Women Break to Front of Tech
USA Today (07/11/08) P. 1B; Swartz, John
The glass ceiling seems to finally be shattering in the technology
industry. "It's gratifying to see more women in prominent roles in tech,"
says Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen, one of the tech industry's top female
executives. A wave of new female CEOs is changing the face of the once
male-dominated tech industry, with women benefiting from more startups,
better funding, and the low cost of starting a Web 2.0 company. Even some
established tech companies such as Google are proving to be welcoming
places for aspiring female executives. "Computer sciences and the Internet
have made technology tangible and put a face on them as careers for
everyone, women included," says Google vice president of search and user
experience Marissa Mayer. Although the number of female CEOs at well-known
tech companies is difficult to determine, estimates easily place more
female CEOs in the tech industry than on the Fortune 500 list, which has
only 12 female CEOs and only one from the tech industry, Xerox's Anne
Mulcahy. There are more opportunities today than there were 10 years ago
because women are pursuing engineering degrees and careers, and they are
better suited for fast-paced environments in the online world, says Teresa
Phillips, founder and CEO of Graspr, which hopes to become the YouTube of
how-to clips. Furthermore, marketers are deploying technology intended to
reach women, which makes those companies more interested in hiring women.
Ruckus Wireless CEO Selina Lo says women are gaining in importance as
technology companies seek employees with more "right brain" skills.
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Study: Electronic Voting Increased Counting Errors in
France
IDG News Service (07/09/08) Sayer, Peter
Polling stations using electronic-voting systems in four recent French
elections suffered from more voting discrepancies than polling stations
that used traditional paper ballots, concludes a new study. University of
Nantes researcher Chantal Enguehard examined the discrepancies between the
number of electors who signed the electoral register to confirm that they
voted and the number of votes subsequently counted for each polling
station. The study compared discrepancies from the 6,427 electronic-voting
stations and the 14,624 paper-ballot voting stations used in both rounds of
the 2007 presidential election and two subsequent elections. There were
discrepancies between the number of signatures and the number of votes in
about 19.8 percent of electronic-voting machines, compared to only 5.3
percent with paper-ballot voting stations. Also, the discrepancies were
larger with electronic-voting machines. Enguehard says it is unlikely that
voters' unfamiliarity with the machines is the cause for two reasons.
First, the ratio of discrepancies between electronic and traditional
stations got worse, not better, with time, and there was no correlation
between the bureaus with discrepancies and the bureaus that received the
most complaints about difficulties with the voting machines.
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Senate Grapples With Web Privacy Issues
Washington Post (07/10/08) P. D3; Whoriskey, Peter
Despite support from leading technology companies and frequent consumer
complaints, Congress has been unable to pass Internet privacy legislation.
Following a two-hour Senate committee hearing on July 9 on Internet
advertising and privacy, Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), who led the
discussion, said the hearing primarily served to emphasize how little
legislators understand about the subject. The hearing was called in
response to fears that the massive volume of information that Internet
companies are collecting on users is violating their privacy. The practice
of assembling profiles on users to determine personal preferences and
activities has been going on for years, but as Web sites have increasingly
been united in large ad networks, the various profiles kept by smaller
sites have been combined to create more detailed and widespread user
profiles. Over the past year, some Internet service providers (ISPs) have
been experimenting with a practice that would provide even more detailed
profiles, using a technology called deep packet inspection, which allows
them to examine streams of data coming from a user's Internet connection.
Critics of deep packet inspection compare the practice to wiretapping. At
the hearing, representatives from companies that provide deep packet
inspection services to ISPs assured the panel that they were doing their
best to preserve privacy. Experts say that before Congress can pass
privacy legislation it must first decide what constitutes personally
identifiable information, whether a person's Internet address should be
considered private, should people be informed about data collection
practices, and should users be allowed to see profiles compiled about
them.
