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Volume 6, Issue 618:  Monday, March 15, 2004

  • "Easier Internet Wiretaps Sought"
    Washington Post (03/13/04) P. A1; Eggen, Dan; Krim, Jonathan

    An FCC petition recently filed by U.S. Justice Department lawyers asserts that Internet broadband and online telephone providers should be beholden to the same laws that require traditional telecom providers to allow the FBI to set up wiretaps and other surveillance measures to monitor communications. The FBI cannot identify and deconstruct data that is transmitted in packets over the Internet, and is concerned that terrorists and other criminals will increasingly use electronic communications methods such as Internet telephony to evade federal dragnets. Though the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which required telecoms to revamp their networks to give police access for surveillance purposes, was set up before broadband and Internet telephone services emerged, the petitioners argue that such services should not be exempt from the law. Washington attorney Stewart Baker says the petition is ignorant of the intent and letter of CALEA, which grants exemptions to "persons or entities insofar as they are engaged in providing information services." Under CALEA, telecom providers are not required to decode possibly encrypted data or break down and identify information, but experts claim that is exactly what the FBI is seeking from Internet providers. The petitioners also want the FCC to "permit carriers to have the option to recover some or all of their CALEA implementation costs from their customers," adding that actual costs to individual customers would be minor. However, Center for Democracy & Technology executive director James X. Dempsey says the FBI is trying to control the engineering of the Internet. He says, "The question is, how deeply should the government be able to control the design of the Internet?" Dempsey warns that deploying the FBI's new Internet and communications services could bring the economy to a screeching halt.
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  • "Tech Jobs: Linux on the Move"
    Enterprise Linux IT (03/12/04); Maguire, James

    The market for Linux programmers, system administrators, and other experts is growing, but with threats of outsourcing and automation in the background. With Linux server sales up 42% for the year and major IT vendors IBM and Sun Microsystems planning Linux desktop initiatives, the future is bright for those with Linux skills. HotLinuxJobs.com recruiting consultant Brent Marinaccio says Linux kernel engineers are especially in demand because they have the core expertise to adapt the Linux kernel for a company's specific requirements, while application developer positions have also been on the rise in the last six to nine months since businesses need new programs for different devices now using Linux. Linux's adoption by technology giants such as IBM shows it is ready for the mainstream and anyone with Linux expertise will be of interest to employers, says Meta Group analyst Maria Schafer, whose job includes writing technology job descriptions for corporations; she reports interest in system administrators, but none so far for site-specific tasks such as a large Linux installation. Technology recruiting site Dice.com lists 1,500 Linux-related jobs--140% more than a year earlier--with about 40% for software programming positions and about 30% for system administrators. A variety of technology experience will help the job seeker, according to Dice.com ads: 945 request both Linux and Unix, 674 seek Linux and Windows, and 400 ask for people with experience in all three operating systems. Schafer says the prospect of company-paid Linux training is slim, given the open-source nature of the technology, and she also notes that Linux is also intertwined with globalization, and many phone-based help desk jobs and programming jobs will be sent offshore. Marinaccio says automation will eventually affect Linux operations management jobs as it has with other operating systems.
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  • "If You Want to Protect a Security Secret, Make Sure It's Public"
    Wall Street Journal (03/15/04) P. B1; Gomes, Lee

    The U.S. government recently awarded two self-proclaimed "Linux hackers" for their publicly developed encryption scheme, and will soon begin using the Daemen-Rijmen Advanced Encryption Standard for all top-secret communication. The competition was an entirely open process with extensive public review, and the two winners are both foreigners. Developing encryption frameworks in public seems counterproductive, but since the development of computer-assisted cryptography, public scrutiny has trumped secrecy in hardening security standards--a trend that electronic voting advocates ought to consider. Auguste Kerckhoffs first suggested in the 19th century that the overall design mattered much less than the specific key pattern, and that a reliable encryption system should be able to withstand inspection by any adversary. In contrast to the most successful encryption schemes developed today, current electronic voting systems are proprietary and with designs hidden from public view, and leaked portions of these designs have been shown to be full of security flaws. "You can't get good cryptography by designing in secret," warns Sun Microsystems chief security officer Whitfield Diffie, who also co-invented the "public key" encryption system. Today, the Internet serves as a testing ground for new security algorithms with graduate students and other aspiring researchers eager to gain fame by pointing out faults. Proof of the superiority of publicly inspected schemes is shown by the success of RSA, SSL, and other security technologies used on the Internet, while DVD systems and European-derived GMS phones, on the other hand, suffer from their faulty and secretly developed security schemes.

