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Volume 7, Issue 778:  Wednesday, April 13, 2005

  • "UC Berkeley to Lead $19 Million NSF Center on Cybersecurity Research"
    UC Berkeley News (04/11/05); Yang, Sarah

    The National Science Foundation has selected the University of California, Berkeley, to head its eight-university Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) center, and the facility is expected to receive a five-year grant of about $19 million, with the possibility of a $20 million extension for another five years afterwards. This comes at a time when the vulnerability of U.S. critical infrastructure makes increased support for fundamental cybersecurity research a matter of considerable urgency, according to a March report from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. UC Berkeley's academic partners include Carnegie Mellon University, Vanderbilt University, Smith College, San Jose State University, Stanford University, Mills College, and Cornell University, while industry and other participants include Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Symantec, and the ESCHER research consortium. "The cybersecurity community has long feared that it would take an electronic Pearl Harbor for people to realize the scale of disruptions possible from a concerted attack by terrorists," explains TRUST center director and UC Berkeley professor S. Shankar Sastry, who notes that system design has not adequately aligned with human users and systems' usability thus far. TRUST researchers will commit themselves to the development of novel technologies designed to make organizations more capable of designing, constructing, and operating trustworthy critical infrastructure information systems. TRUST will sponsor and manage education and outreach programs to help train the next generation of trustworthy systems engineers, with a special emphasis on minority and underrepresented populations. The center will be a interdisciplinary effort that brings together experts in public policy, economics, social science, and human-computer interface technology.
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  • "Russia Looks to Make IT Its Next Natural Resource"
    IDG News Service (04/12/05); Pruitt, Scarlet

    Russia has committed $650 million to invest in the development of IT as the "flagship industry of its modernized economy," according to Russian Minister of Information Technology and Communications Leonid Reiman at the Russian Economic Forum on April 12. The money will be channeled into programs such as e-Russia, an initiative to establish e-government and services such as online medical records, widen the scope of Russia's telecom infrastructure, and provide Internet connectivity to remote communities. Another goal is the creation of government-backed "technoparks" for IT research and development in which software will play a major role. The chief supports of Russia's IT economy are its strong educational infrastructure and prosperous software development community, and the government expects the entire Russian Federation to be covered by a Global System for Mobile Communications network by the end of April. Reiman noted, however, that 46,000 communities still do not have even one fixed line, and the government aims to rectify this by legalizing a universal service guarantee and setting up a service fund, while also encouraging local operators to extend phone access by promising that they will benefit from future market growth. Reiman said Russia's tech industry has overtaken every other industry with its 20 percent to 25 percent annual growth, and mobile phones are penetrating the country at a national rate of 57 percent. Forum attendees cited corruption, limited funding, burgeoning computer crime, and worries of a heavy-handed government approach to corporations as challenges to Russia's establishment of a robust IT economy. Boris Miroshnikov with the Russian police's cybercrime unit is calling for new international legislation for defining cybercrime, as well as a certification program for IT security firms to weed out bogus security consultants.
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  • "Why Robots Are Scary--And Cool"
    CNet (04/12/05); Skillings, Jonathan

    St. Bonaventure University professor Anne Foerst, a former MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory researcher and author of the new book, "God in the Machine: What Robots Teach Us About God and Humanity," explains in an interview that people's motivation for designing and building robots is multifaceted. She says creating the artificial equivalent of people is an ancient fascination, and there are those who seek to better understand mankind through the construction of mechanical counterparts. Foerst sees a gradual shift in the field of AI research as well as cognitive science away from the desire to understand humans by attempting to translate them mathematically, because their complexity defies logic and math and is thus impossible to rebuild. Instead, scientists are taking a much humbler approach that considers the body and social interaction. Foerst describes a human-like robot as one that can interact socially and empathetically, but if such a machine cannot be built with those capabilities already incorporated within it, then the device will have to be designed to learn socially in the same way human infants learn, although the process will take far longer than it would with humans. Foerst says a rough distinction can be made between autonomous robots that perform actions based on their own decisions and non-autonomous robots that simply run pre-set programs. She says the creation of self-aware robots carries with it a host of ethical questions, and believes that such machines should be regarded as an intelligent co-species, which would excuse them from performing functions where they might come to harm. Foerst does not think mankind is ready for humanoid robots, because of our inability to assign all persons personhood. "But I think the whole question about whether or not we should helps us then to consider the question of human personhood," she states.
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  • "Copyright Reform to Free Orphans?"
    Wired News (04/12/05); Dean, Katie