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Bluffing Could Be Common in Prediction Markets, Study
Shows
University of Michigan News Service (07/10/08)
University of Michigan professor Rahul Sami and doctoral student Stanko
Dimitrov have produced a new mathematical model that suggests bluffing in
prediction markets is a profitable strategy more often than previously
believed. The analysis questions the incentives such markets create for
revealing information and making accurate predictions. Predictive markets
have been shown to be more accurate than polls in predicting events, though
dishonest tactics such as bluffing can distort their accuracy. Sami says
their work is the first to demonstrate that strategies involving deception
of future traders are a real possibility in a variety of information
conditions. The researchers' solution to bluffing is to penalize later
trades by charging participants to change their bets. Charging people to
change their bets would give people more incentive to be honest from the
start, the researchers say. "If you're running a prediction market, the
whole point is to make predictions and you want your predictions to be
reflecting the actual information the participants have," Sami says. "What
bluffing does is worsen the predictions with the wrong information. It
defeats the purpose." Their research will be presented at the ACM
Conference on Electronic Commerce, which takes place July 11 in Chicago.
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The New Face of R&D: What's Cooking at IBM, HP and
Microsoft
Computerworld (07/10/08) Anthes, Gary
Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard's research and development agenda
includes considerable investment in collaboration with other companies,
customers, and universities, which Henry Chesbrough of the University of
California, Berkeley's Center for Open Innovation says nurtures an openness
that can expedite the migration of ideas into the marketplace. Following
HP's hiring of Prith Banerjee, engineering dean at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, as the new director of HP Labs, the company announced
that the lab would refocus its R&D efforts on "big bet" projects in the
areas of information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content
transformation, intelligent infrastructure, and sustainability, with
individual projects concentrating on exascale computing, social computing,
quantum computing, and green computing. Banerjee is confident that this
shift in focus will yield more fully developed research prototypes for
product divisions, allowing products to be brought to market faster and at
less expense. Meanwhile, IBM Research's John Kelly has announced that IBM
would explore the "high-risk" basic research areas of nanotechnology,
integrated systems and chip architecture, cloud computing and
Internet-scale data centers, and the use of advanced math and computer
science to manage business integrity at a cost of more than $100 million
over three years. He says IBM would boost collaboration with government
agencies, universities, and other companies, and establish small, regional
joint ventures or "collaboratories" with universities, foreign governments,
or commercial partners to move technology quickly into the marketplace
through the leveraging of local skills, funding, and sales channels.
Microsoft Research focuses on the intersection of computer science with
other disciplines, and stands out from many IT companies with its emphasis
on first doing good computer science and then considering its commercial
possibilities, says director Richard Rashid. "We are increasingly engaged
where computer science is making a big difference in the way other sciences
are done," he says.
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MIT Reports Finer Lines for Microchips
MIT News (07/08/08) Chandler, David
MIT researchers have advanced nanoscale lithography by creating finer
patterns and lines over larger areas than other current methods. The new
technique could lead to next-generation computer memory and
integrated-circuit chips, advanced solar cells, and other devices. The
team created lines about 25 nanometers wide separated by 25 nanometer
spaces. The most advanced commercially available computer chips currently
available have a minimum feature size of 65 nm. The technique could be
economically beneficial because it works without the chemically amplified
resists, immersion lithography techniques, and expensive lithography tools
considered essential to work at such a small scale with optical
lithography. The new method could allow for the commercialization of many
new nanotechnology inventions that have been designed but are unavailable
because of the absence of a viable manufacturing method. The researchers
used a technique called interference lithography (IL) to create the
patterns using a tool that is designed to perform a particularly high
precision variant of IL known as scanning-beam interference lithography.
The new technique uses 100 MHz sound waves, controlled through custom
high-speed electronics, to diffract and frequency-shift the laser light,
creating a rapid patterning of large areas with unprecedented control over
feature geometry.
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UC San Diego Unveils World's Highest-Resolution
Scientific Display System
University of California, San Diego (07/09/08) Ramsey, Doug
The University of California, San Diego's (UCSD) California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) has created the
Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Space (HIPerSpace), the world's
highest-resolution display system for scientific visualization. HIPerSpace
has nearly 287 million pixels of screen resolution, 10 percent more than
the second-largest display in the world, recently constructed at the NASA
Ames Research Center, and 30 percent more than UCSD's first HIPerSpace
display, built in 2006. The original HIPerSpace display was moved to a
larger location and expanded by 66 million pixels to become the new
HIPerSpace display. "The higher resolution display takes us more than half
way to our ultimate goal of building a half-billion-pixel tiled display
system to give researchers an unprecedented ability to look broadly at
large data sets while also zooming in to the tiniest details," says
HIPerSpace principal investigator Falko Kuester. HIPerSpace is an
ultra-scale visualization environment developed on a multi-tile paradigm
featuring 70 high-resolution Dell 30-inch displays in 14 columns of five
displays each. The 31.8-feet-wide by 7.5-feet-tall HIPerSpace is already
being used by a variety of research groups at UCSD, allowing them to view
largest data sets while simultaneously focusing on the smallest
elements.
