icctoday

10 Programming Languages That Could Shake Up IT

2012-01-08T05:13:00.001-08:00

Ten cutting-edge programs aim to address a specific problem or a unique shortcoming of the more popular languages. Google's Dart is similar to JavaScript in that it uses C-like syntax and keywords, but objects in Dart are defined in classes and interfaces, as in C++ or Java. Ceylon, developed by Red Hat's Gavin King, aims to solve the problems associated with Java. There will be no Ceylon virtual machine, and the Ceylon compiler will output Java bytecode that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Go is a general-purpose programming language that is suitable for development and systems programming. F# is based on .Net Common Language Runtime (CLR), which means it can access all of the same libraries and features as other CLR languages. Opa aims to eliminate traditional programming languages by proposing a new paradigm for Web programming. The Opa compiler decides whether a given routine should run on the client, server, or both, and it outputs code accordingly. X10, developed by IBM Research, handles concurrency using the partitioned global address space programming model. Chapel, part of Cray's Cascade Program, is a high-performance computing initiative that aims to develop abstract parallel algorithms from the underlying hardware.

Avoiding Metro Manila Traffic (article from Manila Standard)

2011-08-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

AS a motorist, I’ve never been a big fan of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority. The mention of the agency conjures up images of traffic aides skulking around the bend, waiting to arrest hapless motorists on bogus “swerving” charges. Invariably, the arrest is followed by the descent of a small mob of other traffic aides who mill around the unfortunate victim like a wake of vultures hovering around carrion.

With these images hardwired into my brain, I was pleasantly surprised to see another side to the MMDA, one that helps rather than hassles motorists. Metro Manila Traffic Navigator (http://mmdatraffic.interaksyon.com) is a Web-based application designed to give the public quick access to live traffic conditions along six major Metro Manila thoroughfares: EDSA, Quezon Avenue, Espana, C5, Roxas Boulevard and the South Luzon Expressway.

Developed by the MMDA in cooperation with TV5, the Web site is a nifty tool for planning your route before heading out to the crowded Metro Manila streets. The default system view shows what looks like a subway map, color coded to indicate traffic conditions along those streets: green for light, yellow for moderate and red for heavy traffic. Clicking on any major intersection opens up a window that tells you how long ago the information was updated. The MMDA says information is updated every 15 minutes, which seems often enough to be truly useful.

Clicking on any of the six major routes on the left side of the screen opens up a line view, which clearly indicates traffic conditions on all major intersections along the thoroughfare. Clicking on the magnifying lens icon brings up the chosen route on Google Maps. Traffic Navigator is the brainchild of Yves Gonzalez, 28, a lawyer and iPad developer who joined the agency’s chairman, Francis Tolentino, when he first took over the agency in July 2010.

From conception to public beta, the Traffic Navigator took about nine months to develop, Gonzalez says. Data comes from the MMDA’s network of closed-circuit TVs, traffic enforcers with hand-held radios, and from the public through Twitter (@MMDANavigator) or SMS (0933-7401258). The Navigator team then plugs in the information into Navigator using a Web-based backend, and is reflected on the front-end for the public to view.

In cases where a public report is from an unknown source, Gonzalez says, the data is first verified by having a traffic enforcer go to the area if it is not covered by a CCTV. “I am now looking into ways to improve or automate the data collection for the Navigator so that we can improve our data’s accuracy,” Gonzalez says.

He adds that efforts are underway to expand the Traffic Navigator to include Ortigas Avenue, Marcos Highway, and Commonwealth Avenue, and to extend the C5 line all the way to Tandang Sora Avenue. Even at this early stage, the Traffic Navigator has received positive feedback, both from end-users and other developers. In fact, the project recently won a Boomerang Award, which recognizes the outstanding work in Internet and mobile marketing, for the innovative use of applications, technology or platforms.

“For me, this award symbolizes the power of combining technology and public service to bring real positive change to our country,” Gonzalez says in a post on Google+. Gonzalez, who has also been responsible for the MMDA’s use of social networks, says the move has already reaped many benefits, including the ability to quickly and efficiently get information out to the public, including the traditional media.

Social networks also allow the agency to get the message out to a broad audience at a minimal cost, he adds, compared to the now defunct radio and TV operations that used to cost the MMDA more than P15 million a year in salaries, equipment and leases. Gonzalez, who was recently named traffic czar for Metro Manila, adds that social networks allow the agency to respond to the public’s needs in real time, from basic inquiries to situations that require immediate action.

“Wherever I am, I can monitor Twitter to know where there are problem traffic areas that require immediate attention, so that I can then dispatch my enforcers where they are needed most. This would not have been possible before without social media,” he says. The downside?

“For those of us tasked with monitoring Twitter and Facebook 24/7, it can be very time-consuming as it eats up a lot of our personal time,” he says. For motorists who benefit from the MMDA system, however, it’s time well spent. Our own suggestions to improve Traffic Navigator: 1) Add flood alerts to indicate areas that are impassable during heavy downpours; and 2) Add icons to indicate where the traffic aides are lurking.

Why Software is Eating The World

2011-08-23T02:24:00.000-07:00

Why Software is Eating the World (Marc Andreessen, Wall Street Journal)

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In an interview with WSJ's Kevin Delaney, Groupon and LinkedIn investor Marc Andreessen insists that the recent popularity of tech companies does not constitute a bubble. He also stressed that both Apple and Google are undervalued and that "the market doesn't like tech."

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies. Apple, for example, has a P/E ratio of around 15.2—about the same as the broader stock market, despite Apple's immense profitability and dominant market position (Apple in the last couple weeks became the biggest company in America, judged by market capitalization, surpassing Exxon Mobil). And, perhaps most telling, you can't have a bubble when people are constantly screaming "Bubble!"

But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley's new companies. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

Why is this happening now?

Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees. In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month. Running that same application today in Amazon's cloud costs about $1,500 a month.

With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired—the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and unimportant. Oops.

Today, the world's largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.

Today's largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.

Today's dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple's iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content. Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue from 2% in 2004.

Today's fastest growing entertainment companies are videogame makers—again, software—with the industry growing to $60 billion from $30 billion five years ago. And the fastest growing major videogame company is Zynga (maker of games including FarmVille), which delivers its games entirely online. Zynga's first-quarter revenues grew to $235 million this year, more than double revenues from a year earlier. Rovio, maker of Angry Birds, is expected to clear $100 million in revenue this year (the company was nearly bankrupt when it debuted the popular game on the iPhone in late 2009). Meanwhile, traditional videogame powerhouses like Electronic Arts and Nintendo have seen revenues stagnate and fall.

The best new movie production company in many decades, Pixar, was a software company. Disney—Disney!—had to buy Pixar, a software company, to remain relevant in animated movies.

Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago. It's virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone that doesn't include a software-powered camera, and photos are uploaded automatically to the Internet for permanent archiving and global sharing. Companies like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Flickr have stepped into Kodak's place.

Today's largest direct marketing platform is a software company—Google. Now it's been joined by Groupon, Living Social, Foursquare and others, which are using software to eat the retail marketing industry. Groupon generated over $700 million in revenue in 2010, after being in business for only two years.

Today's fastest growing telecom company is Skype, a software company that was just bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. CenturyLink, the third largest telecom company in the U.S., with a $20 billion market cap, had 15 million access lines at the end of June 30—declining at an annual rate of about 7%. Excluding the revenue from its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink's revenue from these legacy services declined by more than 11%. Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have survived by transforming themselves into software companies, partnering with Apple and other smartphone makers.

LinkedIn is today's fastest growing recruiting company. For the first time ever, on LinkedIn, employees can maintain their own resumes for recruiters to search in real time—giving LinkedIn the opportunity to eat the lucrative $400 billion recruiting industry.

Software is also eating much of the value chain of industries that are widely viewed as primarily existing in the physical world. In today's cars, software runs the engines, controls safety features, entertains passengers, guides drivers to destinations and connects each car to mobile, satellite and GPS networks. The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content. The trend toward hybrid and electric vehicles will only accelerate the software shift—electric cars are completely computer controlled. And the creation of software-powered driverless cars is already under way at Google and the major car companies.

Today's leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition. Likewise for FedEx, which is best thought of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached. And the success or failure of airlines today and in the future hinges on their ability to price tickets and optimize routes and yields correctly—with software.

Oil and gas companies were early innovators in supercomputing and data visualization and analysis, which are crucial to today's oil and gas exploration efforts. Agriculture is increasingly powered by software as well, including satellite analysis of soils linked to per-acre seed selection software algorithms.

The financial services industry has been visibly transformed by software over the last 30 years. Practically every financial transaction, from someone buying a cup of coffee to someone trading a trillion dollars of credit default derivatives, is done in software. And many of the leading innovators in financial services are software companies, such as Square, which allows anyone to accept credit card payments with a mobile phone, and PayPal, which generated more than $1 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year, up 31% over the previous year.

Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation. My venture capital firm is backing aggressive start-ups in both of these gigantic and critical industries. We believe both of these industries, which historically have been highly resistant to entrepreneurial change, are primed for tipping by great new software-centric entrepreneurs.

Even national defense is increasingly software-based. The modern combat soldier is embedded in a web of software that provides intelligence, communications, logistics and weapons guidance. Software-powered drones launch airstrikes without putting human pilots at risk. Intelligence agencies do large-scale data mining with software to uncover and track potential terrorist plots.

Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming. This includes even industries that are software-based today. Great incumbent software companies like Oracle and Microsoft are increasingly threatened with irrelevance by new software offerings like Salesforce.com and Android (especially in a world where Google owns a major handset maker).

In some industries, particularly those with a heavy real-world component such as oil and gas, the software revolution is primarily an opportunity for incumbents. But in many industries, new software ideas will result in the rise of new Silicon Valley-style start-ups that invade existing industries with impunity. Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic. Joseph Schumpeter, the economist who coined the term "creative destruction," would be proud.

And while people watching the values of their 401(k)s bounce up and down the last few weeks might doubt it, this is a profoundly positive story for the American economy, in particular. It's not an accident that many of the biggest recent technology companies—including Google, Amazon, eBay and more—are American companies. Our combination of great research universities, a pro-risk business culture, deep pools of innovation-seeking equity capital and reliable business and contract law is unprecedented and unparalleled in the world.

Still, we face several challenges.

First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign '90s. The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient. And when the economy finally stabilizes, look out—the best of the new companies will grow even faster.

Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There's no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

Finally, the new companies need to prove their worth. They need to build strong cultures, delight their customers, establish their own competitive advantages and, yes, justify their rising valuations. No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It's brutally difficult.

I'm privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies, and I can tell you they're really good at what they do. If they perform to my and others' expectations, they are going to be highly valuable cornerstone companies in the global economy, eating markets far larger than the technology industry has historically been able to pursue.

Instead of constantly questioning their valuations, let's seek to understand how the new generation of technology companies are doing what they do, what the broader consequences are for businesses and the economy and what we can collectively do to expand the number of innovative new software companies created in the U.S. and around the world.

That's the big opportunity. I know where I'm putting my money.

Bill Gates on the Past, Present, and Future of the PC

2011-08-14T02:49:00.000-07:00

The most significant innovation in personal computing over the last 30 years has been the evolution of natural interfaces, with the GUI, speech recognition, gestures and touch receiving equal weight, according to Bill Gates, a co-founder and the former chief executive of Microsoft.

As the PC turns 30, PCMag.com asked Gates, as well as other industry leaders, for their thoughts on the most significant innovation in personal computing, and how PCs have changed people's lives for the better – or worse. Finally, PCMag.com wanted to know what the future holds for personal computing – and maybe whether the "Personal Computer" would exist in its current form.