    The U.S. Copyright Office is attempting to rectify the problem of "orphan works," or copyrighted properties whose owners are unidentified or impossible to find, which makes securing permission for their use a costly, time-consuming, and often fruitless endeavor that could carry the additional risk of infringement lawsuits. The Copyright Office's Jule Sigall says the office plans to hold public hearings about the problem--as well as suggested solutions--in the summer and disclose its findings to the Senate Judiciary Committee by year's end. The office desires a solution that meets the requirements of people who want to build on orphan works while also protecting the owners' copyrights. Proposed solutions include setting up a database of existing copyright owners who want their works shielded, or a provision in which a person who proves that he or she could not find the owner despite a reasonable effort to do so can use the work without fear of being penalized. Many of the properties classified as orphan works would probably be in the public domain by now, were it not for revisions to copyright law in 1976 and the 1990s, most notably the extension of copyright protection to the author's lifetime plus 70 years. Examples of material whose copyright status is hard to ascertain include out-of-date games and software programs, out-of-print genealogy volumes, and old sheet music. It is possible that Congress may opt for a legislative remedy to the orphan works problem.
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  • "Diffie: Infrastructure a Disaster in the Making"
    SearchSecurity.com (04/12/05); Brenner, Bill

    Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems' chief security officer and co-creator of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, says in an interview that his biggest concern is the proliferation of Windows systems into critical infrastructure, which could result in major failures in the event of an attack. He characterizes careful software coding as a more pressing need than tech diversity, explaining that "you probably shouldn't use Windows [for critical infrastructure] because of too little care to coding too deep in its guts." Diffie thinks censorship applications for controlling Web sites employees can visit are overhyped and distracting people from the much bigger problem of critical infrastructure vulnerabilities. He predicts that the next decade will see elliptical curve systems supplant modular arithmetic-based key systems and have a significant impact as smaller, integrated mobile devices become widespread. In addition to being more compact, elliptical curve is faster and more power-efficient, and scales down the size of register keys. Diffie says hand-held browsers and similar technologies will fuel people's hunger for more efficient, lower-power systems. He also foresees standard security technologies such as the Advanced Encryption Standard overthrowing competing products such as DES, 3DES, and RC4, and being incorporated into hardware and software worldwide. Diffie believes widespread Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) use is an inevitability, but acknowledges the existence of a standardization problem he primarily attributes to capital development difficulties.
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  • "'Minority Report' Inspires Technology Aimed at Military"
    Wall Street Journal (04/12/05) P. B1; Karp, Jonathan

    Raytheon, inspired by a gesture-controlled digital display interface in the 2002 sci-fi movie "Minority Report," has developed a similar device for military use by tapping the knowledge of John Underkoffler, a scientist who consulted on the film. The user wears reflective gloves to manipulate images projected on a panoramic screen, triggering commands to zoom, scroll through video, and perform other tasks through hand movements. Infrared cameras bounce light off the gloves' reflective beads to detect motion, and Underkoffler has thus far developed a 20-plus hand gesture vocabulary. Raytheon plans to incorporate the interface into future command centers, where operators can combine real-time video, maps, and database information to evaluate battle situations and respond faster to combat scenarios. Raytheon's Allan Mattson says such an interface could expedite the brain's integration of space and time data and help users identify threats quicker. As a researcher at MIT's Media Lab, Underkoffler invented software that allows architects to position physical models on tables onto which are projected digitally generated shadows, reflections, and wind flows that adjust to the model's movements. The Raytheon system is designed to ease the military's burden of information overload, while its potential commercial applications include 3D modeling and videogames.