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Sneeze-Sensing Software Gives Avatars a Good Laugh
New Scientist (07/11/08) Barras, Colin
Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed software that is capable
of automatically recognizing laughter, sobbing, sneezing, and yawning, and
then generating an appropriate facial expression in animated characters.
Darren Cosker at the University of Bath and Cathy Holt at the University of
Cardiff used optical motion capture to record the facial expressions of
people making such "non-linguistic" sounds, and then recorded their voices.
The software is capable of matching the vocalizations to the facial
expressions. Cosker and Holt also worked with James Edge, a researcher at
the University of Surrey, to animate a standardized facial model. The
researchers say there is some variation in non-linguistic sounds, which
leads to a level of ambiguity in audio. "One person's laugh can sound
similar to another person's crying," Cosker says. "In terms of classifying
actions on the basis of audio alone, we still need to do more work."
Nonetheless, their software could ultimately lead to better Web-based
avatars and computer-animated movies.
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Artificial DNA Can Power Future Comps
Times of India (07/07/08)
Researchers in Japan have developed a DNA molecule made mostly from
artificial parts. Artificial versions of DNA offer enormous information
storage benefits, and some scientists previously have created DNA molecules
with a few artificial parts. However, University of Toyama researchers led
by Masahiko Inouye have stitched together four new basic building blocks
inside the sugar-based framework of a DNA molecule. The artificial bases
have resulted in very stable, double-stranded structures resembling natural
DNA. Moreover, they are right handed and some formed triple-stranded
structures. "The unique chemistry of these structures and their high
stability offer unprecedented possibilities for developing new biotech
materials and applications," according to the Toyama team. The development
could also help clear the way for nano-sized computers.
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Mapping Infectious Diseases
Technology Review (07/10/08) Singer, Emily
HealthMap is a public-health surveillance system that uses real-time
information from a variety of Internet sources to create a map of diseases.
A series of text-processing algorithms analyzes information gathered from
the Internet and picks out diseases being reported and the location of the
event, and tries to determine the story's relevance. For example, the
software must distinguish between a news item on new cases of tuberculosis
from an article about a TB vaccination campaign. HealthMap cofounder John
Brownstein, a professor at the Informatics Program at Children's Hospital
Boston, says the algorithms report stories correctly about 95 percent of
the time. The data is plotted on a world map, with different colors
displaying the most recent reports. Harvard physician Larry Madoff says
being able to see things in a spatial representation helps medical
professionals realize when a disease is spreading, when there is a cluster
of cases, and when different cases may be related. The automated approach
is also very fast, even reporting cases before the World Health
Organization, Brownstein says. The site is fully automated and updates
every hour. World travelers can check the map to look for new outbreaks,
but researchers say the map will likely benefit poorer nations the most,
due to their lack of a public health monitoring infrastructure and
prevalence of infectious disease.
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First European Initiative on Grid Computing, Biomedical
Informatics and Nanoinformatics
AlphaGalileo (07/07/08)
Biomedical Informatics, grid technologies, and nanoinformatics will be the
focus of a new partnership between research organizations in Europe and
Latin America. The European Commission is funding ACTION-GRID, with hopes
of deepening its knowledge of these areas of research and supporting
further collaboration on projects with experts in Latin America, the
Western Balkans, and North Africa. Over the next 18 months, the European
Union will spend about 1 million euros to support the information exchange
and to produce a white paper on how biomedical informatics, grid
technologies, and nanoinformatics could impact medicine and recommend
potential research initiatives. For nanomedicine, the project has
implications for implantable devices, nanosurgery, modeling and simulation
using informatics approaches, and databases of nanoparticles, among other
areas. The Biomedical Informatics Group at the Universidad Politecnica de
Madrid (UPM) is coordinating ACTION-Grid. The consortium also includes the
Institute of Health Carlos III, Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires in
Argentina, Universidad de Talca in Chile, Forth in Greece, HealthGrid in
France, and the University of Zagreb Medical School in Croatia.