While Apple's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak arguably invented and popularized the personal computer, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and later Steve Ballmer at Microsoft crafted and shaped the Windows operating system which became synonomous with the term "PC". The Apple Macintosh and Windows pushed the graphical user interface into the mainstream, driven by the increasing performance of microprocessors from Intel Corp., and later from chips designed by Advanced Micro Devices, Cyrix, Via Technology, and others.

"The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible," Gates said.

"On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant," Gates added. "We just take it for granted now, but the graphical user interface was an amazing breakthrough that made computers dramatically easier for almost everyone to use. Today, we're seeing speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies coming into the mainstream. Touchscreens on phones, tablets and PCs have opened up an incredible new world of applications. And we've barely scratched the surface with new interfaces such as those in Kinect, which incorporate facial recognition along with gesture-based and voice control."

Gates has evolved much as the PC has: in its infancy, the personal computer was a hobbyist product, and expanded into a consumer device, a business tool, and then an ubiquitous device that has helped shape human culture. In his role as the co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates has taken his technology and business acumen on the road, using technology as a tool to crack fundamental problems facing humanity: education, poverty, health care, and agricultural research, among others.

It's the role of the PC as a cultural touchstone for which Gates seems most proud. When asked if the PC had changed people's lives for the better, Gates replied, "There's no question that it has."

"The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of," Gates said. "Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard. All of these have their roots in what the PC made possible, amplified and extended by other devices.

"But we're still falling short in some areas," Gates added. "Education is one example, where the impact of technology lags behind almost every other part of society. There's so much more that can be done to utilize technology in engage students, help teachers, and customize learning for each child."

The question now is how the personal computer will evolve. Clearly, the days of the desktop PC are over; in Oct. 2008, laptops began outpacing the sales of desktop PCs, and that trend has continued to accelerate. And phones have made the computing experience even more personal; the addition of GPS chips to phones allowed the phone to provide location-based services, a capability that notebooks simply haven't been able to adequately duplicate.

Computing devices have become gateways to the Internet, Gates said, and will continue to serve that role.

"On a personal level, technology will be more seamlessly integrated into our lives. We see this taking shape now – so many things are becoming available in digital form and are accessible to us wherever and whenever we need it," Gates said.

"On a societal level, technology will contribute to solving many of our greatest challenges," Gates added. "In global health, it will advance scientific discovery, diagnostics, and delivery of health services to the world's poor. In education, it has the potential to ignite student interest in learning and help teachers understand what's working and what's not in the classroom. And in many other areas, including energy and the environment, computers already are and will continue to be an essential tool for data collection, analysis, and innovation."

And what's on the road ahead? Who knows. "The next 30 years are going to be equally remarkable as the last 30," Gates said. "We're really still just at the beginning of what's possible."

Stanford University Free Online Course

2011-08-03T20:51:00.000-07:00

Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun and Google director of research Peter Norvig are making their artificial intelligence class this fall free to anyone online. The online course will run in tandem with the actual class from October to December, and online students will be expected to watch the lectures, complete the assignments, and take the exams. Although online students will not earn college credit for the class, Thrun and Norvig say they will receive grades and a certificate if they pass it. Since the course was announced in late July, more than 8,000 people have asked to be put on an email list for more details. The researchers want the online students to interact with Stanford's students, and are encouraging that interaction by having the courses run simultaneously. The professors recommend that online students buy the class textbook and dedicate at least 10 hours a week to the course, which is an intermediate-level class, requiring some mathematical and programming knowledge. Norvig says the course might appeal to students at universities that do not offer similar courses, to technology professionals, or to ambitious high-school students.

ParaSail Programming Language

2011-07-30T20:40:00.001-07:00

SofCheck's Tucker Taft has developed the Parallel Specification and Implementation Language (ParaSail), a new programming language designed to maximize the potential of multicore computer processors by avoiding the problems associated with multicore chips, such as dividing tasks and sending them to each core in parallel. ParaSail, which will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, is similar to the C and C++ programming languages, except that it automatically splits a program into thousands of smaller tasks that can be spread across cores, which allows for the greatest number of tasks to be completed in parallel. ParaSail also automatically debugs the programs, which makes the code safer. "Everything is done in parallel by default, unless you tell it otherwise," Taft says. ParaSail has several other components that are based on older programming languages developed in the 1980s and 1990s for supercomputers. "There are a lot of people chipping away at the problem, taking existing languages and trying to make them better at handling parallel processing," Taft says.

Flocking to Google+ By John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, July 11, 2011

2011-07-13T07:24:00.000-07:00

Although the system has only been open to a few million people, the big well-orchestrated buzz over the past week has been about Google+, the Facebook clone. I'm trying to figure out why this product is so attractive when Google, much like Yahoo, has produced numerous and very similar Facebook clones in the past. Google still supports Orkut, for example. Why wasn't Orkut just upgraded years ago to what is now Google+?

And Google+ is not popular just because of all the early adopters who jump on every new thing are jacked up over it. The influence of these early adopters is questionable. You know who I'm talking about. It's the usual suspects—the online crazy joiners who jump on every new product no matter how sketchy. And, of course, they're led by their ersatz leader, the ubiquitous Scoble, the blogger.

Scoble has become so famous for jumping on board with the first tranche of adopters that he's sort of become one of those one-named "celebrities." He's just Scoble now. What was his first name anyway? Ed? Buddy? Lester? I cannot recall for the life of me. There are others who pile on before most of us ever hear of a product, but Scoble is their leader—although they may not want to admit this.

Generally speaking, the first tranche of reviewers, the Scobalites, tend to like everything unless it is out and out terrible or an awful scam. They act as a crude but liberal filter. This releases the second tranche of mavens. This would be like the Gizmodo folks or David Pogue or the group of professional big-name reviewers, including the ones here at PCMag.com. Now we start to get some insight into the third tranche: common reviewers and pundits with all sorts of opinions.

About now, I come along, with a few other meta reviewers who frankly do not give a crap about this social networking stuff because I'm not 14 anymore. It's up to us to try and figure out what the fuss is about so people can say, "Ah, now THAT actually makes sense." And let's face it, the mania around much of this makes no sense. And, yes, I do bumble around the house moaning when I see someone wasting time on Facebook. But I digress.

I do think I know what is going on, though. First of all, make no mistake, Google is acting like Microsoft did in the 1990s when Netscape came along. Netscape stupidly and aggressively said it was going to kill Microsoft because the browser would be the new OS and everything would be done on the Internet. Microsoft immediately believed this was an actual and credible threat and went to work to destroy Netscape.

Facebook pulled a similar dumb stunt by threatening Google with an assertion that all search will gravitate towards social search and it was implied that Facebook would eventually kill Google. This idea has permeated the scene in a curiously subversive way.

Google began to toy with the social mechanism, with some false starts, and then suddenly Google+ hits the scene and people are analyzing it seriously and paying attention to it. The company also rolled it out like Gmail, meaning it would be limited to the thought leaders first and then ratcheted out to the public. So far everyone is pleased with Google+, and it appears that people are beginning to turn away—somewhat—from Facebook. Why?

I think the reason is simple. All of the complaints about Facebook policies have finally caught up with the company. I noticed this with people who have looked at and reviewed Google+. They all make a comment about how the privacy settings are better or easier to access or less intrusive. This small factor is almost always mentioned. The fact is that Facebook was behaving like a classic monopolist and acting in a highly cavalier manner regarding its users. There was a take it or -leave it attitude. This was compounded by the apparent anti-social arrogance of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I honestly believe that all the buzz and enthusiasm around this Google product has more to do with a pent-up reaction to Facebook than it does with the Google+ product itself. It's a backlash, if you will. And Google has the extra benefit of Gmail and the ability of users to leverage their contact lists and socialize them quickly. So it's not as if it will take forever to get a network established.

I have no idea how long this honeymoon with Google+ will last, but Facebook needs to be concerned about it and do something to reverse the enthusiasm. Otherwise, it will become yet another flattened dead skunk on the social networking superhighway.

"Social Network" Movie Inspires More Students To Take Computer Courses

2011-06-14T04:54:00.000-07:00

After a decade of decreases, computer science programs are experiencing a resurgence, even as politicians warn about the decline of U.S. competitiveness in science, technology, engineering, and math. Educators and technologists say the increased interested in computer science is directly related to the popularity of companies such as Apple and Facebook, as well as The Social Network, the movie depicting the success of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. "It's a national call, a Sputnik moment," says Mehran Sahami, Stanford University's associate chairman for computer science education. The rise in the number of computer science degrees awarded started in 2010, and will reach 11,000 this year, according to the Computing Research Association. In addition, the number of students who are pursuing a computer science degree but have not yet declared their major increased by 50 percent last year. Institutions such as Stanford, and universities of Washington and Southern California, have recently redesigned their computer science curriculums to attract new students. The new curriculums emphasize the vast number of careers that use computer science and focus on teaching its practical applications, instead of just vocational skills such as programming languages, which change quickly. Despite the changes and its renewed popularity, the number of computer science graduates does not come close to filling the available jobs.

I.T. Graduates In Demand

2011-05-27T23:39:00.001-07:00

Employers are looking to hire graduates with degrees in computer science more than any other college graduates, according to a new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). More than 56 percent of computer science majors who have applied for a job have received an offer, giving the major the highest offer rate for the class of 2011. NACE surveyed more than 50,000 college students and found that the job offer rate for computer science graduates has increased 13.8 percent from 2010. Half of engineering graduates who have applied for jobs have received an offer, and the overall job offer rate for 2011 graduates has risen to 41.2 percent from 38.2 percent a year ago. In a separate survey released earlier in the month, NACE reported that computer science graduates were receiving starting salaries of $63,000.

What Makes an Image Memorable?

2011-05-25T21:45:00.001-07:00

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed an algorithm that can identify which photos humans will find memorable, based on statistical data taken from a study of people remembering images. The researchers, led by MIT's Phillip Isola, found that the most memorable photos are those that contain people, followed by static indoor scenes and human-scale objects, while landscapes are not as memorable. After gathering the data, the researchers created memorability maps of each image by asking people to label all of the objects in the images. A computer model analyzed the maps to determine which objects make an image memorable. Then the researchers used machine-learning techniques to create a computational model that analyzed the images and their memorability rate, which enabled them to create an algorithm that can predict the memorability of images the computer has not previously analyzed.

I.T. Professionals in High Demand

2011-05-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

There are more technology job openings in a single day on Dice's career Web site than there are computer science graduates joining the U.S. workforce, according a Dice Holdings report. The report also found that 18 states have shortages of local graduates compared to job openings, particularly in key tech markets such as Silicon Valley, Seattle, Dallas, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago. The report notes that the gap between graduates and job openings has created competition for talent among tech companies. There are at least two or three jobs for every computer science graduate, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Ann Hunter. " 'America's Tech Talent Crunch' is a snapshot of how businesses, educational institutions, and employees are dealing with palpable shortages in real time," the report says. An earlier Dice report found that, on average, technology professionals had not received salary raises in the last two years. However, "companies can no longer get away with paltry salary increases for their technology staffs based on the demand we are seeing for talent," says Dice's Tom Silver.

Path Social Network Limits Users to 50 Friends

2011-04-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

Most people on Facebook have several hundred "friends," so it's safe to assume that the average person does not divulge their most private thoughts on the site. A new social network from a former Facebook executive, however, aims to tighten your personal network to just 50 people so you can feel more comfortable sharing details of your life. The Personal Network, or Path, is a photo-based service that lets you upload photos and share that moment with your closest family and friends. It launched last November as an iPhone app, but a Web-based version is also available. Path is the brainchild of Dave Morin, a former senior platform manager at Facebook who will serve as Path's chief executive. The company's lineup, however, is a who's who in the tech startup world, including Napster founding Shawn Fanning. Digg founder Kevin Rose is also an investor. Path social network. "Path allows you to capture your life's most personal moments and share them with the 50 close friends and family in your life who matter most," Morin wrote in a blog post. "Because your personal network is limited to your 50 closest friends and family, you can always trust that you can post any moment, no matter how personal. Path is a place where you can be yourself."