  • "Brooks Forecasts Future of Robotics Technology"
    Cornell Daily Sun (NY) (04/13/05); Rao, Maya

    Roboticist and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Rod Brooks discussed how intelligent robots could impact society over the next half century in an April 12 lecture. He said humans and robots exhibit greater similarities to each other than people think, and backed up his assertion with videos of several CSAIL-designed robots. One video showed a scientist and a robot passing an object back and forth, a situation in which the machine picked up motion cues from the researcher in much the same way that an infant picks up motion cues from a parent. Several robots from CSAIL can also be taught words, which they can repeat and associate with corresponding objects. Brooks said the next 50 years will see a global demographic shift that will make robots useful in such fields as agriculture, elderly assistance, and manufacturing. He envisioned the roboticization of big agricultural machines for taking care of individual plants and removing the need for humans to perform tedious chores such as pruning and picking. Brooks also foresaw the employment of robot arms for fixed automation, which entails making the devices as dexterous as a six-year-old, while a third application for in-home elderly care was also projected. Brooks said the biggest challenge could be convincing people to accept machines whose abilities may be equal to or greater than their own, while emotional machines would be an even tougher sell.
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  • "Benching the Benchmarks: Measuring Performance in HPC"
    HPC Wire (04/08/05) Vol. 14, No. 14; Panoff, Robert

    High-performance computing (HPC) researchers are developing a suite of codes that will measure HPC systems in a meaningful way, not just according to teraflops and LINPACK loops, writes Shodor Education Foundation executive director Dr. Robert Panoff. Computer speed is only one measurement of how useful a system is; human time spent modifying, testing, and tuning algorithms so they match the architecture is just as important as machine performance when it comes to determining real usefulness, while supporting software development tools are critical as well. In order for HPC researchers to find the best system for their application, the HPC community should create a set of example codes that provide better insight into total system performance, in addition to helping educate a new generation of HPC users. Like the "homework potentials" created by nuclear theorists in the late 1970s, these example codes will help HPC users make sure they have the best solution, not just the fastest system. The main problem with popular HPC benchmarks is that they focus on computation rather than communication between machine components, whereas real-world problems often have lower computation-communication ratios. The Blue Gene/L computer currently billed as the fastest computer in the world does not yet have real codes that can exploit even 10 percent of its potential computing power, according to published estimates from Blue Gene/L owners at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The National Science Digital Library has so far gathered three example codes: A parameter space study applied to a Monte Carlo model, a 2D cellular automata model, and an N-Body gravitational dynamics code. HPC users who have other examples are encouraged to contribute those codes to the project.
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  • "Helping Human and Robot Firefighters Work as a Team"
    IST Results (04/13/05)

    The IST-funded PELOTE project's goal was to design the operational foundation for systems in which firefighters and semi-automated robots work as a team to get people to safety in highly dangerous or low-visibility situations. "We wanted to see how robots with a certain amount of intelligence could share tasks and communicate with their human partners, despite problematic environments and severe limitations on their capabilities," says PELOTE project coordinator Libor Preucil of the Czech Technical University in Prague. The project sought to complement robots' enhanced strength, tolerance to hazardous conditions, and other non-human capabilities with people's adaptability to changing circumstances; at the core of the initiative was a personal navigation and localization system that could direct the movements of firefighters and their robot partners while simultaneously keeping the outside command center apprised of each team member's precise position. Firefighters wear a backpack equipped with inertial guidance systems that show their location on personal displays and in the command center, while wireless communication keeps the team abreast of video and sensor input. C++ and Java was the platform for the technology between the screen representations, while the wireless communication was based on standard Wi-Fi. Mission controllers can send robots into areas where toxic fumes, collapsed structures, or other obstacles make human navigation difficult or hazardous, to look for victims and function as communication platforms between victim and controller. Preucil says a demonstration of the PELOTE prototype proved that the technology could expedite rescue missions, while the system could also have household, educational, industrial, and exploratory uses.
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  • "Wi-Max's Future: Boom or Bust?"
    TechNewsWorld (04/12/05); Korzeniowski, Paul