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New Logic: The Attraction of Magnetic Computation
ICT Results (07/07/08)
The EU-funded MAGLOG project sought to adapt magnetoelectronic technology,
which takes advantage of the magnetic properties of electrons and their
charge, for logic operations, including memory, data storage, and
computation. "The main goal of MAGLOG was to show that magnetic logic
gates could be produced on a conventional complementary
metal-oxide-semiconductor [CMOS] platform," says MAGLOG project coordinator
Guenter Reiss. "For successful commercialization, it is critical that this
novel method of data processing can be integrated into conventional chip
technologies." Lithographic etching of structures within ferromagnetic
material to create zones where the material's magnetic orientation can
switch between states in response to input signals is one successful
production approach. Another approach employs magnetic tunneling junctions
that are assembled from alternating layers of ferromagnetic materials and
insulators, resulting in a programmable logic gate. This property could
enable chip designers to fabricate generic chips that can then be tailored
via logic gate programming. Magnetic logic can facilitate greater
efficiency because magnetoelectronic components are generally less
power-consumptive than conventional microprocessor elements, while their
non-volatility can lower chip consumption even further.
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IBM Looks to Tap Massive Data Streams
HPC Wire (07/03/08) West, John E.
IBM says the solution to capitalizing on the massive amount of data being
generated everyday may lie in stream computing. "In traditional computing
the machine dictates the pace at which things gets done," says IBM
Research's Nagui Halim. "In stream computing, the machine's job is to
figure out what's going on in the real world in real time." For example,
Halim says the financial services industry generates five million data
items per second, and some opportunities, such as information asymmetries
that can be exploited, last only a few seconds. Consequently, real-time
systems are needed to consume, analyze, and react to the millions of pieces
of data that are created in only a few milliseconds. Similar demands exist
in real-time monitoring of complex industrial processes such as chip
manufacturing, credit card fraud detection, commercial flight tracking, and
various other monitoring tasks. Companies have become experienced in
building solutions to handle such massive amounts of information, but so
far efforts have focused on solving specific problems in specific
businesses. Halim wants to take what has been learned from various point
solutions and build a generalized infrastructure and body of knowledge that
will accelerate the adoption of stream computing by research groups and
individuals. IBM is designing the stream infrastructure to be useful to
nonexperts from the ground up, a significant change from much of the
software written for supercomputers. Halim is working on a complete
solution that involves hardware, operating systems, compilers, middleware,
and tools.
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The Secret to Designing User-Friendly Interfaces for
Desktop Software
Computer Weekly (07/04/08) Clark, Lindsay
Northwestern University professor Donald Norman says that interface
designers may be obsessed with how good their programs look, but it is how
users feel after using the program that determines the usability of a
device. For example, he says it is the system that powers iTunes, and not
the iPod's circular touch-and-scroll interface, that makes the device so
user friendly. "What people miss about the iPod is that it's not about the
device," Norman says. "Apple did a magnificent job of the entire system,
from licensing the music to the iTunes Web site." Norman says people care
about getting the job done and feeling happy when they are finished.
Features on Amazon.com, such as the variety of emails sent after a
purchase, the ability to cancel within a few hours, and being able to track
where it is shipping from and when it will arrive, are more important than
traditional usability, Norman says. Overall usability is not only an
organization's ability to design applications or Web sites that matter, but
whether it can create the supporting infrastructure to make the experience
pleasant and useful. Norman says accomplishing such usability requires
breaking down departmental boundaries and allowing multidisciplinary teams
to consider the user experience throughout the process.
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KU Researcher Calls for Approval of Wireless Gadgets That
Use 'White Space'
University of Kansas News (07/02/08)
A new generation of personal electronic devices could make use of
unoccupied "white space" in the television spectrum, according to research
at the University of Kansas. KU professor Joseph Evans, director of the
university's Information and Telecommunication Technology Center, says the
TV bands are located right in the middle of the spectrum below 1 GHz, which
is described as "beachfront property." Evans and colleagues recently
performed research focused on unlicensed devices using white space and
found that the operation of unlicensed devices in the television band could
be carried out with no significant effect on DTV receivers in the area.