Path: How's the Weather?

2011-04-18T04:38:00.000-07:00

As our obsession with the moment continues, we are always looking for new ways to help you add context to your moments. In thinking about context, we like to think of the important questions good friends ask each other to start a conversation over a distance: How are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? Where are you? And often times the question of: How’s the weather? Weather often times defines our days. A beautiful sunny day evokes feelings of warmth and happiness. While a cold and rainy day reminds us of staying inside and cuddling in blankets while listening to the rain against the windows. Weather is ever changing but always a constant and important context. Path & SimpleGeo worked together to add weather, including the temperature and the forecast, to all of your moments. Bringing a new layer of context to the social web.

Path, A New Social Network

2011-04-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

Path limits users to 50 friends. The photo-centric service, built for smart phones, is designed to help users share information only with people they trust. It was launched November 2010. Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar has a famous theory that the number of people with whom one can maintain a close relationship is limited to 150 by the size of the neocortex, the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language. The Internet has made it quicker and easier to connect with far-flung acquaintances, but Dunbar says it's impossible to overcome that basic brain programming. With high rollers on Facebook boasting up to 5,000 "friends," digital friendship has become increasingly indiscriminate. And that keeps some people from feeling comfortable sharing the more intimate details of their lives. That's the motivation behind Path, a San Francisco company that is offering a more exclusive social network. Path bills itself instead as a "personal network."Dave Morin, formerly an executive at Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., and Shawn Fanning, co-founder of Napster, are betting that people crave more private interaction with a much smaller social circle: Path lets each user designate only 50 friends. Morin estimates that, based on Dunbar's research, 50 is "roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks."

Carnegie Mellon University Lecture Series 2011

2011-04-15T22:00:00.001-07:00

Computational thinking ought to be embedded within educational programs in order to cultivate children's analytical ability, says Carnegie Mellon University professor Jeannette M. Wing. "Computational thinking helps us figure out how to solve problems through reduction, embedding, transformation, decomposition, or simulation," Wing told attendees at Carnegie Mellon Qatar's Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series. Everyday skills such as planning, learning, scheduling, searching, and making trade-offs come into play with computational thinking, she says. "Teaching computational thinking cannot only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science because of its intellectual adventure, but will benefit people in all fields," Wing says. Everyone is capable of learning computational thinking concepts, according to Wing, and she says the tech-savvy generation should be exploited to teach more people computer science. Carnegie Mellon Qatar professor Kemal Oflazer notes that a discussion on how computer science needed to be perceived in an educational context was started by Wing's 2006 opinion paper in the Communications of the ACM. She persuasively contended that computer scientists' wide-ranging skills represent a universally applicable attitude and skill set required for everyone.

Demand High for Mobile App Developers

2011-04-15T21:58:00.000-07:00

Many companies increasingly want to hire mobile application engineers, but there are not enough developers for all the available positions. The increased demand is forcing companies to increase wages, retrain software engineers, outsource work to third-party developers, and set up offshore development labs. The number of mobile development jobs offered on Elance.com, a freelancer Web site, doubled between the first quarters of last year and this year, twice as fast as job growth overall. Some companies are trying to attract new developers by holding recruitment drives at college campuses and public technology seminars, while others are choosing to retrain software engineers in mobile development. Meanwhile, 31 percent of companies reported that the average salary among mobile software developers increased at a higher rate than normal, according to a Dice.com survey. The survey also found that the average mobile salary was about $76,000, but many companies pay as much as $150,000 a year.

Major Advance in Artificial Intelligence

2011-02-18T20:05:00.000-08:00

IBM's Watson supercomputer represents a major advance for artificial intelligence (AI) research through its ability to answer verbal questions posed by people. IBM researchers and industry analysts say this skill makes the system better equipped than any previous machine to organize its responses and engage in verbal conversation with humans. "To reach [a computer] conversationally and have it respond with knowledgeable answers is a sea change in computing," says analyst Richard Doherty. The goal of AI researchers to create a computer capable of mimicking human intelligence took a step forward this week with Watson competing against human players on the game show Jeopardy! "Watson is a significant step, allowing people to interact with a computer as they would a human being," says IBM researcher Jennifer Chu-Carroll. "Watson doesn't give you a list of documents to go through but gives the user an answer." The Jeopardy! match especially showcased the confidence the IBM researchers instilled within the supercomputer, as demonstrated by its frequent buzzing in. Chu-Carroll anticipates computers learning to use actual common sense within the next decade, and Doherty believes such advances will revitalize competition between AI researchers.

IBM Supercomputer wins in Jeopardy TV Game Show

2011-02-18T20:04:00.000-08:00

IBM's Watson supercomputer concluded its third and final televised round of Jeopardy! on Wednesday in triumph, defeating the human players and winning the three-day tournament. Watson finished the three rounds with $77,147, while the two other contestants won $24,000 and $21,600. Watson proved very proficient at buzzing in quickly to answer questions--a reflection of its confidence in its answers--and its victory was a vindication for computer science and the notion of developing a thinking machine. The supercomputer excels at parsing language. For example, it responded to "A recent best seller by Muriel Barbery is called 'This of the Hedgehog,'" with "What is Elegance?" IBM plans to announce a collaborative venture with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to develop a doctor's assistant service based on the Watson technology, which will permit physicians to ask questions of a cybernetic assistant. Another collaboration with Nuance Communications will strive to add voice recognition to the assistant, possibly making the service available in as soon as 18 months. IBM executives also are discussing the development of a version of Watson that can engage with consumers on various topics such as buying decisions and technical support.

IT Job Sector Continues to Strengthen

2011-02-09T17:42:00.000-08:00

Information technology-related (IT) jobs experienced a net gain of 11,800 in January, the eighth straight month of positive growth, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Five bellwether IT job segments had a net gain of 74,200 jobs over the past 12 months, led by management and technical consulting services and computer systems design and related services segments, which together accounted for close to 95 percent of all new IT jobs. Foote Partners CEO David Foote says the government defines the IT professional narrowly, recognizing just 21 job titles, which are all traditional infrastructure jobs in systems analysis, programming, data communications and networks, tech support, and database administration. "The role of technology in the enterprise is now so pervasive that managing it is no longer entrusted to one group but instead split among every department, function, line of business and product group," Foote says. "The job of each one of these entities is to determine how to make the best use of information technology for producing revenues and profitability, building market share, ensuring satisfied customers, controlling costs, innovating solutions, and generally to stay competitive in their industries."

Virtual Training

2010-12-06T17:36:00.000-08:00

University of Leeds researchers are leading the ImREAL project, which is developing a virtual-reality training tool aimed at creating a simulated learning environment that responds and adapts to users' behavior. The project also involves researchers from Austria, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and will focus on training workers for business, academia, and volunteering. "Simulated environments provide a cost-effective alternative to standard face-to-face training, but they need to incorporate the cognitive, social, and emotional aspects of the activities that are being modeled," says Leeds' Vania Dimitrova. The ImREAL project will focus on developing systems for interpersonal communications, which are important for managing relationships, customer service, and providing advice. The project also will develop tools that help trainees learn how communication and social cues vary across different cultures. The researchers plan to develop a self-growing adaptive simulation that uses a virtual mentor to help users learn about the experience as they work through it. "By the end of three years, we aim to have two fully functioning demonstration simulators up and running that incorporate these new ideas and illustrate highly innovative technologies for learning," Dimitrova says.

Online Social Networks and Human Behavior

2010-11-03T19:41:00.000-07:00

Online social networks have become important laboratories for social scientists studying human behavior. "The volume of online social networking is exploding, and it appears it is becoming more pervasive than real-life social networking," says Suffolk University professor Dan Stefanescu. Online social networks provide data that can be used to engineer new social systems and predict certain events and economic outcomes, Stefanescu says. Suffolk University researchers are studying the structure of online social networks and looking for properties that characterize them. "When studying different behaviors in online social networks, such as flow of information, bargaining power, flow of influence, it is useful to be able to characterize a node with respect to the whole network," Stefanescu says. He says the researchers use certain measures that can "describe various aspects of the 'importance' of a node in a network: how connected the node is, how easily it can reach other nodes, how much it mediates the connection between other nodes, etc." Stefanescu and colleagues are also studying interrelationships between offline characteristics of users, such as gender or culture, and their Internet preferences. They want to better understand the correlation between these offline characteristics and their online behavior, such as communication patterns and relationship building.

7 New Popular Programming Languages

2010-10-29T19:27:00.000-07:00

Seven increasingly popular niche programming languages offer features that cannot be found in the dominant languages. For example, Python has gained popularity in scientific labs. "Scientists often need to improvise when trying to interpret results, so they are drawn to dynamic languages which allow them to work very quickly and see results almost immediately," says Python's creator Guido von Rossum. Many Wall Street firms also rely on Python because they like to hire university scientists to work on complex financial analysis problems. Meanwhile, Ruby is becoming popular for prototyping. Ruby sites are devoted to cataloging data that can be stored in tables. MatLab was originally designed for mathematicians to solve systems of linear equations, but it also has found a following in the enterprise because of the large volumes of data that organizations need to analyze. Although JavaScript is not a new programming language, new applications for JavaScript are constantly in development. For example, CouchDB uses JavaScript's Map and Reduce functions to help bring harmony to both client and server-side programming. Other popular niche languages include R, which also is known as S and S-Plus, Erlang, Cobol, and CUDA.

Internet Users To Hit 2 Billion: UN agency

2010-10-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

The number of Internet users will surpass two billion this year, approaching a third of the world population, but developing countries need to step up access to the vital tool for economic growth, a United Nations agency said on Tuesday. Users have doubled in the past five years, and compare with an estimated global population of 6.9 billion, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said. Of 226 million new Internet users this year, 162 million will be from developing countries where growth rates are now higher, the ITU said in a report. However, by the end of 2010, 71 per cent of the population in developed countries will be online compared with 21 per cent of people in developing countries. The ITU said it was particularly important for developing countries to build up high-speed connections. “Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology,” said ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure, of Mali. “It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity and underpin long-term economic competitiveness.” Access varies widely by region, with 65 per cent of people online in Europe, ahead of 55 per cent in the Americas, compared with only 9.6 per cent of the population in Africa and 21.9 per cent in Asia/Pacific, the ITU said. Access to the Internet in schools, at work and in public places is critical for developing countries, where only 13.5 per cent of people have the Internet at home, against 65 per cent in developed countries, it said. A study last week by another U.N. agency showed that mobile phones were a far more important communications technology for people in the poorest developing countries than the Internet.

Face of FaceBook

2010-09-20T19:55:00.001-07:00

Through Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg aims to create something that moves beyond search engines and other Web-indexing tools. Three years ago, Zuckerberg announced Facebook's transition to a platform for applications devised by outside developers, while two years ago he introduced Facebook Connect, an app that allows users to sign onto other Web sites, gaming systems, and mobile devices with their Facebook account. Spring 2010 marked the unveiling of the Open Graph, which lets users reading articles see what articles their Facebook friends have read, shared, and enjoyed. Zuckerberg ultimately envisions Facebook as an underlying layer of virtually every electronic device. Such ambitions require people to be willing to cede more and more personal information to Facebook and its partners, and last December Facebook amended its privacy policies so that much more of users' information would be publicized by default. Users and institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center balked, and in response Zuckerberg announced a streamlined version of the privacy settings. Critics say his vision of the world as a more honest place through greater transparency does not align with many individuals' inclinations.