    As standards-compliant Wi-Max products continue to appear on the market, analysts are still split about the future of the technology, with some seeing it as the wireless alternative to wired WAN technologies and others relegating Wi-Max to only niche applications. The IEEE 802.16 standard comes in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint flavors, though the latter version will not see a final standard until the end of this year. Wi-Max products are roughly the size of a pizza box and support a number of network transport protocols, including asynchronous transfer mode, Ethernet, and Internet Protocol; but because of the technologies' cost and lack of expertise, Wi-Max has only been used in niche applications, such as for connecting rural communities to the Internet or where it is less expensive than alternatives such as T-1 lines. Wi-Max provides 70 Mbps bandwidth and signals can cover about 30 square miles, making it a possible alternative for supporting localized Wi-Fi hotspots. In-Stat/MDR analyst Eric Mantion notes that Wi-Max was meant for carrier-grade WAN implementation, while Wi-Fi was designed to supplant wired LAN infrastructure. Another possibility for Wi-Max deployment is in underdeveloped regions such as Eastern Europe and Latin America, says Yankee Group analyst Lindsay Schroth. Potential barriers to widespread Wi-Max use include the technology's cost relative to WLAN WAN carrier and end-user products, for instance; also, few resellers or users know how to deploy and manage Wi-Max networks, which involve unique interference and maintenance issues because the products are for outdoor use.
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  • "Using Automatic Speech Recognition to Assist Communications and Learning"
    University of Southampton (ECS) (04/07/05); Wald, Mike; Bain, Keith

    Mike Wald of the University of Southampton and Keith Bain of Saint Mary's University detail how communication and learning can be improved through automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology under investigation by the Liberated Learning Consortium. They describe an idealized ASR system as a tool that creates a simultaneous mistake-free text version of vocal utterances and that plays a key role in enhancing communication and learning for various users. Requirements for such an ASR system include complete transparency to speakers and listeners, recognition of any person's speech regardless of accent or distortion, recognition of any word in any context, identification of speakers and their location, accommodation for any speech quality or level and any type or level of background noise, and text-speech synchronization to facilitate text-based searching and manipulation of speech. Liberated Learning demonstrates that the IBM ViaScribe ASR system appears to be the only existing ASR tool capable of synchronized Automatic SpeechText (AST). ViaScribe provides a readable display of transcribed text by noting pauses and silences in the normal speech stream, but the authors report that visual indicators of pauses showing how the speaker groups words together augment readability. They explain that AST's accuracy could be improved by using one or more editors to correct errors in real time, while readability could be further enhanced via confidence levels and phonetic cues. "Pre-trained" voice models and language models could streamline the system's speaker-dependent training process, and installing these models on classroom machines through a network approach boosts ease-of-use. Liberated Learning has also determined that personalized displays are more effective than a single large-screen classroom display in many scenarios.
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  • "For High-Tech Control, the Eyes (and Hands) Have It"
    EE Times (04/11/05) No. 1366, P. 6; Johnson, R. Colin

    Computer interfaces that use eye-tracking and gesture recognition technologies were demonstrated last week at ACM's CHI 2005 conference, whose overriding theme was "Technology, Safety, and Community," according to Vrije University Amsterdam professor and conference Chair Gerrit van der Veer. Roel Vertegaal and David Fono of Ontario's Queen's University presented EyeWindows, an interface that combines eye-tracking software and a traditional keyboard to remove the clutter from multi-windowing interfaces, and which was reported to be 72 percent faster than manual window management. The interface automatically highlights a window as the user's eyes focus on that window, but waits for the user to hit a key to activate it. The AppLens tabular fisheye interface demonstrated by the University of Maryland's Amy Karlson and Benjamin Bederson and Microsoft Research's John SanGiovanni allows users to navigate and select screen objects with the tip of their thumb on a cell phone or PDA touchscreen. Three researchers from South Carolina's Clemson University detailed their feed-forward method that employs eye-tracking software to speed up the training process for aircraft wing inspectors. Brunel University's Laurel Swan and Microsoft Research's Alex Taylor presented a paper suggesting that users of sophisticated future interfaces would favor customizable schemes offering a toolbox of personalization options over preset interfaces with extras inspired by engineers.
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  • "Touching Molecules With Your Bare Hands"
    Scripps Research Institute (03/28/05) Vol. 5, No. 11; Bardi, Jason Socrates

