ACM Group Honors Research Team for Helping Computers
Solve Practical Problems
AScribe Newswire (05/28/08)
ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory (SIGACT)
has named Yale University professor Daniel A. Spielman and Boston
University professor Shang-Hua Teng the winners of the 2008 Godel Prize.
Their paper, "Smoothed Analysis of Algorithms: Why the Simplex Algorithm
Usually Takes Polynomial Time," helped explain the effectiveness of
algorithms on real data and real computers for solving business and other
practical problems. Spielman and Teng introduced the Smoothed Analysis in
2001, and the technique has served a key role in research efforts since
then. Their findings were published in the Journal of the ACM in 2004.
SIGACT and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science
(EATCS) will present Spielman and Teng with the award for outstanding
papers in theoretical computer science at the International Colloquium on
Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP), which takes place July 6-13,
in Reykjavik, Iceland. The prize comes with a $5,000 award.
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Pumping Up the Comp Sci Pipeline
ZDNet (05/28/08) Dawson, Christopher
ACM's Computer Science Teachers Associations (CSTA) is working with
Google, using a grant from the National Science Foundation, on a two-day
conference to improve connections between university computer science
programs, K-12 educators, and private industry. The conference will focus
on outreach programs that college students and faculty can hold for primary
and secondary schools as part of a larger effort to promote computer
science careers. CSTA executive director Chris Stephenson says computer
science-related fields are one of the few areas in the weakening economy
that are expected to experience strong growth over the next few years. She
notes that an increasing number of computer science workers run health care
systems, banking, and other "backbone" industries. Stephenson says the
conference will bring together stakeholders in university computer science
education, computer science graduate "consumers," and K-12 educators in an
effort to create lasting partnerships between these groups. The effort is
extremely important as K-12 educators often have a poor understanding of
the nature of computer science while universities and industrial groups
have a poor understanding of the demands on primary and secondary
schools.
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Monkeys Think, Moving Artificial Arm as Own
New York Times (05/29/08) P. A1; Carey, Benedict
University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University brain-machine
researchers have successfully implanted tiny sensors in two monkeys that
enable them to control a mechanical arm using only their thoughts. The
monkeys have been able to reach for and grab food and adjust for the size
and stickiness of the food when necessary. The research suggests that
brain-controlled prosthetics, while still impractical, are within reach.
In previous studies, researchers demonstrated that paralyzed humans could
learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves, and
that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm,
robot hand, or a robot on a treadmill. The new research takes the
technology even further. The monkeys' brains seem to have adopted the
mechanical appendage as part of the body, refining its movement as it
interacted with objects in real time. Experts say the findings are likely
to accelerate interest in human testing, particularly because of the need
to treat head and spinal injuries in veterans. In the experiment, the
monkeys first used a joystick to get a feel for the arm, which has a
shoulder joint, an elbow, and a two-fingered grasping claw. Then a grid
about the size of a freckle was implanted just beneath the monkeys' skulls
on the motor cortex, over a patch of cells known to signal arm and hand
movements. The grid contains 100 tiny electrodes, each one connecting to a
single neuron. The grid was connected to a computer programmed to analyze
the firing of the motor neurons and translate them into arm movements. The
scientists helped the monkeys learn to use the arm using biofeedback, but
after several days the monkeys needed no help.
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DAC Targets 45-nm Design
EE Times (05/28/08) Mokhoff, Nicolas
Key chip design issues involving 45-nm process technology will be
addressed during the Design Automation Conference's special Management Day
session. DAC is scheduled for June 8-13, 2008, at the Anaheim Convention
Center, and the all-day Management Day session will take place on June 10.
Seven executives from fabless companies and independent device
manufacturers will share their tradeoff analysis and decision criteria for
moving to new process technology nodes, optimizing for high-volume
production, overcoming power constraints, and other issues. Intel's
Elinora Yoeli will discuss critical design challenges for the company's
45-nm Atom low-power processor. Philippe Magarshack of ST
Microelectronics' central R&D lab will address 45- and 40-nm low-power
designs with regard to wireless multimedia SOCs. Charles Matar of Qualcomm
will focus on the design challenges for new wireless SOCs using 45-nm
process technology in low-power cell phones. Other speakers include
MediaTek's Andrew Chang, Bob Pitts of Texas Instruments, Microsoft's
Srinivas Nori, and SanDisk's Manuel D'Abreu.