5 Indispensable IT Skills of the Future

2010-08-29T20:04:00.000-07:00

In the future, the most sought-after information technology (IT)-related skills will be those that involve the ability to mine large amounts of data, protect systems from security threats, manage the risks of growing complexity in new systems, and communicate how technology can increase productivity. By 2020, IDC predicts that the amount of data generated every year will reach 35 zettabytes, which will stimulate a high demand for IT workers that can analyze the data, as well as work with business units to define what data is needed and where to find it. Risk management skills also will be in high demand through 2020, especially at a time when business is working with growing IT complexity, says futurist David Pearce Snyder. Meanwhile, robots will have taken over more jobs by 2020, says futurist Joseph Coates. Protecting users' privacy also will be very important in 2020, because fewer interactions will be face-to-face, more personal information will be available online, and new technologies could make it easier to impersonate people, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report. In addition, network systems and data communications management will be a top priority in 2020, Snyder says.

Future on Display

2010-08-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

National Taiwan University (NTU) researchers have developed a lamp that can convert a multitouch tabletop display into a three-dimensional (3D) projection. Users viewing an image projected onto a tabletop display can zoom in on specific areas by positioning the lamp device on them. "We combine an infrared projector and a standard color projector to simultaneously project visible content and invisible markers on the table surface," says NTU's Li-Wei Chan. The lamp is equipped with infrared cameras and can use the hidden markers to compute its position in three dimensions. The lamp analyzes the information to control the projection of high-resolution images onto the correct place on the tabletop display. The NTU team also has created a tablet computer that enables viewers to see a two-dimensional scene in 3D. Users hold the computer over a specific area on the map, and a 3D view of that area will appear on the screen.

3D Virtual Learning

2010-06-28T19:47:00.001-07:00

Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) researchers working on the eMadrid project are studying how to use three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds for teaching. Three-dimensional virtual worlds must include teaching elements such as a training program, with a sequence of activities for students to acquire knowledge, as well as a methodology to evaluate previously defined learning results, to become a learning platform, says UC3M professor Carlos Delgado Kloos. "The 3D learning environments are not only appropriate for transmission of knowledge, but also for teaching competencies, and if they also include augmented reality elements for the manipulation of a three-dimensional world with real physical elements, even better results are obtained, as the barrier of a fictional world immersion is reduced," Kloos says. The eMadrid project is working to achieve these standards by collaborating with researchers from other universities, including Autonoma, Complutense, Politecnica, Rey Juan Carlos, and the National Distance Education University of Spain. The researchers are developing defined standards and best practices for implementing teaching environments in 3D virtual platforms.

Watching 3D Without the Glasses

2010-06-15T04:07:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group (APG) has designed a lens that could help make it possible to watch three-dimensional (3D) movies without glasses. The lens is thinner at the bottom than at the top, a design that steers light to a viewer's eyes by switching light-emitting diodes along its bottom edge on and off. When combined with a backlight, the switching diodes make it possible to show different images to different viewers, or to create a 3D effect by presenting different images to a viewer's left and right eye. "What's so special about this lens is that it allows us to control where the light goes," says APG's Steven Bathiche. Microsoft's display can deliver 3D video to two viewers at the same time no matter where they are positioned. The 3D display uses a camera to track viewers so it knows where to steer the light. The lens design, which includes a rounded, thicker end, dictates how the light bounces around and when and where it can escape, Bathiche says. He says the lens could replace the traditional backlight in a liquid-crystal display to create a glasses-free 3D display.

RobotC 2.0 Programming Language

2010-04-14T17:37:00.000-07:00

Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Academy recently released ROBOTC 2.0, a programming language for robots and a suite of training tools designed for use by both elementary school students and college-level engineering courses. Based on the C programming language, ROBOTC is designed to evolve as students move from elementary school through college-level robot programming. Version 2.0 feature a new graphical user interface and an interactive real-time debugger that operates with either a wired or wireless connection to a PC. "We introduced ROBOTC four years ago because students working with robots should spend their time learning scientific, mathematical, and engineering principles, not learning a different programming language for each robot platform," says Robotics Academy director Robin Shoop. ROBOTC 2.0 is an integrated development environment that consists of a compiler, text and project editor, and a run-time environment. The debugger supports both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi links and provides users with complete access from a PC.

Microsoft Manual Deskterity

2010-04-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

Microsoft researchers have developed Manual Deskterity, a computer interface that combines touch input with the precision of a pen. The prototype drafting application, designed for the Microsoft Surface tabletop touchscreen, enables users to perform touch actions such as zooming in and out and manipulating images, but they also can use a pen to draw or annotate those images. Manual Deskterity also allows users to touch an image onscreen with one hand while using the pen in the other hand to take notes or perform other actions that pertain to that object. Users need to learn more tricks to use Manual Deskterity, but the natural user interface should ease the learning curve by engaging muscle memory. "This idea that people just walk up with an expectation of how a [natural user interface] should work is a myth," says Microsoft research scientist Ken Hinckley. The researchers also plan to adapt the interface for use with mobile devices. Incorporating only touch input into devices is a mistake, according to Hinckley, who believes that pen and touch interactions can complement each other.

Using Twitter to Predict Event Success

2010-04-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

HP Labs researchers have developed a way to use Twitter to gauge real-time interest in movies and accurately predict how they will perform at the box office on opening weekend. HP Labs' Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman developed computational formulas that analyze Twitter feeds and use the rate at which movies are mentioned in Twitter updates to predict the first-weekend returns. The research also showed Twitter could be used to predict other events, such as how major products will be received and the outcomes of elections, according to Huberman. HP Labs studied nearly 3 million Twitter updates that mentioned 24 major movie releases over the course of three months. The researchers factored in the release date and the number of theaters the movie would be shown in, to predict the opening weekend box office performance with 97.3 percent accuracy. They also developed a system that evaluates the sentiments of Twitter updates as positive, negative, or neutral, to predict the following weekend's returns with 94 percent accuracy.

Microsoft OfficeTalk

2010-03-24T18:18:00.001-07:00

Microsoft is preparing a small-scale pilot for OfficeTalk, an experimental microblogging service for business users developed by its OfficeLabs researchers. The pilot will allow Microsoft to study how businesses use OfficeTalk, which enables employees to share information in short messages similar to Twitter. "This concept test applies the base capabilities of microblogging to a business environment, enabling employees to post their thoughts, activities, and potentially valuable information to anyone who might be interested," according to a company blog post. OfficeTalk was one of the most popular concepts in OfficeLabs' internal tests. Use of the microblogging service quickly spread across informal networks, offering a unique and efficient collaboration experience, according to the blog post. "OfficeTalk isn't a product--it's a research project focused on learning how people might use social networking tools at work and in what ways both people and organizations realize their value," the blog post says.

Mobile Learning

2010-03-22T20:08:00.001-07:00

Peruvian and Belgian researchers have developed an open source mobile learning application that enables health-care workers to connect to the free learning platform Moodle with their iPhone or iPod. The application was tested by health-care workers engaged in 20 clinics throughout Peru. The three-month pilot program used multimedia, three-dimensional animations, group discussions, policy documents, and peer-reviewed literature. The researchers are now finalizing the code before making it available under a Create Commons GNU license. Once the application is completed, the researchers say that institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and companies will be a

Multilingual Search Engine

2010-03-19T19:38:00.000-07:00

Universidad Politecnica de Madrid researchers have developed a multilingual search engine that can query a data repository written in Interlingua using questions formulated in any language and provide an answer in that same language. The search engine requires an information base that is written in the Universal Networking Language, the only general-purpose Interlingua. The search engine works by deducing the answer from the question instead of just finding the answer. First, the system searches the text corpus for statements that could contain the answer. Second, it determines which statements actually contain the answer. Finally, it generates the answer in the same language the question was formulated in. The researchers used a biographical encyclopedia to test the system, and reported that 82 percent of the 75 questions they posed were correct.

China & Russia Tops Intl Programming Competition

2010-02-08T17:23:00.000-08:00

The top 10 rankings of the 2010 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC) were dominated by five Russian teams and four Chinese teams. In first, second, third, and fourth place were Shanghai Jiaotong University, Moscow State University, National Taiwan University, and Taras Shevchenko Kiev National University, respectively. The University of Warsaw claimed eighth place, making it the only non-Russian or non-Chinese team to make the top 10. ACM President Dame Wendy Hall described the ICPC's global nature as an exceptional instance of the association's recent efforts to extend its technical activities, conferences, and services for the computing profession, and to acknowledge computing achievement in international areas. "By strengthening ACM's ties in multiple regions throughout the world and raising awareness of its many benefits and resources with the public and in-country decision-makers, we can play an active role in the critical technical, educational, and social issues that surround the computing community," she said. Hall also stressed the importance of computer science education in the international economy, citing ACM's initiatives to help high school students, teachers, and parents better comprehend the kinds of careers that studying computer science facilitates.

Digital Doomsday

2010-02-03T17:49:00.001-08:00

In the event of a disaster that destroys the vast majority of the world, humanity's legacy will largely reside on data stored on hard drives. However, hard drives were never meant for long-term storage and no one can be sure how long they will last. The Canadian Conservation Institute's (CCI's) Joe Iraci says that although the most important data is backed up on magnetic tapes or optical discs, these formats cannot be trusted to last even five years. Iraci has conducted accelerated aging tests by exposing different forms of media to high heat and humidity. The tests found that the most reliable data storage devices are recordable CDs with a reflective layer of gold and a phthalocyanine dye layer. Many experts believe that after a major catastrophe only information that is written on paper will survive. "Even the worst kind of paper can last more than 100 years," says the CCI's Season Tse. Proposals to make a paper format that can store digital data for centuries using a system similar to bar codes have been slowed due to a lack of commercial interest. Another option is the Rosetta Disk, which holds descriptions and texts of 1,000 languages. The Rosetta Disk is made out of nickel, etched with text that is only readable at 1,000 times magnification. Each disk holds about 30,000 pages of text or images.

Latest Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Research

2010-01-23T02:16:00.000-08:00

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed Sikuli, a system that enables computer users to write programs using screen shots of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The researchers say that Sikuli could allow novice computer users to create their own programs without having to master a programming language. Sikuli was designed by MIT professor Rob Miller and graduate student Tsung-Hsiang Chang, and the University of Maryland's Tom Yeh. The researchers won the best-student-paper award at ACM's recent User Interface Software and Technology conference. The paper described how Sikuli can build short programs that aid other, larger programs. Sikuli uses computer vision algorithms to analyze the computer screen and can work with any program that has a graphical interface. Another Sikuli application lets programmers who are working on large software development projects create scripts that automatically test an application's GUI components.

Thought Controlled Technology

2010-01-21T20:48:00.000-08:00

Researchers are developing technology that would enable people to control electronic devices using only their thoughts. The technology uses software that can analyze and interpret patterns in the brain's electrical activity when people think about specific words or actions. "If we could access the global information network simply by using the power of our thoughts, it would open up incredible new opportunities for computing technology," says Intel's Dean Pomerleau, who has been working with Carnegie Mellon University researchers to study brain patterns. The U.S. Army is working with University of California, Irvine researchers to study how to harness brain waves to send nonverbal messages in battle. Meanwhile, Mayo Clinic researchers think thoughts can be read faster by placing sensors inside the skull. The Mayo Clinic's Jerry Shih says that one day people's brains could be implanted with microchips similar to those used for personal computers. Already, University of Southern California researchers have implanted chips into the brains of rats to try to study ways to boost memory, with applications for Alzheimer's patients in mind.