  • "Privacy Fears Erode Support For a Network to Fight Crime"
    New York Times (03/15/04) P. C1; Schwartz, John

    The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (Matrix), envisioned as a law enforcement tool for tracking down terrorists and other criminals by integrating and mining information from public and private databases--vehicle registrations, driver's license data, real estate records--has been struck a heavy blow by the withdrawal of 11 out of its original 16 member states. Advocates claim Matrix simply allows authorities to access data that they are legally permitted to view, while critics warn that the system could infringe on civil liberties and raise the risk of innocent civilians becoming embroiled in police investigations. According to a recent ACLU report, Matrix is "a body blow to the core American principle that the government will leave people alone unless it has good reason to suspect them of wrongdoing." Most of the states that opted out of the program cited money issues, but New York, which announced its withdrawal last week, declared that eroding support for the network heavily influenced its decision. However, New York Sen. Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) says privacy concerns were at the root of the states' hesitancy. Opponents of Matrix call the network little more than a state-level version of Total Information Awareness (TIA), a federal data-mining surveillance initiative that was halted by Congress because of the public outcry it engendered. Despite New York's decision not to participate in Matrix, New York State Office of Public Security director James W. McMahon acknowledges that the network could be an effective tool for recovering kidnap victims. Though Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU appreciates the termination of TIA and the erosion of Matrix, he is concerned that even more insidious surveillance programs are operating under the radar.
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  • "Search Tool Aids Browsing"
    Technology Research News (03/17/04); Patch, Kimberly

    With funding from the Palo Alto Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed prototype software that can help Web surfers find the data they want faster. ScentTrails shows how strongly the search results match the topics the user is querying by enlarging the font size of hyperlinks that boast more connections to relevant Web pages; CMU professor Christopher Olston says this tool enables users to browse continuously. "The goal is to provide a happy medium between unassisted browsing, which can be tedious, and standard keyword search, in which it is difficult to remain oriented," he explains. The software was put through a trial run, and the results demonstrated that users could consider browsing cues and search cues at the same time, while statistical data indicated that ScentTrails enabled users to find information faster than they would via searching or browsing alone. Olston notes that key to the software's usability was making it able to score and highlight the stronger links for a Web page in less than a second, and this was done by ensuring that as much data as possible was computed ahead of time. The CMU professor says that researchers are trying to tackle three key issues so that ScentTrails can be employed across multiple sites: Finding a workable technique for highlighting links that can extend across assorted pages without unnecessarily affecting the readability of content; modifying the software algorithms so they can be applied to large Web collections; and determining good places for user queries to begin. Olston forecasts that one to two years may pass before the technique can be used to carry out searches within a Web site, while two to five years may transpire before Web-wide searching is practically feasible.
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  • "Robots to Get Boss Upgrades"
    Wired News (03/15/04); Baard, Mark

    Attendees at this week's Emerging Robotic Technologies and Applications Conference attested that next-generation robots will not just have military applications, but entertainment and caregiver applications as well. IRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks, whose company invented the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, opined that engineers should start developing robots that can assist the elderly, predicting that tomorrow's major robot applications will focus on the growing populations of the aged in Japan, Europe, and the United States. Brooks and other roboticists think the next phase of robotics development will center around modules constructed atop current mobility platforms: "Some of the most effective robots are those that do something as a side effect of their navigation, such as cleaning or lawn mowing," the iRobot co-founder remarked. His company's PackBot, which has seen employment in the military as a reconnaissance device, was recently modified to disable and remove roadside bombs in Iraq, and iRobot Chairman Helen Grenier says the device could be a convenient tool for domestic bomb disposal. Other robotic military applications are under development at Applied Perception, which is outfitting all-terrain vehicles and lawn tractors with navigation systems and sensors, and is also working on an autonomous tank designed to rescue soldiers wounded in battle. The head of Applied Perception, Carnegie Mellon University graduate Todd Jochem, is co-developing the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Ground System (JAUS) communications standard for the U.S. Department of Defense; the JAUS spec will accelerate the development of robots with modules built atop existing mobility platforms, and allow robots to be controlled by PDA, laptop, and other devices. Meanwhile, MIT researchers have built the Cardea robot using the gyroscopically balanced Segway Human Transporter as the locomotive component.
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  • "Emotional About Design"
    Guardian Unlimited (UK) (03/11/04); Schofield, Jack