Evans says devices using the TV band could lead to more interoperable
public safety communication, reduced broadband costs, and simplified
implementation of wireless technology in rural areas. "I've become a
believer that white space technology is feasible," he says. "I do believe
it is fair and prudent that the engineering details be carefully worked
through--we're still some distance from being able to field those types of
devices." This fall the FCC will decide whether to allow the use of
devices that scan TV frequencies for white space and use these unused bands
for transmission, and in February 2009 a new swath of white space will be
opened as TV stations transition from analog to digital broadcasting. The
KU research has informed a public debate over whether the FCC should
approve such technology, with Evans presenting evidence in 2007 that white
space devices do not generate interference for TV viewers when operated
under suitable rules.
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Research Institute in Pensacola Shapes the Future
Orlando Sentinel (FL) (07/02/08) Smith, Wes
The Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Fla.,
uses state-of-the-art technology to enhance human performance through
artificial intelligence, robotics, and "sensory-substitution." The
nonprofit research center has attracted top research scientists from around
the world, and has $26 million in contracts, mostly with the military and
NASA. The center also collaborates on projects with the University of
Central Florida's (UCF) Institute for Simulation & Training, says UCF's
Terry L. Hickey. Hickey, a neuroscientist, says the center's researchers
are good at applying scientific knowledge in useful ways. A new satellite
office will open next year in Ocala, Fla., which will give Orlando-area
scientists more opportunities to work on making cutting-edge concepts a
reality, says IHMC board member Beverly J. Seay. "If we don't have unique
people like them thinking 10 or 20 years out, we will lose our technology
edge," Seay says. The Pensacola center includes nearly 100 cognitive
psychologists, neuroscientists, physicians, philosophers, engineers, social
scientists, and others, such as former Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers
guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, a part-time "senior thinker." Baxter is an
expert in terrorism, missile defense, and chemical and biological warfare.
Part of the center's mission is to develop concepts that can be turned into
products for businesses, such as the "human-oriented" aircraft cockpit
system that will be licensed and sold commercially.
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Artificial Intelligence Tied to Search Future
InfoWorld (07/10/08) Krill, Paul
Speaking at "The New AI: New Paradigms for Using Computers Workshop" at
the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., University of
Washington Turing Center director Oren Etzioni said that artificial
intelligence (AI) could potentially enhance Internet searches, but there
are obstacles to overcome first. Etzioni said that within the next five
years next-generation search systems will emerge based on technologies such
as Open IE (Information Extraction), which involves techniques for mapping
sentences to logical expressions. Other solutions for enhanced searches
are also emerging, including semantic tractability, which allows for simple
sentences and even conversations with possible double meanings to be
understood by computers, Etzioni said. Etzioni also highlighted the
KnowItAll project, which focuses on extracting high-quality information
from text on the Web, and TextRunner, which deals with open information
extraction and is intended to serve as a foundation for a massive knowledge
base. The event also showcased several projects in AI and machine
learning, including using AI to identify interesting assertions, data
visualizations, and continuous interfaces; and examining obstacles to
software developer adoption of statistical machine learning.
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New Ways to Connect Data, Computers, and People
Chronicle of Higher Education (07/07/08) Foster, Andrea L.
Astrophysicist Edward Seidel will take over the National Science
Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure (CI) starting in September. The
CI office awards competitive grants to researchers conducting revolutionary
work in computer science, as well as oversees national advances in
supercomputing, high-speed networking, data storage, and software
development. Seidel says developing a CI-savvy work force might be the
most important long-term investment that needs to be made, noting that the
nation is facing a critical shortage of computationally skilled researchers
and support staff. Increasing the number of researchers who understand the
importance of CI is just as important as increasing budgets and upgrading
to new equipment, Seidel says. He says that all areas of research,
education, and industry are being transformed by advances in CI, and future
advances will require assembling teams with different kinds of expertise to
attack complex problems in a variety of subjects. Universities need to
hire more faculty who will use CI to advance their disciplines, and
consider developing local training courses in computation science, the use
of CI, as well as participate in national training events.
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