International Internet Classroom

2010-01-08T19:54:00.001-08:00

University of Arizona (UA) researchers are developing the International Internet Classroom as a way to help teachers access information and teaching resources. The project will use artificial intelligence and user-generated data to create pertinent educational resources. The UA team plans to release a Unit Package Editor in February 2010 to a small test group of teachers. The tool will enable teachers to build and share collections of educational resources such as lectures, exercises, homework assignments, and videos. "Just about every single educational idea is out there, and we want to make it easy to develop and to share that information," says UA computer science department head Paul Cohen. A similar project, called eTwinning, already exists in Europe and has about 74,000 members and 3,980 active projects for teachers to use. The service connects educators from European Union countries. International collaboration among students is very important, as educators in other countries have realized, while U.S. teachers seem to fight global educating efforts, says Alan November, an international education consultant. As part of the UA project, a survey of U.S. educators was developed to determine how they use Internet-based resources. According to the survey, teachers use tools such as Wikipedia, Discovery Education, and YouTube, as well as search engines such as Google and Yahoo, to locate educational resources.

Do Computers Understand Art?

2009-12-23T19:07:00.000-08:00

Researchers from the University of Girona and the Max Planck Institute have demonstrated that certain mathematical algorithms can offer clues about a painting's artistic style, although this is still a far cry from human-like artistic interpretation. The research team has shown that some artificial vision algorithms mean a computer can be programmed to "understand" an image and distinguish artistic styles based on low-level pictorial data, which covers such aspects as brush thickness, the type of material, and the composition of the color palette. Medium-level information encompasses differentiation between certain objects and scenes appearing in an image, as well as the type of painting. High-level information accounts for the historical context as well as knowledge of the artists and artistic trends. "It will never be possible to precisely determine mathematically an artistic period nor to measure the human response to a work of art, but we can look for trends," says study co-author Miquel Feixas. The researchers' analysis of various artificial vision algorithms used for art classification discovered that certain aesthetic measurements--calculating the order of the image by examining pixels and color distribution--along with the composition and diversity of the color palette, can be helpful. The researchers plan to apply their work to the development of image viewing and analysis tools, the classification of and search for museum collections, the creation of public informative and entertainment gear, and a better understanding of the interplay between people, computers, and works of art.

Learning Programming From Scratch

2009-12-14T19:28:00.000-08:00

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Mitchel Resnick and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab have enjoyed great success with Scratch, a computer programming language geared toward children ages eight to 16. Scratch users write code by connecting graphical blocks together. Concurrent with the launch of Scratch two years ago was the rollout of the Scratch Web site, where programmers can publish their Scratch projects online and share them with others. Nearly 800,000 projects have been uploaded to the site since its launch, and the site has nurtured an online community that enables sharing and collaboration on Scratch projects. Resnick's motivation behind Scratch's creation was to make programming fun for kids as part of an effort to get young people more interested in computer science as well as achieve fluency in digital technologies. Resnick and his team believe Scratch is an important tool through which computer science concepts can be introduced to students. The team is creating support materials and cooperating with educators on the best way to use Scratch in the classroom. Resnick believes that digital fluency is becoming increasingly essential for many careers, including those that are outside of technology, such as the creative arts. He notes, for example, that Scratch is being used in English courses as a tool to help produce book reports.

Microsoft's Vision of Computing

2009-12-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

Over the next 10 years, how people interact with computers will evolve drastically, with hand gesture controls becoming as common as keyboards, and file selection being determined by eye scans instead of mouse movements, predicts Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie. "Today, most people's interaction is through a screen--whether they touch it, type it, point or click, it's still just graphical user interface," Mundie says. "While that's very powerful and has a lot of applicability, I think it will be supplemented in dramatic ways by what we call a natural user interface." He says computers will soon be able to emulate the human senses of sight, hearing, speech, touch, and gesture, and combine them in multiple ways for people to interact with machines. The interactivity revolution will be fueled by new multiprocessor computers, which are expected to be widely available by 2012. Mundie says these new processors should provide a major performance gain, with some performances increasing by a factor of 100. One of the first major commercial applications of the new interface technology is expected to be released next year when Microsoft launches its new line of Xbox gaming consoles, which will completely eliminate the need for handheld controllers. Mundie says the new gaming interface enables players to move and use gesture controls, with the system calculating in real time the angular position of the 22 major joints in the body. Mundie envisions a day when users will simply be able to talk to their computers about solving problems. "You should be able to describe the problem or the policy you want and the computer should be able to somehow implement that," he says.

Ten Emerging Technologies to Watch in 2010

2009-11-23T19:22:00.000-08:00

The editors at EE Times have compiled a list of 10 emerging technologies to watch in 2010. First, biofeedback or thought-control of electronics could give people with disabilities, the military, and consumers new ways to control user interfaces. Second, the possibility of rapidly printing multiple conductive, insulating, and semiconductive layers to create electronics could significantly lower the cost of manufacturing electronics. Third, the development of plastic memory could lead to rewritable, non-volatile memory capable of retaining data for more than 10 years and one million cycles. Fourth, maskless lithography could be a spoiler in the effort to replace immersion lithography with extreme ultraviolet lithography. Fifth, parallel processing will become better understood and more widely used as initiatives such as OpenCL and Cuda expand the understanding of how multiple processors will be programmed and used for increased computational and power efficiency. Sixth, energy harvesting will increasingly be used in devices, such as vibration-powered wireless sensors on machinery or vehicles, or motion-powered mobile phones. Seventh, biology and technology will continue to merge, building off of devices such as under-the-skin tags for pets and heart pacemakers for humans. Eighth, resistive RAM, or the memristor, will continue to evolve. Ninth, the depth of the interconnect stack on top of the leading-edge silicon surface could lead to a splitting of front-end fab production into surface and local interconnect. Finally, various batter technologies will emerge to power an increasingly diverse number of devices.

Facebook Offers Poor Personal Data Protection

2009-11-19T18:52:00.000-08:00

A study of Norwegian Internet users and social media found that people are willing to post their personal information on social media sites even when they are not aware how it will be used. Conducted by SINTEF for the Norwegian Consumers' Council, the researchers found that 60 percent of Norweigan Internet users are on Facebook. SINTEF's Petter Bae Brandtzaeg and Marika Luders conclude that Facebook offers relatively poor personal data protection due to the service itself, its design, the level of competence of its users, and their lack of awareness of how to protect themselves. "Facebook has become an important arena for social participation in our personal environment," Brandtzaeg says. "However, it is becoming ever more easy to gather and aggregate personal information, outside the control of users." Still, people are willing to post their personal information because so many other people use Facebook, and they rarely hear of unfortunate incidents. Respondents were usually not aware that Facebook uses personal information for commercial purposes, and their personal information also can be used against them, such as when they apply for a job. The researchers say that people and objects will be woven together ever more closely by the next wave of Internet media such as Google Wave and mobile smartphones. "This can make us even more vulnerable to failures of personal data protection," Luders says.

Google's Go Programming Language

2009-11-13T19:14:00.000-08:00

Google has unveiled Go, a new programming language the company says offers the speed of working in a dynamic language such as Python and the performance and safety of a compiled language such as C or C++. "Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection," according to the Google Go team in a blog post. However, Google is not using the experimental language internally for production systems. Instead, Google is conducting experiments with Go as a candidate server environment. "The Go project was conceived to make it easier to write the kind of servers and other software Google uses internally, but the implementation isn't quite mature enough yet for large-scale production use," according to the FAQ on the Go language's Web site. With Go, developers should find builds to be spontaneous. Large binaries will compile in just a few seconds, and the code will run close to the speed of C. Go is the second programming environment Google has released this fall. In September, Google released Noop, a Java-like programming language.

Mobile Supercomputers

2009-10-31T04:31:00.000-07:00

Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes the future of computing lies in smart mobile devices and data centers. "A billion people on the planet are carrying supercomputers in their hands," Schmidt says. "Now you think of them as mobile phones, but that's not what they really are. They're video cameras. They're GPS devices. They're powerful computers. They have powerful screens. They can do many, many different things." Schmidt says over the next few years mobile technology will continue to advance and consumers will be exposed to new applications that are unimaginable now. For example, Google's Android phone division is working on an application that can take pictures of bar codes, identify the corresponding product, and compare prices online. Another Android application can translate a picture of a menu written in a foreign language. Cloud computing will provide the computational muscle for many of these future services, which Schmidt says is probably the next big wave in computing. He also believes that computing will continue to bring major changes to our society. "We're going from a model where the information we had was pretty highly controlled by centralized media operatives to a world where most of our information will come from our friends, from our peers, from user-generated content," Schmidt says. "These changes are profound in the society of America, in the social life, and all the ways we live."

The Latest Technologies

2009-10-26T18:33:00.001-07:00

Five new technologies are on their way that will give users unprecedented access to data thanks to new high-speed connections and user interfaces. First, USB 3.0 is a new standard that preserves backward compatibility by allowing older cables to plug into new jacks, but features an extra pin that boosts the data rate to 4.8 Gbps. USB 3.0, dubbed SuperSpeed by the USB Implementers Forum, can transfer a 30 GB video in just over a minute. Second, by 2012, two new wireless protocols--802.11ac and 802.11ad--should be able to provide over-the-air data transmissions of 1 Gbps or faster. The faster wireless data rate will enable users to stream multiple high-definition videos throughout a room or house. Third, the next wave of next-generation TVs will allow viewers to experience three-dimensional (3D) videos at home. 3D TVs are likely to rely on alternating left-eye and right-eye views for successive frames. Many HDTVs already operate at 120 Hz, so the ability to alternate left and right eye images far faster than the human eye can see is already available. This type of 3D viewing will require glasses that use rapid shutters to alternate the view to each eye, but TV manufacturers also are working on 3D sets that do not require glasses. Fourth, augmented reality in mobile devices will become increasingly popular as consumers expect to be able to receive information on any subject in any location. Researchers also are developing contact lenses capable of projecting images into someone's sight. Finally, HTML5 promises to do away with browser conformity issues and the need for audio, video, and interactive plug-ins. HTML5 will enable designers to create Web sites that work the same on every browser and give users a better and faster Web experience.

3M Jobs for I.T. Professionals in Asia-Pacific

2009-10-11T23:03:00.000-07:00

Nearly three million jobs are expected to be created by the Asia-Pacific region's information technology (IT) industry by 2013, according to a new IDC study, which also projects 4.8 percent growth in IT spending each year for the next four years. "Innovation in technology will play a vital role in enabling new business opportunities and employment growth throughout Asia," says Microsoft's Emilio Umeoka. "IT will be a catalyst for the wider economic recovery, as companies take advantage of technology solutions to improve their cost base and service outcomes." The study involved the participation of more than 50 nations, and focused on IT's contribution to gross domestic product, IT job creation, software sector employment, formation of new companies, local IT spending, and tax revenues. The study predicts that 32,000 new businesses will be created by higher IT spending by 2013, with the majority of those companies being small and locally owned. Singapore's IT spending is expected to grow by almost 2 percent a year through 2013 and create approximately 17,000 new IT jobs. The study names cloud computing as the next major IT development area, and anticipates that the sector could generate close to $300 billion in net new business revenues to the Asia-Pacific region's economy by the end of 2013.