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Web Vote Offered to Military Abroad
Miami Herald (05/26/08) Fineout, Gary
Florida's Okaloosa County plans to use the Internet to make it easier for
U.S. soldiers stationed overseas to vote. Okaloosa elections supervisor
Pat Hollarn's plan would allow those living on or near three military bases
in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan to cast ballots online in the
November election. During a 10-day period before Election Day, overseas
voters will use a computer kiosk to vote on an encrypted electronic ballot,
which will be sent to Florida via the Internet and counted. Poll workers
on site will verify that the voter is registered in Okaloosa County.
Hollarn says her "distance balloting project" is just like other absentee
ballots, except it uses the Internet instead of the mail. However, critics
and voting activists say the project is unsafe and goes against a new law
that requires the state to use paper ballots. Although voting-rights
activists agree that absentee ballots for voters living overseas have been
plagued by significant problems, they say the idea of using the Internet to
transmit ballots is problematic due to security concerns. Hollarn says the
voting mechanism will be safe, emphasizing that the machines and software
being used will be reviewed by an independent team of computer analysts.
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A Low-Cost Multitouch Screen
Technology Review (05/29/08) Greene, Kate
Microsoft recently demonstrated LaserTouch, a new multitouch platform that
includes hardware that is inexpensive enough to retrofit any display into a
touch screen. Microsoft believes that providing inexpensive hardware will
make researchers more inclined to experiment with different form factors
and develop multitouch software. LaserTouch uses a camera mounted on top
of a computer display, with two infrared lasers with widespread beams at
the corners of the display, essentially creating sheets of invisible light.
When a finger touches the screen, it breaks the plane of light, which is
detected by the camera. LaserTouch can be used on high-resolution displays
designed for graphics applications such as photo and video editing, and
because LaserTouch can be fitted to any type of display it could also be
used for office applications such as presentations. In addition to
Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories has developed a touch
table for business collaborations, and Perceptive Pixel has a wall-sized
touch screen that supports multiple inputs. Meanwhile, an open source
touch-screen table is available to the public that allows individuals to
assemble their own touch-screen tables.
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The A-Z of Programming Languages: AWK
Computerworld Australia (05/27/08) Hamilton, Naomi
Columbia University professor Alfred V. Aho co-developed the AWK pattern
matching language, which was founded on the principle of pattern-action
processing for the purpose of handling simple data-processing tasks. Aho
describes AWK as "a language for processing files of text," and attributes
its popularity to the fact that it was a standard program embedded in every
UNIX system. "In AWK we have taken expressive notations and efficient
algorithms founded in computer science and engineered them to run well in
practice," he says. Aho notes that AWK was used by other language
developers as a model for creating more powerful languages such as PERL,
and he thinks AWK's initial popularity resided in its simplicity and the
types of tasks it was made to perform, adding that the concept of
pattern-action programming comes very naturally to people. Aho cites AWK's
consistency since the mid-1980s as another advantage, and observes that
useful programming languages are oftentimes spinoffs of computer
scientists' main focus of research. Aho points out that the initial
deployment of AWK did not have an element of rigorous quality control,
which the language's developers have since redressed with the institution
of a regression test for all AWK features.
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Q&A: Google's Open-Source Balancing Act
CNet (05/28/08) Shankland, Stephen
There must be a significant measure of give and take to Google's
open-source initiatives, and Google open-source programs manager Chris
DiBona says Google repays the open-source community by offering its
modifications back to open-source projects, espousing the open-source
doctrine, and cultivating next-generation open-source programmers. "We
came up with these goals for our group: To support open-source development
in general, which means to support open-source infrastructure; support the
release of open-source code, from Google and in general; and to create more
open-source developers, because especially when I started, there was a
perception that Google took a lot of people from the open-source world and
then went away," he says. DiBona lists the Linux kernel, compilers, and
languages as the three key open-source projects at Google, followed by
libraries such as OpenSSL, PCRE, and zlib. He points to a negative
perception that Google's contributions to the open-source community are not
equal to its usage, which he says is largely inaccurate in view of the fact
that there will always be critics. DiBona notes that Google is releasing a
new project every two or three weeks, or patching scores of projects each
month. He conservatively estimates that about 1 million lines of code are
being released annually by Google. DiBona says Google's projects are
generally released under the Apache 2 license because it boasts the
"fairest language," and he says Google vets or reviews open source for
intellectual property issues before using it.