    Former Apple fellow and Northwestern University professor of computer science, psychology, and cognitive science Don Norman, whose book "The Psychology of Everyday Things" is regarded as a milestone in the way product designers perceive usability, is an advocate of emotional design, which posits that a product's design affects users on three levels. Norman attests that the first level, visceral design, is "biologically prewired;" it encompasses the appearance, feel, and sound of products, and is characterized by their sometimes instantaneous appeal to consumers. As an example of visceral design appeal, Norman cites iMacs in colorful plastic cases. The second level, behavioral design, relates to a product's performance--how well it functions and how easy it is to operate--and is not always vital to a product's consumer appeal. Unfortunately, there are many technology products that exhibit a profound lack of behavioral design. Norman considers the third design layer, reflective design, to be perhaps the most essential element: The reflective level sends a message about the user's background, culture, and other things directly tied to identity and self-image; branding and marketing play a major role in reflective design. Norman explains that reflective design helps determine how a consumer relates to a product in the long term, and becomes more essential as products mature. He notes that reflective appeal is the deciding factor for consumers once a product's functionality can be taken for granted. Technologies that Norman thinks should be made more emotionally appealing include automobile interiors, cell phones, and home theater systems, which he says are becoming excessively complex and usability-challenged; robotics is another area of interest to him, and his latest book, "Emotional Design," considers the value of emotional machines.
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  • "$2 Million NSF Grant Funds Grid Security Research and Builds Self-Defense Toolkits at USC"
    USC Information Sciences Institute (02/23/04)

    The National Science Foundation has awarded a $2 million grant to underwrite a joint project between University of Southern California computer scientists and international partners to develop an automated defense system for computer grids. Project leader Kai Hwang of the USC School of Engineering says the GridSec project will build "a new self-configuring security and privacy framework to support trusted Grid applications" that will attempt to thwart cyberattack-driven system failures in Grid resource sites. GridSec will develop the NetShield library as a resource for deploying distributed micro firewalls and anti-intrusion software, and Hwang characterizes it as a tool to watch network traffic for threatening signs, and counter them via dynamic configuration. Supporting the library will be special virtual private networks constructed atop the Globus security architecture devised by the Argonne National Laboratory and USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). According to the project plan, the GridSec architecture "will support network-based cooperative and pervasive computing with seamless security, assured privacy, data integrity, confidentiality, and optimized resource allocations." The multidisciplinary GridSec project involves the participation of Professor Viktor Prasanna of the USC department of electrical engineering, who is focusing on the dynamic hardware challenges; Tatyana Ryutov of ISI's Computer Networks Division, who is working on access control and policy management; Zhiwei Xu, leader of the Chinese Academy of Science's Vega Grid Project; and Michel Cosnard and Sophia Antipolis of France's University of Nice and INRIA.
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  • "DARPA Aims for Machine Cognition"
    Federal Computer Week (03/12/04); French, Matthew

    The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to develop the first cognitive personal assistant--a computer that can learn from experience and anticipate its user's needs based on the data. "They need to be able to learn about their environment over time so that once they survive an attack or a breakdown, they can immunize themselves against future occurrences," explains DARPA information processing technology director Ronald Brachman, speaking at the DARPAtech 2004 conference. "They need to be able to adapt to their users so that humans can do their jobs more effectively." He says the goal is developing smart, cognitive machines, not human-like ones. A smart radio, for example, would learn where in a platoon's patrol area the reception is poor, and warn the user to finish transmissions before entering the area. DARPA's information processing technology office says that a truly intelligent machine will have a cognitive architecture featuring real-world learning and reasoning, natural language, perception and cognition, episodic memory, and self-aware reflection.
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  • "An Effort to Make Arabic Easier"
    New York Times (03/15/04) P. C2; Chartrand, Sabra