Robots in Education

2009-10-03T23:44:00.001-07:00

Robots are increasingly becoming ubiquitous in education. The Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million contest to design a robot capable of traveling to the moon, is being envisioned for children by the X Prize Foundation, Google, Lego Systems, and National Instruments on MoonBots. The winner of the Google Lunar X prize can send his or her robot to the moon to gather information, photographs, and video footage to send back to Earth. Children can assemble robots that imitate the same tasks using a Lego Mindstorm kit. The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has a Senior Capstone Program in Engineering (Scope) that asks students to work on a large engineering project that simulates the kind of problems they would tackle in the corporate world. Vision Robotics Corp (VRC) has asked the Scope group to help them design fruit-picking robots. The first robot finds the fruit, and the second picks it. The team of seniors designed an end effector that can select the fruit, and the device has been added to a working model of the fruit-picker. Researchers from Nanyang Polytechnic, Schmid Engineering, and Analog Devices--from Singapore, Switzerland, and the U.S., respectively--have put together a spider robot that can crawl into small places and across difficult surfaces. Equipped with six legs, the robot can move in any direction, either slowly with all six of its limbs or more quickly with just three. Scope director David Barrett says that robots are the new groundbreaking technology, in use today "in the military, in industries and the consumer level."

Open Web Education Alliance

2009-09-30T20:36:00.000-07:00

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is creating the Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA), a new body designed to help ensure that educational institutions around the world are providing Web professionals and information technology graduates with the skills the industry needs. OWEA co-chair John Allsopp says students might learn things that are relevant to their role in the industry, but the fast-evolving nature of the Web often requires Web practitioners to teach themselves new skills. "The goal is to create a sustainable organization to promote best practices in education for Web professionals, working to both develop curricula itself and promote this within universities, colleges, private education providers, and inside large organizations," Allsopp says. "There's a strong belief within the industry that something like this is really needed and we are currently investigating different models of sustainability for the organization." OWEA, which is expected to launch in 2010, is preparing a white paper on its operational plans for the W3C. A dozen international Web professionals are involved with OWEA, which also is backed by Microsoft, Adobe, and Opera Software.

Wimax: City-Wide Wireless Service

2009-09-21T23:36:00.000-07:00

Cities will be transformed by WiMax, smart grids, social networks, and other emerging technologies, once they are cohesively integrated. WiMax is seen as a critical tool for supporting city-wide wireless services. WiMax offers more ubiquitous access than Wi-Fi, because WiMax is available throughout a given area while Wi-Fi hot spots require users to search for them. The notion of the smart grid is oriented around the idea of using electricity when it is available at low cost rather than at peak periods, and the integration of renewable energy sources into the grid via two-way communication between utility companies and the businesses and individuals who use their power. There might be a central command center for overseeing and adjusting power usage and for delivering information technology (IT) services through WiMax, but the actual IT operation could reside in the computing cloud rather than in the city's data center. Social networking technology also is being tapped to provide online services through which citizens can keep up with local developments and comment on neighborhood issues. For example, Dublin, Ohio, uses networking software to operate a portal where government officials can post blogs, engage in dialogue via instant messaging, and share documents. Dublin plans to make the private network accessible to all citizens over the next several months.

LifeLogging

2009-09-15T17:57:00.001-07:00

Pioneering Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has been recording and storing virtually every aspect of his daily life in an effort to build a searchable electronic memory for everyone, and he speculates that increasing numbers of people will be doing the same in the future. He envisions the practice of lifelogging as the logical next step up from social networking. The cell phone is already a rudimentary instrument for lifelogging, and support of the practice is increasing as phones add more features to record daily activities. Concurrent with this trend is the development of specialized devices and Web services geared toward lifelogging enthusiasts. For example, Zeo is a sleep-monitoring gadget that maps out the patterns and quality of each night's sleep, while an accompanying Web service helps users optimize their sleep habits. Livescribe, meanwhile, is a digital pen that converts notes and sketches into image files and records the sound of conversations, lectures, and conferences. Analyst Esther Dyson forecasts that markets will open for software to "extract order and meaning from the chaos of proliferating data."

Scala Programming Language

2009-08-22T19:50:00.000-07:00

The Scala programming language, which runs on the Java Virtual Machine, could become the preferred language of the modern Web 2.0 startup, according to a Twitter developer. Scala creator Martin Odersky says the name Scala "means scalable language in the sense that you can start very small but take it a long way." He says he developed the language out of a desire to integrate functional and object-oriented programming. This combination brings together functional programming's ability to build interesting things out of simple elements and object-oriented programming's ability to organize a system's components and to extend or adapt complex systems. "The challenge was to combine the two so that it would not feel like two languages working side by side but would be combined into one single language," Odersky says. The challenge lay in identifying constructs from the functional programming side with constructs from the object-oriented programming side, he says. Odersky lists the creation of the compiler technology as a particularly formidable challenge he faced in Scala's development. He notes that support of interoperability entailed mapping everything from Java to Scala, while another goal of the Scala developers was making the language fun to use. "This is a very powerful tool that we give to developers, but it has two sides," Odersky says. "It gives them a lot of freedom but with that comes the responsibility to avoid misuse."

Online vs Clasroom Education

2009-08-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

Students' performance in online education settings tended to trounce that of those receiving face-to-face instruction, according to a study SRI International carried out for the U.S. Education Department. The study analyzed the comparative research on traditional versus online education over a 12-year period, with the bulk of the studies done in colleges and various adult continuing-education programs. The report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses, and an analysis determined that students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance on average, versus the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. Lead study author Barbara Means says the report indicates that online learning often outclasses traditional instruction, and the report suggests that online education could experience sharp growth during the next several years. Experts say the real promise of online education is delivering learning experiences that are more customized to individual students than classrooms, which facilitates more learning by doing. Philip R. Regier, with Arizona State University's Online and Extended Campus program, expects continuing education programs to exhibit the most growth in the near term, and he also predicts that online education will continue to gain ground in the transformation of college campuses. Regier says the growing use of social networking technology will hasten the evolution of online learning into a model where students help and teach each other by creating new forms of learning communities.

International Symposium on Wikis

2009-08-10T19:34:00.001-07:00

The explosive growth of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia is petering out, while a less welcoming attitude toward new contributors could negatively affect the archive's quality in the long term, according to a team of Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) researchers. The number of articles added to the Web site per month reached a plateau at 60,000 three years ago and has since fallen by about one-third, while the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped expanding in 2007. Occasional editors' power has thinned as more active and established editors come to dominate, and infrequent contributors have a greater percentage of their additions deleted or reverted by other editors than they did before. "This is evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content," says the PARC team. PARC researcher Ed Chi cautions that this resistance could hurt Wikipedia in the longer term by discouraging participation by new editors, thus reducing the number of editors available to identify and repair vandalism. "Over time the quality may degrade," Chi says. The PARC researchers will present their findings at the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration in October. Blue Oxen Associates' Eugene Eric Kim, who is helping to lead a review of Wikipedia launched by the Wikimedia Foundation, says there are several possible reasons for the changes Wikipedia has undergone. He posits, for example, that the increasing use of spam software that embeds promotional text in articles may actually be responsible for the high number of reverts.

Shortage of Cyber Defenders

2009-07-24T21:09:00.001-07:00

A consortium that includes the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the SANS Institute, and the U.S. Department of Defense aims to cultivate a new generation of computer security and network administration experts with a triathlon of contests designed to inspire students to become technically proficient in protecting cyberspace. SANS Institute research director Alan Paller points to a shortage of cyberdefenders graduating from schools, estimating that the United States needs about 20,000 to 30,000 people capable of competing in a cybercompetition, versus about 1,000 now. The U.S. Cyber Challenge includes DC3's Digital Forensics Competition, in which teams vie to solve a series of puzzles that an expert might encounter when probing a crime. Almost 600 teams have registered for the contest so far this year, compared to 199 teams in 2008. The second contest is the CyberPatriot High School Cyber Defense Competition, whose goal is to nurture high school students' knowledge of network defense. The contest is run by the Air Force Association and the University of Texas at San Antonio's Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security. The third competition is NetWars, a SANS Institute-hosted capture-the-flag tournament waged on a virtual private network over the Internet. Teams are awarded points for assaulting other teams' virtual machines and commandeering certain services and files. Players attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in their rivals' systems and then protect the systems they compromised from the other attackers. The federal government has not announced funding for the U.S. Cyber Challenge, but companies such as Google and state governments such as Delaware have already expressed interest in participating in the competitions.

Microsoft Faculty Summit

2009-07-15T19:44:00.000-07:00

Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie says future computers will do more work for people autonomously with less reliance on human input. "I've lately taken to talking about computing more as going from a world where today they work at our command to where they work on our behalf," Mundie says. At Microsoft's recent annual Faculty Summit, Mundie addressed a group of university professors and government officials. He emphasized that computers are still only tools, and that unless users have done an apprenticeship to learn how to master the tool they are unlikely to use computers to their full capabilities. Microsoft's shift in focus to more autonomous computers comes after 10 to 15 years of working to enhance human-computer interfaces, including handwriting, gesture, voice, and touch interaction. "The question is, Can't we change the way in which people interact with machines such that they are much better to anticipate what you want to do and provide a richer form of interaction?" Mundie asks. He compares the current shift in computing technology to when people realized they could use video cameras to piece together pieces of film to create a movie, instead of just recording entire plays. In one demonstration, Mundie used gestures to move documents and files around wall surfaces in the office of the future, where any surface is part of a virtual world, and used a virtual keyboard on the screen in his desk.

Future of Artificial Intelligence

2009-07-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

The lack of a rigorous mathematical foundation for electronics impelled engineer Leon Chua to develop one, which led to the formulation of the memristor--a theoretical fourth basic circuit element in addition to the resistor, capacitor, and inductor where electric charge and magnetic flux come together. Since then the creation of memristors has been achieved, and their novel abilities might unlock key insights about the human brain that would be a tremendous step forward for the field of artificial intelligence. Advantages of memristors include rapid, nanosecond writing of data using a very small amount of energy, and retention of memristive memory even when the power is turned off. The most immediate potential application for memristors is as a flash memory replacement, while durability improvements should make memristors ideal for a superfast random access memory, says Hewlett-Packard (HP) Laboratories Fellow Stan Williams. The discovery that a slime mold was behaving in the manner of a memristive circuit in that it could memorize a pattern of events without the aid of a neuron inspired a physicist at the University of California, San Diego to construct a circuit capable of learning and predicting future signals. Much earlier, Chua had noticed a sharp similarity between synapse behavior and memristor response, leading to speculation that memristors might help engineer an electronic intelligence that can mimic the power of a brain. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has embarked on a project to create "electronic neuromorphic machine technology that is scalable to biological levels." HP's Greg Snider has envisioned the field of cortical computing that focuses on the potential of memristors to imitate the interaction of the brain's neurons. He and Williams are working with Boston University scientists to devise hybrid transistor-memristor chips that aim to replicate some of the brain's thought processes.

Mind-Reading Computers

2009-07-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

Washington University in St. Louis researchers have developed technology that gives computers the ability to understand speech imagined in the mind. "The idea is to basically connect people with devices and machines through their thoughts directly," says Washington University Medical School neurologist Eric Leuthardt. The research is based on brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, which monitors brainwaves and uses computers to decode those signals and transform them into action. So far, BCI research efforts have only been able to decode imagined actions. The ability to decode imagined speech will make mentally communicating with computers far easier. Leuthardt says the technology will better connect humans and machines, and will give the disabled unprecedented access to the world. Leuthardt and Washington University biological engineer Daniel Moran have developed video games that can be played with the mind. Players control the game by imagining an action. For example, imagining moving the left hand may mean moving left, while imagining moving the tongue may create upward movement. The system has only been tested on a few people because the sensors used require brain surgery. So far, children with epilepsy have been given the chance to participate because they already have similar equipment surgically implanted to locate electric signals in the brain.

