get worse before it gets better. A recent RIM survey
found that 90 percent of young people of both sexes between the ages of 11
and 16 say they think using technology is cool, with respondents saying
they regularly chat with friends about technology, but only 28 percent of
girls have considered a career in technology, compared to 52 percent of
boys. In addition to providing role models, experts say people in the
industry need to show that not everyone in the technology industry is an
engineer, and that companies need people from a variety of backgrounds that
can lead projects and analyze how businesses run.
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Electronic Voting System Tested at University
Newcastle University (05/14/08)
A new electronic vote capture and counting system developed at Newcastle
University was recently given its first major test. The Pret a Voter
system, created by Newcastle University professor Peter Ryan, is designed
to overcome the problems that have plagued computerized voting systems
worldwide. Ryan says Pret a Voter is far less susceptible to error,
hacking, and corruption than either manual counting or other
electronic-voting systems. The test was conducted with the support of the
Electoral Reform Services and Newcastle University's Center for Software
Reliability and School of Computing Science. The test was an election
between three charities, each trying to secure student votes. Student
voters were given a paper ballot and asked to draw a cross by a candidate,
but the positions of the candidates on each ballot were selected at random.
After the cross had been drawn, the student tore off the list of
candidates so it was impossible to tell which charity had been chosen. The
strip of paper with the mark was scanned into a computer, along with the
ballot's serial number, which allowed the computer to allocate the vote to
the correct candidate. After the election, voters could check to see that
their vote was correctly cast by logging on to a Web site and entering
their ballot's serial number.
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IBM Close to Breaking Petaflops Barrier
EE Times (05/12/08) Merritt, Rick
The administrators of the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers
in the world have given IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory more time to
test the performance of the Road Runner system for the June rankings. The
Los Alamos team hopes to break the petaflops barrier. "We have made a
major exception for them until May 15 and can provide a few more days
beyond that," says University of Tennessee professor Jack Dongarra, who
helps manage the Top 500 list. "It's a big deal if they can do it, so we
want to give them every possibility." The Road Runner makes use of AMD
dual-core Opteron processors and an IBM version of the Cell processor. A
supercomputer at the University of Texas in Austin, an Intel Xeon system at
NASA, and a Cray XP4 system at Oak Ridge National Lab are also close to
surpassing a quadrillion floating point operations per second, but they are
more likely to be tested in time for the November rankings. The BlueGene/L
system at Lawrence Berkeley Lab has been the most powerful supercomputer in
the world since November 2004, and it can now reach about 478 TFlops.
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Developers' Role Shifting From Apps to Platforms
InfoWorld (05/12/08) Krill, Paul
Sun engineer Todd Fast told developers at the recent JavaOne conference
that their jobs are being taken over by untrained neophytes. Fast said
that applications have shorter lifespans and more non-professionals are
getting into the application development space, so career software
developers will increasingly work as platform builders instead of
application builders. During his speech, Fast made three predictions.
First, that software engineers will become an endangered species. Second,
high school and college students will take over the jobs of software
engineers. Third, professional engineers will not mind because there will
be plenty of work in other areas. Fast said it has become common for
casual developers, who do not identify themselves as engineers, to use
templates in PHP and create applications for social networking sites,
blogs, and RSS feeds. Applications are even being built out of existing
applications, and there are not enough professional software developers to
keep up with the increasing demand. Web applications are being built to
fill short-term needs, and there has been a wave of non-traditional Web
applications, such as widgets, social applications, mashups, and
situational applications. Attendees at Fast's presentation tended to agree
that the role of the professional is shifting, though some say not as
quickly as Fast believes. "I don't think it's coming as fast as he is
pointing out, but it's probably coming," says software engineer Ceco
Ivanov, who says the shift will happen in the next 10 to 15 years, not over
the next two as Fast predicts.