    Molecular biology researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have created a new augmented reality program for testing interactions between molecules and understanding how they work. The system uses plastic models of molecules that are created using 3D printers, then tracks those models with a digital camera and superimposes molecular information on the screen image. Professor Art Olson says the method blends modern computer simulation with old-school modeling, as was required before computers gained requisite graphical processing capabilities in the 1980s. Before computer simulations were available, molecular biologists spent long hours building models from thousands of pieces of balsa wood or plastic, and Olson helped end this era by creating the AutoDock program with colleagues in the 1980s, which was used to predict interaction of protein structures and drug candidates. The new Tangible Interfaces for Structural Molecular Biology augmented reality set-up allows students to easily create models that are meant to be handled, even manipulated so that students can test interactions by placing ends of molecules near each other, for example. Certain molecules will display either positive or negative reactions, displayed on the computer screen as blue- or red-tinted clouds surrounding those molecular appendages. Olson and his team inserted magnets into parts of the new components to simulate natural orientation, 3D folding, protein docking, and viral assembly. Molecules with these magnets can be put into a jar and shaken so that they eventually form an assembled virion.
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  • "U.N. Must Earn Net Role"
    eWeek (04/11/05) Vol. 22, No. 15, P. 33

    Information technology vendors and users should submit comments to the United Nations' working group on Internet Governance during its upcoming public-comment period on the issue of Internet development and management. Comments would address whether the UN should be heavily involved in Internet governance. For years, the UN has wanted its International Telecommunication Union agency to have a larger role in running the Internet, but the United States, ICANN, and other parties in the Internet community have opposed such a move. The working group is scheduled to resume work on the issue in Geneva next week, and comments will help shape the report that is delivered to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in July. World leaders will get a chance to review the report in November, during the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society. Concerns about the Internet losing its level of free expression under UN control continue to linger. The UN should prove that it can help Internet users, such as by coordinating an international effort to improve security and crack down on spam, before it is given a larger role involving the Internet.
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  • "Will Machines Ever Understand Us?"
    New Scientist (04/09/05) Vol. 184, No. 2494, P. 22; Mullins, Justin

    Some business analysts expect voice-recognition software to drive the rapid incorporation of human-machine conversation into everyday life, but the vagueness of the software's progress has led to many diverging predictions. Some experts think voice recognition will soon be advanced enough to make communications with household appliances practical, while others predict the technology will not be ready for another half century. Outside experts calculate the error rate of commercially available voice-recognition programs to be about 5 percent (meaning that the software misses about two or three words out of every 100), as opposed to the approximately 2 percent claimed by manufacturers--while background noise, voice distortion, and other factors can raise that rate to 30 percent. Improving voice-recognition software is a tough challenge, considering that a program with just a 100-word vocabulary must sift through 1 million permutations just to identify a three-word phrase, compared to the astronomical number of permutations an average adult with a 50,000-word vocabulary must consider. Cornell University computer scientist Lillian Lee says a computer system that can recognize speech with precision equal to a human will not be practical for 50 years, given the scope of the sparse data problem, in which a huge percentage of phrases has yet to be uncovered because of the vast volume of permutations. However, Carnegie Mellon University's Roni Rosenfeld thinks improvements to voice recognition could be facilitated with a system similar to Palm's Graffiti handwriting recognition program, which boosts the computer's recognition rate by having the user learn a stylized alphabet.
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    (Access to this article is available to paid subscribers only.)

  • "'Tactical Language' Training"
    Defense News (04/04/05) Vol. 20, No. 14, P. 30; Rayko, Rebecca

    Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) researcher Ralph Chatham has developed a video game, "Tactical Iraqi," that trains soldiers to speak rudimentary Arabic in order to facilitate effective and respectful communication with locals. Tactical Iraqi uses the Unreal Tournament 2003 computer game as a foundation, and users must wear headphones and speak into microphones to interact with the game environment and characters. The game only uses vocabulary applying to military situations that soldiers in Iraq are likely to be confronted with; it also emphasizes gestures, which are an important aspect of Iraqi communication that can engender distrust if ignored or misused. Center for Research in Technology for Education director W. Lewis Johnson says the game also incorporates "trust meters" so that players can see how much the locals trust them. Students can start on a level in which they guide a figure with one-word commands, and the successful completion of this mission allows them to move on to more sophisticated, civil-affairs-type missions. However, some testers claim most troops will face more tactical scenarios--house searches, crowd control, vehicle checkpoints, etc.--and the game's developers say such situations are being incorporated. Data on how effective the game is in preparing soldiers for actual missions will also be accumulated. "Putting [language training] in the form of a game widens the interest level quite a bit," says Army linguist Sgt. Amy Perkins, who notes she must regularly cope with trainees who have no enthusiasm for learning Arabic.