Cars Driving Themselves

2009-01-22T19:28:00.000-08:00

University of New Brunswick researchers led by professor Howard Li are developing cars capable of driving themselves. Li says one of the first steps is to take detailed pictures of sharp turns, deer, pedestrians, and other obstacles and program those images into a simulator so the system learns what objects to avoid. He says the biggest challenge is developing the right algorithms to allow thousands of smart cars to be compatible on the road and avoid collisions with each other. "We obviously can't use thousands of vehicles to test artificial intelligence compatibility," he says. "We'll use computer simulations to test it and write computer simulations of multiple cars working together." Li says the technology is likely decades away from being used in commercial cars. However, he says there will be breakthroughs made as part of the process that could lead to sensors that prevent accidents by warning drivers of potential dangers. The technology also could be used to save lives in Afghanistan by helping troops avoid hazards. Li says artificial intelligence technology could be used to automate vehicles for tasks such as snow removal, city transit, assembly lines, and farming. "The robotics market is growing 40 percent every year," he says. "This is a field that's going to keep growing and evolving, and one day it will be as common for every family as owning a PC is today."

Schools and Video Games

2009-01-07T20:09:00.000-08:00

Teachers are increasingly incorporating video games, virtual reality, and simulations to improve education. Business and science classes are starting to use sophisticated software that allows students to test out potential careers, practice skills, or explore history through simulated adventures in national parks, ancient cities, or outer space. The military and medical schools, which use games and simulations to train new personnel, are helping to boost the use of video games in classrooms. Advocates argue that games can teach vital skills such as teamwork, decision-making, and digital literacy. Games also can challenge students just enough to keep them interested in reaching the next level. "There is a revolution in the understanding of the educational community that video games have a lot of what we need," says Jan Plass, co-director of the Games for Learning Institute at New York University. Game designers are replacing the violence in video games with equations and educational challenges. For example, Dimension M is a suite of math games that require players to learn about functions and solve equations to stop a biodigital virus from taking over the world. The Federation of American Scientists is promoting games as a way of inspiring new scientists, and has developed two games in which players fight bacterial invaders in a blood vessel. A recent revision to the Higher Education Act authorized the creation of a research center for assessing and developing educational technologies such as simulations and video games.

Educational Technology

2009-01-07T20:07:00.000-08:00

University of Arizona (UA) scientists have received a $300,000 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant to develop artificial intelligence and education technology that mirrors the consumer tracking algorithms used by sites such as Amazon and iTunes. The researchers, led by UA professor Paul R. Cohen, want to maximize a tutoring system model by using data on learners to improve the feedback provided by intelligent tutoring systems. "Teaching people means making a sequence of dependent decisions," Cohen says. "We're trying to optimize the value of each decision by reasoning algorithmically about how it sets up the student for future learning opportunities." The researchers are developing a program that would be capable of already knowing what a student knows and matching that knowledge with comparable students before suggesting specific texts, exams, videos, educational games, demonstrations, and other Web-based educational tools. The technology would be able to direct students to the best possible learning experience for each student, refining each student's curriculum as it learns more about learners in general. Preliminary findings from a pilot project suggest that students who used the model learned more quickly and were able to retain information better, and that the program improved as more students participated.

Mobile: Future of the Internet

2008-12-17T23:35:00.000-08:00

Mobile phones will become the primary Internet device for most people by 2020, largely due to their increasing computing power, predicts the "Future of the Internet," a new Pew Internet & American Life Project report. "Telephony [will be] offered under a set of universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators internationally, making for reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world to another," the report says. The report, based on a survey of 578 Internet activists, builders, and commentators, also predicts that despite the widespread access to other cultures and viewpoints on the Internet, Internet use will not make people more socially tolerant. The report says that some survey respondents even suggested that the divide between the tolerant and the intolerant could widen due to Internet-based information-sharing tactics. The report also found that 55 percent of experts believe that by 2020 people will routinely interact in artificial spaces through virtual worlds and other types of augmented reality. Voice activation and touch interfaces will be common by 2020, predict nearly two-thirds of experts, and "air-typing" will become common because small handheld devices will display a full size virtual keyboard on any flat surface. A majority of experts, 78 percent, believe that the current Internet architecture will not be completely replaced by a new system in 2020, but search, security, and reliability will have been improved by next-generation research.

Microsoft Research Projects

2008-12-08T03:25:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is supporting a host of projects in its research and development division that are focused on tackling real-world technical challenges but could have a potentially dramatic impact on computing. One such project is Eagle 1, a tool for disaster recovery teams that captures information from multiple databases and generates real-time interactive maps through the use of geospatial mapping technology. Microsoft Surface, which has reached the product phase, promotes social interaction through a multitouch table with a ruggedized acrylic interface. Its capabilities include object recognition, optical tagging, and interaction with physical objects. LucidTouch V2 technology is a credit card-sized display screen that the user can reach behind to control a mobile device. Visual Studio 2010 upgrades Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform with new features that include unified modeling language, a debugging tool that can pinpoint non-reproducible bugs by automatically generating data sets, and an application that lets development teams visualize a model of the existing development architecture and find any existing code assets that are not well categorized. The Touch Wall is a new hardware/software interface with multitouch control that can mix and match media on the same large-screen display to enhance collaboration. The OSLO project offers a framework that allows all members of a team to access data models in a repository across the entire software development life cycle. Microsoft also is working on a robotic receptionist to be installed at the company headquarters that will help visitors find transportation, using voice and facial recognition technology. Finally, BlueTrack is mouse technology that employs a wider and brighter laser beam than conventional optics so that it can operate on uneven surfaces.

Hackers & Cellphones

2008-10-20T21:46:00.000-07:00

Georgia Tech security researchers say that hackers will likely target cell phones for use in creating botnet armies. They say that as cell phones get more computing power and better Internet connections, hackers will be able to exploit vulnerabilities in mobile-phone operating systems and Web applications. Millions of PCs have already become part of botnets, and owners generally never know. The Georgia Tech researchers say that if cell phones become absorbed into botnets, new types of scams could be created. For example, infected phones could be programmed to call pay-per-minute 900 numbers, or to buy ringtones from companies established by criminals. The researchers say hackers are particularly drawn to cell phones because they are always on, they are always sending and receiving data, and they generally have poor security. "This is the perfect platform (for hackers)," says Georgia Tech professor Patrick Traynor. "There are some challenges for the adversaries, but we've seen them overcome the challenges in their way before." One challenge for hackers is learning how cellular networks work, which are tightly controlled by cell phone operators.

The Future of Internet Search

2008-10-03T00:15:00.000-07:00

Danny Fine of BrainDamage in Haifa, Israel, says computers, not people, should be carrying out Internet searches. He says searching is a form of artificial intelligence that analyzes documents and creates a map of keywords and their relationships to each other. "The search engine doesn't really understand what you're asking, of course--it's just a dumb computer, after all," Fine says. "The way it figures out what you're looking for is by comparing your request to a long list of keywords that are indexed in a database with other terms that could really be what you're looking for." BrainDamage is developing Noesis, a new approach to Internet searching based on natural thinking technology. Natural thinking technology puts the burden of understanding search queries on the search engine, enabling it to return more accurate results. Fine says Noesis gathers information and develops it, guided by the user, to reach a conclusion using the same patterns of logic and ideas that humans use. Noesis essentially teaches machines to understand what humans have in mind when they make a request. "Our system advances artificial intelligence far beyond where it is today, enabling computers to truly understand what is being asked of them--and to respond appropriately," Fine says.

2008 Technology Innovation Awards

2008-10-03T00:14:00.001-07:00

The Wall Street Journal's 2008 Technology Innovation Award winners included Salesforce.com's Force.com software tool suite, which enables companies to build their own specially tailored business applications that are developed and delivered over the Internet. The cloud computing service enables companies to access computing power on an as-needed basis. Globalstar's Spot unit earned an award in the consumer electronics category for the Spot Satellite Messenger, a handheld device that transmits preprogrammed messages such as "I'm OK," along with users' whereabouts. Software that tests for security holes in new applications by searching for flaws in binary code netted an award for Veracode, and company co-founder Chris Wysopal says the method offers the accuracy of source code analysis without the need for disclosing proprietary source code. The winner in the network/Internet technologies category was Xsigo Systems for hardware and software that allows the replacement of physical cables in a data center with virtual connectors, each of which is capable of mimicking the performance of up to 14 separate cables. Dispersed Storage software from Cleversafe won for a technology that allows sensitive computer files to be stored more securely and reliably by slicing them up and sending the slices, which by themselves are unreadable to unauthorized parties, over the Internet to multiple storage locations on a network. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology professor Jane Royston says the software "could be an important part of Internet data storage systems." The winner in the wireless category was Tata Consultancy Services' mKrishi service, which can supply crop advice to farmers in rural India via cell phones using a combination of remote sensors, a voice-enabled text-messaging service, and a camera phone.

Web 3.0

2008-10-03T00:13:00.000-07:00

Europe is in an excellent position to become the leader in Web 3.0 technology because of its focus on open and pro-competitive telecom networks and commitment to online privacy and security, says Viviane Reding, the European Commission's (EC's) commissioner for information society and media. "Web 3.0 means seamless 'anytime, anywhere' business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks," Reding says. "It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines." She says there could be a 10-fold increase in the scale of the digital universe by 2015. The EC's consultation on the next generation of the Internet launched on Sept. 29 was accompanied by a roadmap. The report described social networking, online business services, nomadic services based on GPS and mobile TV, and smart tags using RFID as trends that would lead to Web 3.0. In a blog post, Vint Cerf welcomed Reding's stance on free and open networks and on open standards. "For Europe to keep up in the global online race, it needs to sprint ahead powered by an openness recipe encompassing a neutral network, users' rights, and open standards," Cerf wrote. "I'm delighted to see that Europe's policymakers stress the successful ingredients to promoting a robust, healthy Internet."

The Web's Future

2008-09-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is helping to create the World Wide Web Foundation, a new organization that will certify Web sites it finds to be trustworthy and a reliable source of information. Berners-Lee says there needs to be a new system that will give Web sites a label for trustworthiness once they have proven to be a reliable source. "On the Web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable," he says. "A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging." Berners-Lee and colleagues at the World Wide Web consortium examined simple ways of branding Web sites, but concluded that a whole variety of different mechanisms are needed. In addition to creating a trustworthiness rating, the World Wide Web Foundation also will strive to make it easier for people to get online. Currently, only 20 percent of the world's population has access to the Web. The foundation also will explore ways of making the Web more mobile-phone friendly, which will increase its use in Africa and other developing parts of the world where there are few computers but plenty of handheld devices. The foundation also will examine how the Web can be used to benefit those who cannot read or write. "We're talking about the evolution of the Web," Berners-Lee says. "When something is such a creative medium as the Web, the limits to it are our imagination."

Microsoft Asia Research

2008-08-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Bill Gates says the dramatic growth of the Internet will eventually help eliminate "the last constraints we have" and lead to a software-writing revolution. Speaking at a forum marking the 10th anniversary of Microsoft's Asian research division, Gates said that technology currently in development will transform how people use computers as well as expand their ability to interact with machines. Greater Internet connectivity will give users better services, providing remote access to a variety of software and information, Gates says. "That will eventually lead to machines that have lots of server capacity, lots of low-cost computing, low-cost storage," Gates says. "And that will let us write software in an even more ambitious way, eliminating the last constraints we have." Gates believes that uses for computers will expand to encompass all interactive techniques, such as touch, sight, and speech. Gates also praised the work of Microsoft's Asian research division, and praised science and technology as a force for positive change. Gates says major developments in Internet services and computer interfaces are at a good stage of development in the labs, and should be widespread within 10 years, while more advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence or robotics, could be available within 20 years.