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MIT Students Show Power of Open Cell Phone Systems
Associated Press (05/12/08) Bergstein, Brian
Mobile software projects designed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) students using Google's Android open source operating system indicate
that cell phones could soon challenge the Internet as a source of
innovation. Most of the projects produced by MIT professor Hal Abelson's
seven teams of students involved programs that let phones monitor and track
the user's physical location, or the locations of their friends, to help
them meet up and participate in activities. One project named GeoLife
notifies users of tasks they have on their to-do lists when they are near
something related to one of the tasks, such as the grocery store, while
another named Flare was designed to help small businesses track their
drivers. The assignment was particularly challenging for the students
because Android-based phones are not expected to be available until the
second half of the year, so they had to develop their programs using
software that simulates a phone's operation. The idea that cell phones
should be open to new programs in the same way PCs are to Web sites has
recently taken hold, and more companies are starting to open up their
phones. In addition to Android, the LiMo Foundation is backing open source
phones, and Apple has recently taken steps to allow third-party developers
to create new applications for its iPhone.
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Dim Outlook For H-1B Changes in This Congress?
CNet (05/12/08) Broache, Anne
George Fishman, chief counsel to the Republican side of a U.S. House of
Representatives Judiciary Committee panel on immigration, says the U.S.
Congress likely will not increase the number of H-1B visas anytime soon.
Fishman says that proposals to raise the annual H-1B cap would sail through
Congress if called to a floor vote, but political considerations mean it
will probably not happen in the near future. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas),
Fishman's boss and the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has
proposed an emergency H-1B increase to 195,000 in 2008 and 2009, which
would be the highest level since its peak between 2001 and 2003. Smith's
bill does not propose new checks on the system, but Fishman says Smith is
aware of concerns over H-1B abuse and wants to create a balance. Opponents
of increasing the H-1B limit say abuse of the system has displaced American
workers and depressed wages, and Fishman acknowledges that the Labor
Department is not as well-equipped to fight suspected H-1B fraud as it
could be. Part of the reason, Fishman says, is that the system is based on
"attestations" from employers that they are hiring employees with the
proper qualifications at the requisite wage levels, and Labor cannot open
an investigation until someone files a complaint. An aide to Rep. Steny
Hoyer (D-Md.) says Democrats will continue to hold hearings to move H-1B
visa reform forward.
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Designing Bug Perception Into Robots
ICT Results (05/12/08)
European researchers aim to enhance the functionality of robots and
robotic tools by instilling them with perceptive abilities modeled after
those of insects. The SPARK project team has devised a new software
architecture for artificial cognitive systems designed to substantially
augment the ability of robots to respond to changing environmental
conditions and to learn behavior in response to external stimuli. The
robot's perceptive capabilities are improved within the spatial-temporal
array computer-based structure architecture by its ability to utilize data
culled from visual, audio, and tactile sensors to organize a dynamically
evolving pattern, which is subsequently employed to determine the robot's
movements. A core research goal was developing a machine able to build
knowledge independent of human control, and the basic building blocks of
the insect brain were used as the basis for the proposed artificial
cognitive system architecture. The device can autonomously learn via the
cognitive system based on a blend of fundamental reflexive behaviors and
feedback from external environmental data, and thus far the demonstrations
have incorporated such basic behaviors as the ability of a robot to guide
itself toward a specific sound source. The SPARK project's innovations
have fueled software and hardware advancements for machine perception
enhancement, and products produced by some of the project's partners have
already incorporated the researchers' cognitive visual algorithms. The
follow-up SPARK II project will further investigate insect brain
neurobiology to improve, evaluate, and generalize the SPARK cognitive
architecture.
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Commencement 2008: Gaining Independence Through Video
Games
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (05/13/08) Cleveland, Amber
Three Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students have developed Capable
Shopper, a computer game designed to encourage independence among disabled
individuals. Graduating seniors Jennifer Ash, Zach Barth, and Peter
Mueller led an interdisciplinary team of students that included
programmers, game designers, character and level artists, electrical
engineers, and music composers to create interactive simulations to help
individuals with disabilities develop life skills and improve independence.