    Arabetics, a simplified Arabic alphabet that can be read right-to-left in the traditional Arabic manner or left-to-right in English fashion, is the result of a two-year effort by Saad D. Abulhab, director of technology at New York's Baruch College, to make Arabic less intimidating to Arabic-language students and software programmers. His goal in making the language less difficult to learn was to render it in a bidirectional format, and his solution was designing letters that maintained their form regardless of where they appeared in a word, could be printed in block style, and would remain separate characters rather than linked in a flowing cursive script. Abulhab's project involved the study of 22 Arabic-based languages, including, Kurdish, Persian, and Urdu. In traditional Arabic, a letter can take four distinctive shapes depending on where it appears in a word, which can be a headache to software programmers who must design programs powerful enough to render an Arabic font. Abulhab notes that not only does such software require a right-to-left format, but also a shaping engine to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of Arab letters. To solve this problem Abulhab has developed a font, Mutamathil--Arabic for "symmetric and uniform"--that he has patented. The researcher does not consider Arabetics to be a replacement for the traditional Arabic alphabet, but a tool that can help overcome people's reluctance to learn the language because of its unusual characteristics.
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  • "Robot Designers Get in the Swim"
    Wired News (03/12/04); Mandel, Charles

    Aqua, an underwater robot designed by Canadian researchers at McGill University, is equipped with six individually controlled rotating flippers that enable the machine to swim, dive, perambulate, and sit on the bottom of the sea floor. The robot is controlled by a laptop connected to a fiber-optic cable, and boasts three analog cameras for recording visual data. Gregory Dudek, who heads the Mobile Robotics Lab at McGill's Center for Intelligent Machines, notes that Aqua's flipper propulsion makes the robot less likely to disturb local marine life, whereas robots that use jets or propellers are more likely to disrupt the ecosystem because they must struggle with the current and stabilize themselves. Dudek adds that Aqua expends less power than jet-driven robots thanks to its flipper-walking ability. The robot can also hold itself steady in shallow waters using its flippers. Applications Dudek sees for Aqua include coral reef monitoring, carrying illumination and tools for divers, examining telecommunications cables and water pipes, and checking the undersides of ships for contraband. Scientists at McGill, Dalhousie, and York universities plan to augment Aqua with position-estimation software that would enable the robot to recall and return to familiar places, and an acoustic-localization system that would help operators locate the machine in a noisy environment. Aqua is a descendant of RHex, a six-legged walking robot modeled after a cockroach that was a joint project between Canadian and American universities sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
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  • "Watts Humphrey on Software Quality"
    Computerworld (03/08/04); Anthes, Gary H.

    The Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP) are designed to show individual developers and their teams how to apply the principles of the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in their work, according to Watts S. Humphrey in an interview with Computerworld magazine. Humphrey, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wrote the first version of CMM for software in 1987, and developed PSP and TSP. He suggests that PSP and TSP were needed because the CMM framework only told engineers what to do. The best approach to PSP and TSP is to have a small group in a department use them for a couple of projects. Once the group understands how it works, it will be easier to gain more support from the organization and gain momentum for CMM. PSP and TSP offer productivity improvements between 70 percent to 80 percent, as well as 100-to-1 quality improvements in shipped code. Humphrey says the new Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) product suite is more of a business solution that supports the overall organization, but he does not recommend moving up the old CMM ladder then switching to CMMI at Level 5. And he advises IT managers to focus more on making improvements in an orderly manner than on trying to get to Level 3 or Level 4, to gain the support of senior management, and to reward line managers with bonuses but also hold them accountable.
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  • "The Path to Safety?"
    eWeek (03/08/04) Vol. 21, No. 10, P. 32; Carlson, Caron