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Carbon Nanoribbons Hold Out Possibility of Smaller,
Speedier Computer Chips
Stanford Report (05/28/08) Ballon, Massie Santos
Stanford University chemists have developed field-effect transistors using
carbon nanoribbons that could eventually be integrated into
high-performance computer chips to increase their speed and reduce heat
output. Researchers led by professor Hongjie Dai made the Graphene-based
transistors with nanoribbons that require significantly lower temperatures
than silicon-based chips. Dai says previous demonstrations of field-effect
graphene transistors were done at very cold temperatures. Dai's research
group succeeded in making graphene nanoribbons less than 10 nanometers
wide, which allows the devices to operate at room temperature. The
researchers used a chemical process they developed to make nanoribbons, or
strips of carbon 50,000 times thinner than a human hair, that are smoother
and narrower than nanoribbons made with other techniques. While graphene
could either supplement or even replace silicon, part of the problem is
that some nanotubes are made semiconducting and others are made metallic,
which cannot be switched off and would actually act as an electrical short
in a device. All of the narrow graphene nanoribbons made by Dai's team
using their novel chemical technique are semiconductors, but Dai believes
that graphene will not replace silicon anytime soon.
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Crash-Predicting Car Can Brace Itself for Impact
New Scientist (05/27/08) Simonite, Tom
European engineers have run trials on an automobile that safeguards
occupants by strengthening its frame just before a side-on collision using
a crash-prediction system that incorporates software, radar, and cameras.
The frame is strengthened by a metal reinforcing bar, whose deployment
before a collision depends on the safety system anticipating a crash about
230 milliseconds before it occurs. Such brace-for-impact systems are being
facilitated by enhancements to sensors and computing, and car manufacturers
will most likely adopt the sensors and software used in these systems
initially. "We can give conventional in-crash devices like airbags more
time to react," says Continental engineer Joachim Tandler. Roger Hardy of
Britain's Cranfield Impact Center says the decision to incorporate such
safety technologies into motor vehicles is ultimately a matter of
economics. "It comes down to the manufacturers deciding if the extra
weight and cost of installing the system on new cars is worth it."
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Transforming Buses Into Mobile Sensing Platforms
ICT Results (05/26/08)
European researchers' work could lead to public buses being used as mobile
sensing platforms to help gather data to assist with traffic management,
road safety, and hazard alerts. The researchers' test put environmental
sensors and cameras on city buses, enabling buses to serve as transmitters
of measurements, warnings, and videos to authorized people. MORYNE project
researchers perfected a variety of mobile sensing, data acquisition,
analysis, and telecommunications technologies that could be used in public
buses. Among the sensors in use during the test were humidity and
temperature sensors, with some sensors checking on the road surface with
another pair analyzing the air, aiming for resistance to pollution.
Bus-mounted road cameras can also be used to spot cars violating bus-lane
rules and inform police. Looking forward, the MORYNE researchers could
help boost security for bus drivers and passengers. "All the public
transport authorities we spoke to over the project showed a great and
increasing interest for on-board security applications, but it was beyond
the scope of the project," says MORYNE coordinator Patrice Simon. "Still,
we have made significant progress in realizing this type of system, and the
image and sound analysis software to detect aggression is the only major
element currently missing."
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Revisiting Semantic Web's Pros and Cons
InternetNews.com (05/26/08) Adhikari, Richard
Computer scientists see the Semantic Web as a way to connect data from
different sources to create a holistic view of the world, but others
believe the Semantic Web would result in a massive invasion of privacy.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor James Hendler is one of the
scientists looking to promote the Semantic Web. "My work is trying to
integrate heterogeneous data using appropriate amounts of metadata and
doing things with metadata that you can't do with language or specific
data," Hendler says. For example, he says searching for a video on YouTube
would be difficult unless the user knew the name of the artists they wanted
to see, adding that the brief descriptions of videos online are sometimes
helpful, but often they are not descriptive enough or the video is missing
one altogether. However, if the files included a small amount of metadata,
people would be able to find what they are looking for without even knowing
the name of the file they want. However, critics warn that to create a
Semantic Web full of metadata, computers would have to know as much as
possible about everyone and everything online to deal effectively with
simple day-to-day tasks.