  • "Is Two-Factor Authentication Too Little, Too Late?"
    Network World (04/04/05) Vol. 22, No. 13, P. 32; Schneier, Bruce; Uniejewski, Joe

    Counterpane Internet Security CTO Bruce Schneier and RSA Security CTO Joe Uniejewski offer differing opinions on the importance of two-factor authentication in twin essays. Schneier says two-factor authentication is useful for some situations, such as enforcing internal controls, but does not protect against identity theft and fraud because it focuses on identifying the user. Online criminals, however, have already devised ways to bypass two-factor authentication protections and will continue to innovate new methods of impersonating user identities. A better approach to fighting identity theft is to authenticate transactions, similar to how credit card firms make little effort to verify identities but invest in infrastructure that monitors transactions, says Schneier. RSA's Uniejewski argues two-factor authentication is a major advance in securing people's identities because it invalidates some of the most productive hacker tools, such as mass harvesting of identity and account information from Web sites. Two-factor authentication is not a complete solution, but is a critical security component when integrated into operating system and application interfaces and protocols. This integration also helps protect against some man-in-the-middle attacks and malware.
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  • "How Women in IT Make It to the Top"
    Federal Computer Week (04/11/05) Vol. 19, No. 10, P. 26; Ferris, Nancy

    Women who hold high-ranking positions in the federal information technology sector do not perceive a glass ceiling, which Office of Management and Budget e-government and IT administrator Karen Evans disparages as an outmoded concept. Success stories such as Evans are marked by an enthusiasm for learning, versatility, and a can-do, risk-taking attitude. Role models have also played an important part in these women's career tracks: Debra Filippi, who serves as program director for the Defense Information Systems Agency's Net-Centric Enterprise Services, says her father taught her the value of a solid work ethic. Filippi and Adair Martinez of the Department of Veterans Affairs note the importance of great bosses who do not micromanage and who provide employees with growth opportunities. However, Martinez acknowledges that there is little chance of advancement for leaders of support operations such as IT; "IT is its own glass ceiling," she comments. Gender-based discrimination is a reality, but the problem is less pronounced in federal organizations such as the Social Security Administration thanks to good managers and a commitment to a diverse workforce, as SRA International senior VP and former SSA staffer Kathleen Adams recounts. Acquisitions Solutions President and former USDA CIO Anne Reed says frequent movements to other organizations throughout her career were key to her success, and also cites the advantages of participating in professional organizations and activities. Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems and Solutions VP Carlaine Blizzard says the increased presence of women in the Army has raised women's comfort levels in that sector, but cautions that the most formidable challenge for women is striking a balance between career and family obligations.
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    To learn more about ACM's Committee on Women and Computing, visit http://www.acm.org/women.

  • "E-Commerce Gets Smarter"
    Technology Review (04/05) Vol. 108, No. 4, P. 54; Buderi, Robert

    Online and in-store retail are being fused together through "multichanneling," which carries benefits for both retailers and consumers: For retailers, multichanneling technologies allow them to simplify and derive more value from the collection of customer data; for consumers, they enhance the convenience of online shopping with the ability to check out items in the store before deciding to purchase them. Personalizing the shopping experience via technology is a necessity, as building and maintaining close ties with customers becomes increasingly difficult as more and more retailers expand. Jupiter Research estimates that consumers spend $6 offline for every $1 spent online as a result of Web-based research, and this illustrates the rationale behind retailers' multichanneling efforts. At the heart of virtually all e-commerce personalization and customization initiatives are data mining and Web analytics technologies, which retailers can use to detect signs of fraud as well as determine customers' habits and preferences even when such information is not voluntarily provided. Such practices make privacy a key concern, and organizations such as the IBM Privacy Management Council were formed to address this issue, primarily through aggregate profiling of customers that allow retailers to adjust their offerings to people as members of a broad category rather than as individuals. Experts say shoppers will be reluctant to permit retailers to collect information about them unless the retailers offer something worthwhile, such as discounts, special parking privileges, and so on. Jonathan Reynolds with the University of Oxford's Institute of Retail Management says how well retailers wield new technologies that enable customers to influence their own profiles and classifications will determine how successful they are in adapting to the shifting e-commerce landscape.
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