    Some of the biggest U.S. companies are due this month to announce voluntary recommendations to secure cyber-infrastructure, in an effort to keep the federal government from enacting legislation to make it mandatory. Federal policymakers fear that industry-owned networks are vulnerable to terrorist attack even a year after the release of the White House's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, and critics say the strategy lacked specific action items. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Information Technology Association of America, TechNet, and the Business Software Alliance have put together ideas for implementation of last year's strategy, which include gathering research data from small businesses and educating individual users through television ads. "In most cases, the recommendations will be more like road maps of what we need to do to get where we want to be," says ITAA vice president of information security policy Gary Garcia, who explains that the initiative tries to encourage buy-in from stakeholders like users and vendors. It recommends public awareness campaigns to alert individual users and smaller businesses. Policy makers fear a broad attack on computer networks combined with a physical attack. For example, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) says the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks would have been much worse if a cyberattack had been launched simultaneously. He says, "An attack on these systems would have inhibited emergency services from dealing with the crisis and turned many of the spectators into victims." The initiative also recommends early-warning improvements and the integration of existing alert systems. Garcia says plans also call for integrating existing alert systems to improve early warnings and better information sharing, as well as working with DHS to fund security research.
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  • "The Many Forms of 'Rugged'"
    Federal Computer Week (03/08/04) Vol. 18, No. 5, P. 23; Robinson, Brian

    The U.S. Air Force Standard Systems Group recently awarded the Information Technology tool blanket purchase agreements (BPAs) to six providers of ruggedized computers, reflecting the increasing need for more reliable mobile computing technologies. There are several divisions of ruggedized computers--semirugged, fully rugged, and ultrarugged. To qualify as a fully rugged system, a device is subjected to the Mil-Std 810F and the Ingress Protection tests: The Mil-Std 810F series measures a system's resistance to temperature, vibration, water, dust, and sudden shocks, while Ingress Protection examines how well-sealed a device is against water and dust. Another general advantage of ruggedized computers is that they can be designed and built to individual customer specifications. About two-thirds of the total rugged market is comprised of semirugged systems, which are cheaper and more popular than the other kinds, and Itronix VP Vince Menzione attributes their popularity to his observation that "Semirugged systems come closer to the kind of performance you'd find in commercial systems." Chris Pate of GTSI, a supplier on the Air Force BPAs, notes that semirugged notebooks are widely used by the Navy because of their compactness and reliability; drawbacks include heat management issues, fragile hard drives, and screens that are easy to damage, reports Jan O'Hara of Panasonic Computer Solutions. On the other hand, the processor speed of fully rugged systems often lags behind the best commercial machines by a whole generation. Modern rugged systems are put together out of individually ruggedized components, while fully ruggedized computers boast lightweight, strong, and corrosion-resistant magnesium alloy packaging.
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  • "Return of the Homebrew Coder"
    Economist Technology Quarterly (03/04) Vol. 370, No. 8366, P. 10

    Henry Ford's assembly line and computerized supply chains squelched the lively trade of cobblers, tailors, and carpenters, but now a new type of artisan is reversing the trend--the homebrew coder. Programmers have long distributed their shareware via dial-up bulletin boards, computer disks inside magazines, or on the Internet--but now cheap Web hosting, broadband Internet, and convenient online payment services are helping more programmers ply their trade independent of a large company. In addition, the proliferation of programmable devices such as smart phones is creating a number of unusual market niches too esoteric for large firms to tackle: Stockholm-based Salling Software founder Jonas Salling, for instance, sells a software utility that lets people with Sony Ericsson phones communicate with Microsoft Entourage on a Macintosh computer; the phone acts as a remote control via Bluetooth. Ranchero Software founder Brent Simmons in Seattle sells a program called NetNewsWire for the Mac OS X that allows people to read news and then easily post comments to their blog sites. Simmons says he enjoys the creative freedom of developing his own solutions, and earns about as much working from his garage as he would in the corporate world. Nick Bradbury, founder of Bradbury Software in Tennessee, created one of the first Web-publishing tools and then sold it to Allaire, now part of Macromedia; his company, which now sells Web-page editor TopStyle and news-reading application FeedDemon, provides him with much more personal satisfaction than a regular company job, he says. Gaurav Banga and Saurabh Aggarwbi in Sunnyvale, Calif., run one of the most successful homebrew coding operations with VeriChat, a subscription service that lets smart phones and PDAs send and receive instant messages.