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Boston University Researchers Developing Sign Language
Video Dictionary
Canadian Press (05/25/08)
Boston University doctoral student Joan Nash, who has used American Sign
Language (ASL) for most of her life, is part of a team working on an
interactive video project that would create a virtual sign language
dictionary, allowing someone to demonstrate a sign in front of a camera and
have a computer program interpret and explain its meaning. The researchers
are working with a three-year, $900,000 grant from the National Science
Foundation, and are currently in the early stages of the project, which
involves capturing thousands of ASL signs on video. As Nash goes through
the hundreds of words in English, Elizabeth Cassidy, a native ASL speaker,
signs them in front of four different cameras, three in front of her and
one to her right. Two of the cameras in front of her capture close-ups
from different angles and one is a wider shot. The goal is to develop a
database of more than 3,000 signs, with the meaning of each sign being
determined by the shape of the hands, the movement of the hands and arms,
and even facial expressions. Eventually, the researchers hope the
technology will be used to develop a multimedia ASL dictionary to help
hearing parents better communicate with deaf children and to help sign
language students.
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Managing Computer Fraud
EurekAlert (05/23/08)
Information security researchers are starting to look at computer fraud
from a social angle. Southern Utah University computer scientist Shalini
Kesar writes in the International Journal of Business Information Systems
that companies should educate management on the impact of organizational
structure on security measures, and then let other employees know that
management is well informed on security issues. Computer fraud often
occurs in organizations that do not facilitate widescale communication.
Reported cases of computer fraud are only part of the problem, considering
employees pose a threat from the inside, Kesar says. "Lack of awareness of
social and technical issues among managers largely manifest themselves in a
failure to implement even the most basic safeguards and controls," Kesar
writes. "Concomitantly, if management ignores wider organizational
structural issues then this too increases the likelihood of a potential
offender committing computer fraud."
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Software Designers Strut Their Talent at Cost of Profit,
Says Management Insights Study
INFORMS Online (05/19/08)
The current issue of Management Science includes a Management Insights
feature that suggests the personal goals of software designers might be
behind the increasing complexity of product design projects. In "The
Hidden Perils of Career Concerns in R&D Organizations," Enno Siemsen of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign argues that many software
designers are making products more difficult because they want to show off
their talent for a future career move. Even designers with average skills
pursue more difficult designs in an attempt to cover up some of their
limitations, Siemsen argues. Companies can address this problem by tying
bonuses directly to the success or failure of projects. Siemsen also
believes that companies should collect better data on the outcome of their
design projects, and have managers who understand the technology and have a
stake in its outcome evaluate product designers.
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How the Free Software Movement Is Winning the War in
Brazil
Brazzil.com (05/20/08) Bagueros, Ryan; Bagueros, Isabela
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's support for migration to open-source
software for government and state-owned industry has drawn free-software
supporters' attention to Brazil. Numerous impressive initiatives
underscore the country's free-software commitment, both in terms of code
and in terms of real-world deployment of free software for large and
complex organizations. Marcos Mazoni, president of the state-owned
data-processing company SERPRO and head of the Technical Committee for the
Implementation of Free Software, recently described the progress of free
software in Brazil. His prior experience with free software was mixed. He
says SERPRO "has a lot of ties to the free software world but also to
traditional software." Mazoni says software development and the
introduction of the free-software paradigm into the management culture have
made up much of the contribution in state-owned IT firms. "We have public
companies in the IT area, on the state and federal level, with a lot of
technical capacity, we have top professionals who, when they are exposed to
free software technology, get very excited about the possibility of doing
real computing," he says. "This is a steadily growing example that evolved
in Brazil in the past 10 years."
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TU Delft Robot Flame Walks Like a Human
Delft University of Technology (05/22/08)
Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) researchers have developed
Flame, a robot capable of walking like a human. TU Delft Ph.D. student
Daan Hobbelen demonstrated for the first time that a walking robot can be
both energy efficient and highly stable. Hobbelen says the breakthrough is
the result of inventing a suitable method for measuring the stability of
how people walk, followed by building a robot capable of improved
performance. Flame contains seven motors, an organ of balance and various
algorithms that ensure its high level of stability. For example, the robot
can use information provided by the organ of balance to place its feet
slightly farther apart to prevent a fall. Hobbelen says Flame is the most
advanced human-like walking robot in the world. TU Delft plans to continue
its research into walking robots in order to develop walking robots that
can learn, see, and run.
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