The CapAbility Games Research Project was done in collaboration with the
Adult Services Division of the Center for Disability Services in Albany,
N.Y., with the goal of creating a game that specifically addresses the
needs of the center's users. Capable Shopper simulates a trip to a local
grocery store. Players must maneuver through the virtual grocery store,
which is based on the blueprints from a nearby grocery store where the
center's users frequently shop. The players use a specially designed
joystick or head mouse depending on their mobility level. A monitor in
front of the user shows the layout of the store and a second monitor
displays a shopping list. Players select a meal they would like to make
and must then find all of the items needed for that meal. "Games like
Capable Shopper illustrate the potential for new gaming genres such as
serious games that combine the strengths of interactivity with multimedia
to provide engaging simulations in communication, education, and artistic
expression," says RPI professor Kathleen Ruiz, faculty leader of the
CapAbility Research Project.
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Who Killed My Hard Drive?
Dark Reading (05/06/08) Wilson, Tim
Crashed hard drives can cost a company thousands of dollars in repairs,
lost productivity, and lost revenue, according to a recent study by the
University of Pepperdine. The study looked at the most frequent causes of
drive error and the extent to which a "fatal" error could harm a computer.
Hard drive failure was the factor behind 38 percent of data loss
incidents--second only to physical theft--and in about 30 percent of these
cases, data was lost as a result of drive problems that corrupted the disk
and made it unintelligible. Attacks by hackers and human error accounted
for about 13 percent and 12 percent of data loss cases, respectively. When
the IT cost of a failed drive--approximately $1,150--is coupled with the
cost of lost productivity--around $1,750--the total cost of each failed
drive comes to roughly $2,900, according to the study. If faced with a
failed drive, a company should leave recovery to a professional, since
around 15 percent of all non-recoverable data loss incidents in the study
were caused by improper recovery attempts. "Non-professional tools and
system software often fix errors by overwriting the file system on the
drive," the authors say. "Though this may repair the file system, it
permanently destroys the data."
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Linkoping University Researchers Break 'Unbreakable'
Crypto
Linkoping University (04/21/08) Falklof, Lennart
Researchers at Linkoping University in Sweden have discovered that quantum
computing is not 100 percent secure. Quantum computing was considered
unbreakable because quantum-mechanical objects cannot be measured or
manipulated without being disturbed, and an attempt to copy a
quantum-cryptographic key in transit would lead to extra noise that is
noticeable and would not yield any usable information. However, Jan-Ake
Larsson, associate professor of applied mathematics, and his student Jorgen
Cederlof have found that it is theoretically possible for an unauthorized
person to extract the key and hide their activities by simultaneously
manipulating the quantum-mechanical and regular communication needed for
quantum cryptography. "The concern involves authentication, intended to
secure that the message arriving is the same as the one that was sent,"
Larsson says. In an article in the journal IEEE Transactions on
Information Theory, Larsson and Cederlof also describe a solution that
would secure quantum cryptography.
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Swarming Spy Bots That Share Information Being Built for
Military
Computerworld (05/09/08) Gaudin, Sharon
BAE Systems is creating microbots inspired by birds and insects for the
U.S. Army Research Laboratory. The robots could eventually be used by
soldiers to locate nearby enemies, determine their positions and weaponry,
and listen in on their conversations. BAE's Aaron Penkacik says the robots
will operate as a distributed system, or swarm, to gather information and
send it back in a unified stream. For example, a swarm of robots the size
of large insects could contain one robot that captures video, another that
records sound, and another that detects chemical agents. The robots will
share the information and send it back to a command center or soldier in a
unified message. BAE scientists recently started designing the system,
which is expected to be a five-year project, but Penkacik says soldiers may
be able to use basic models of the spy robots earlier than that while
engineers continue to refine the machines. Penkacik says the biggest
challenge is to make the robots work collaboratively. "We need to work on
collaborative behavior with multiple robots so they can do distributed data
fusion in an ad hoc network that's moving in real time," he says. "All the
information you get from these different sensors is what we're looking at
to create knowledge that helps the war fighter stay alive."
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