  • "America's Flimsy Fortress"
    Wired (03/04) Vol. 12, No. 3, P. 95; Schneier, Bruce

    Counterpane Internet Security CTO Bruce Schneier dismisses the tremendous effort to beef up homeland security in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy as largely ineffectual. He observes that security technologies that have become embedded in our daily lives--suspected terrorist databases, face recognition, artificial intelligence--are more likely to generate false positives than correctly identify terrorists, given the rarity of a terrorist presence. In fact, Schneier points out that the odds that one will become the victim of a terrorist attack in an industrialized nation are almost nil, and calls the Sept. 11 bombing a "statistical anomaly." The author maintains that most of the security measures the U.S. government has deployed to fight the war on terror entail drawbacks--high costs, erosion of civil liberties--that far outstrip any actual safety improvements. Furthermore, since practically anything can be a terrorist target, an all-encompassing defense is ultimately unworkable. Schneier believes a more effective anti-terrorism strategy is to trace and capture the orchestrators of terrorist plots using old-fashioned detective methods. He acknowledges that airports and government buildings should have perimeter defenses, and sees a certain value in screening technology. But Schneier argues that "more damage was done to Al Qaeda by disrupting its funding and communications than by all the guards and ID checks in the U.S. combined."
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  • "Fighting a War of Words"
    Government Executive (03/04) Vol. 36, No. 4, P. 62; Schwartz, Karen D.

    The war on terrorism cannot be won unless effective and accurate translation software is provided, and government agencies are spearheading the development of next-generation multilingual text-based technologies to make this dream a reality. The U.S. Defense Department's Language and Speech Exploitation Resources (LASER) program is a five-year effort to enhance machine translation that involves the assessment and customization of commercially available technologies, and National Security Agency language technology expert John Kovarik reports that the goal of the initiative is to create universally applicable machine translation technology. LASER has purchased and refined products from commercial vendors such as MITRE, Systran Software, and Language Weaver, but so far the LASER system's translation accuracy rate is still below desired levels. Language Weaver, a subsidiary of In-Q-Tel, will collaborate with the LASER team to create machine translation software that utilizes a statistical rather than rule-based strategy, enabling the capture of English phrases calibrated to their foreign counterparts in parallel texts, Kovarik says. Multilingual information retrieval is another translation application that has attracted federal interest; the method involves a user entering an English phrase, triggering the retrieval of documents containing that phrase in other languages. Still another tool is multicultural name recognition, which focuses on variant spellings of people's names in different cultures. Multilingual information extraction, meanwhile, offers a way to zero in on names, dates, and other words or phrases across numerous resources. The optimum strategy for boosting the efficiency of translation technologies is to combine approaches, according to government language experts.

  • "A Conversation With Teresa Meng"
    ACM Queue (03/04) Vol. 2, No. 1, P. 14; Broderson, Robert

    Atheros Communications founder Teresa Meng, now Reid Dennis Professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, explains that she set up Atheros "to provide the technology to change [people's perception of wireless] so that when people think about wireless in the future, they won't feel its presence, as there will be almost unbounded, unlimited capacity everywhere, and it will be much cheaper and easier to use." She says wireless technology is comprised of three fundamental elements: Signal processing, the deployment of gigahertz RF circuits with digital CMOS technology, and the opening up of the unlicensed band; the future development of wireless depends on changing people's view of it as a telecommunications medium to a data-communications medium that supports fast, cheap equipment upgrades. Particularly intriguing to the Stanford professor is the opening up of the unlicensed band, which has discredited the notion that wireless bandwidth is a limited resource. "The bandwidth is unlimited in the sense that we haven't figured out how to use it appropriately," Meng asserts, adding that capitalizing on this untapped resource is necessary for future wireless development. Her work at Stanford focuses on how the brain operates--specifically, how it encodes information in neural signals; potential applications of such research include wireless brain implants that allow paralysis patients to operate prosthetic limbs or directly control their muscles by thought. Another area Meng is investigating is plastic computing, in which computers adapt gradually by using reconfigurable hardware to automatically change their computing fabric by learning from their environment. Meng also thinks signal processing will be applied to the bio field in the next couple of decades, perhaps in diagnostics or genome analysis, for example.



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