Artificial Tongue

2008-08-04T22:28:00.001-07:00

Anton, a mechanical tongue and jaw that has successfully mimicked the muscular activity involved in producing certain vowel sounds will be presented at this year's International Society of Artificial Life conference. Robin Hofe of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom says Anton has the potential to help improve speech recognition software. Existing systems are working with larger databases of recorded speech, but their performance has not significantly improved because the way people talk is not steady and uniform. Speech can be affected by where people are and what they are doing. The researchers believe Anton will be a key to learning more about how the mouth produces sounds, since obtaining data from inside the human mouth might not be the best approach. The researchers also want to embed artificial muscles in Anton to make it more realistic, and eventually have it produce sound. The previous test involved MRI scans to compare the movements of Anton with those of real mouths.

Plastic Based Electronics

2008-08-04T22:27:00.000-07:00

Plastics-based electronics can be cheaper and less energy intensive to manufacture than their silicon counterparts while also being bendable and potentially more energy efficient. Organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) can be used for displays that require no backlight and are flexible, and major technical issues such as uneven wear and durability have been addressed. Experts say price is currently the biggest obstacle to the launch of a mass market OLED display. High-definition televisions that can be rolled up after use is one OLED application that is envisioned to happen after the technology breaks into the mainstream. Electronics for plastic displays can be "printed" roll to roll like a newspaper rather than be constructed piece by piece, and NanoMarkets analyst Lawrence Gasman says this feature will probably lower the cost of fabricating OLEDs to a significant degree. Universal Display has a two-year, approximately $2 million contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop thin OLED lighting panels that can either be printed or mounted onto numerous surfaces. Another breakthrough in plastics electronics is electronic paper. Co-op America estimates that electronic magazine delivery through e-paper could spare 35 million trees from getting converted into paper yearly. The emergence of affordable solar panels could also be accelerated by plastic electronics through the efforts of companies that are working on organic solar panels.

Cuil Search Engine

2008-07-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

Cuil is a new search engine started by former engineers from Google and several other tech giants. Cuil's founders say the new search engine covers as many as three times the number of Web pages as Google. Cuil aims to deliver better results than other major search engines by searching through more Web pages and studying pages more accurately. Cuil's results page also is different; it looks more like a magazine than a list of results. "You can't be an alternative search engine and smaller," says Cuil cofounder Anna Patterson, one of the engineers who helped build Google's search index. "You have to be an alternative and bigger." Cuil claims to be able to search across 120 billion Web pages, compared with Google's 40 billion. Patterson says Cuil has developed a faster and better way to index Web pages that relies of fewer machines. Analyst Greg Sterling says the strong skills of Cuil's founders, which includes Patterson's husband Tom Costello, who built search engine technology for IBM and was on the research faculty at Stanford University, and the fact that the company has already built such a large search engine from scratch strengthens Cuil's chances of competing over the long term. However, the company must still find a way to generate enough advertising revenue to fund the hefty infrastructure and technology costs of scaling a search engine.

Comparing Web 1.0 & Web 2.0

2008-07-08T04:42:00.001-07:00

Among Web 2.0's key attributes are the growth of social networks, bi-directional communication, diverse content types, and various "glue" technologies, and the authors note that while most of Web 2.0 shares the same substrate as Web 1.0, there are some significant differences. Features typical of Web 2.0 Web sites include users as first class entities in the system, with prominent profile pages; the ability to connect with users through links to other users who are "friends," membership in various types of "groups," and subscriptions or RSS feeds of "updates" from other users; the ability to post content in various media, including blogs, photos, videos, ratings, and tags; and more technical features, such as embedding of various rich content types, communication with other users through internal email or instant messaging systems, and a public API to permit third-party augmentations and mash-ups. Web 1.0 metrics of similar interest in Web 2.0 include the general portion of Internet traffic, numbers of users and servers, and portion of various protocols. About 500 million users reside in a few tens of social networks with the top few responsible for the bulk of the users and traffic, and traffic within a Web 2.0 site is more difficult to measure without help from the site itself. The challenges for streamlining popular sites for mobile users differ slightly between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, in that instant notification to users through mobile devices can be facilitated because of the short or episodic nature of most Web 2.0 communications. Most communication in Web 2.0 is between users, so Web 2.0 sites have no easy way to select during overload; however, the sites apply varying restrictions to guarantee that overall load and latency is reasonably maintained. Some of the Web 2.0 sites are eager to maximize and retain members within an "electronic fence," which can facilitate balkanization, although total balkanization is likely to be prevented by a countercurrent stemming from the prevalent link-based nature of Web users continuously connecting to sites outside the fence. The authors point out that there are substantial challenges in permitting users to comprehend privacy implications and to simply represent usage policies for their personal data.

Intel's Ct Programming Language

2008-07-08T04:41:00.002-07:00

Intel showed off a new programming language for multi-core computing, called Ct, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., on June 11. An extension of C/C++, the programming language automatically partitions code to run on specific cores. "With Ct, it's almost like you're writing to a single-core machine," said Intel researcher Mohan Rajagopalan during the open house for Intel labs. "You leave it to the compiler and runtime to parallelize." Intel developed the Ct compiler, which chops up the code to run on separate cores based on the type of data and the operation performed on the data, in addition to the runtime and an API for the compiler. Less than 5 percent of Ct is new, so C/C++ programmers will find it easy to use. Rajagopalan also noted that programs compiled in Ct can scale to the available number of cores. Intel is relatively close to bringing to market a product developers will be able to use to make financial analytics applications and software for processing images or decoding video

CCTV That Can Hear

2008-07-08T04:41:00.001-07:00

University of Portsmouth researchers are working on a three-year project to incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities into visual recognition software that would enable CCTV cameras to turn in the direction of a certain sound and capture it in about 300 milliseconds. "So, if in a car park someone smashes a window, the camera would turn to look at them and the camera operator would be alerted," says David Brown, director of the Institute of Industrial Research. Portsmouth will not have the algorithms capture full conversations, but they will be capable of listening for specific words associated with violence. The idea is to develop shapes of sounds that can be recognized by the software of the CCTV cameras. "The software will use an artificial intelligence template for the waveform of sound shapes and if the shape isn't an exact fit, use fuzzy logic to determine what the sound is," Brown says.

Computers & Diamonds

2008-07-08T04:40:00.000-07:00

University of Melbourne physicist Steven Prawer says the current generation of computers are power hungry and inefficient, but that quantum computers made using diamonds are a practical way to achieve a significant improvement in computer power without generating more heat. Prawer says quantum computers provide a new paradigm for computing that utilizes exponential processing power through a highly efficient process that does not create heat. Quantum computers will use "qubits" that can be on, off, or both states at the same time depending on the electrons' spin, providing extremely high processing power because messages based on different states can be processed in parallel. Prawer says many quantum computer designs rely on very low temperatures and complex infrastructures to detect the electron spin and protect from being influenced by the outside environment, but diamonds can provide a unique platform for building quantum computers that can operate at room temperature. "All of the things that you would want from a quantum computer have been demonstrated in diamond," says Prawer. Tiny manufactured diamonds with a nitrogen atom at their center can act as a qubit, and the spin of the electrons in the diamond can be manipulated using microwaves or laser pulses. Although true quantum computing is still years away, Prawer says diamonds can already be used for a variety of new engineering and research devices, and that the first quantum device to be commercialized was a diamond-based single photon source used for quantum cryptography.

Educational Benefit of MySpace

2008-07-08T04:39:00.000-07:00

University of Minnesota researchers have determined the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and also found that low-income students are in many ways just as technologically proficient as their more advantaged counterparts. The researchers found that 94 percent of students in the study used the Internet, 82 percent used the Internet at home, and 77 percent have a profile on a social networking site. Students said social networking sites taught them technology skills, creativity, being open to new or diverse views, and communication skills. Data was collected over six months from students in 13 urban high schools in the Midwest. In addition to the initial surveyed students, a follow-up, randomly selected subset were asked questions on their Internet activity while they used MySpace. University of Minnesota learning technologies researcher Christine Greenhow says students that use social networking sites learn and practice the kinds of 21st century skills that educators say are needed to be successful. "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content, and thinking about online design and layout," Greenhow says. The results show that social networking sites provide more than just social fulfillment or professional networking and have implications for educators, who have an opportunity to support what students are learning on the Web, Greenhow says. The study contradicts a 2005 study from Pew that suggests a digital divide is forming in which low-income students are technologically impoverished.

Laptop in your Pocket

2008-07-08T04:38:00.000-07:00

Modern laptops may soon be replaced by smaller, more useful devices such as the smart phone. Current trends for low-power chips, such as those used in devices such as cell phones and iPods, indicate that we will likely see eight times the CPU power in handheld devices by 2010, says former Sun Microsystems distinguished engineer Adrian Cockcroft. Cockcroft envisions an always-on device that wirelessly and seamlessly connects to a car when driving, a desktop monitor and keyboard when working, and to projection systems and portable displays when giving a presentation. Such powerful and capable handheld devices could lead to what Cockcroft calls computer-assisted telepathy, or a permanent connection to alternate worlds such as Second Life, as well as "lifesharing," which would create a network of permanently connected friends and family. Cockcroft says lifesharing is the next logical step from the behaviors of today's youth. Older users less interested in frictionless communication would be able to used the constantly connected device to remind themselves of forgotten names at social gatherings and other tasks. Cockcroft says the underlying technology driving such advancements is the increasing robustness of low-power chips and devices, which is allowing handhelds to advance faster than laptops. For example, laptop memory doubles every two years, while pocket devices double in memory annually. Cockcroft predicts that by the end of the year smart phones will have double the CPU power and RAM of current state-of-the-art handheld devices such as the iPhone.

Singapore-MIT Research

2008-05-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

MIT students have developed AudiOdyssey, a computer game for visually impaired users. AudiOdyssey simulates a DJ trying to create a catchy tune and get people to dance. The player uses the Nintendo Wii's remote-control device to create a rhythm and lay down a series of musical tracks, gradually building a song. Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab graduate student Eitan Gilnert says that although the Wii gaming system has attracted a lot of people who never previously played video games, people with disabilities are being left behind. Gilnert started to research available video games that were designed for the visually impaired, and found that the games were so specifically adapted for sound and tactile play that they gave visually-impaired players too much of an advantage. Gilnert set out to create a game that could be played equally well by both visually impaired and sighted players. The game also is designed to be played on a regular keyboard for those without Wiis. Gilnert says the game is an early prototype and limited in its capabilities. MIT Comparative Media Studies program graduate Alicia Verlager, who is blind, helped develop the game. "The element I probably most envy about gamers is just the way they hang out together and share doing something fun," Verlager says. "Hanging out with other gamers playing AudiOdyssey was really fun."

Visual Analytics

2008-05-21T20:08:00.002-07:00

Visual analytics is the current focus of Jim Thomas, director of the U.S. Homeland Security Department-sponsored National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC), who describes the field as "the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces." A 2006 paper posits that visual analytics integrates visualization with human factors, geospatial, scientific analytics, and information so that people can extract individual fragments of a whole from a vast volume of unstructured data, and then piece the whole together. NVAC's mission is fivefold: To understand the vulnerabilities of and risk to critical U.S. infrastructure, reduce the terrorism threat, devise a visual communication infrastructure for response teams, cultivate an enduring talent base, and produce effective communications metaphors that can encompass the conclusions of risk evaluations as well as the evidence and chain of logic. Among the users of NVAC's products are intelligence analysts who must sift through the Web information streams and first responders managing a crisis as it occurs. Thomas says the presentation of information in a context that is apropos to individual users is vital, while discovery, comprehension, and confirmation requires interaction. He says the visual analytics field has expanded to more than 1,000 researchers up from 40 researchers just a few years ago. Thomas says about 50 percent of NVAC's funding is committed to basic research via a quintet of university-led research centers, each of which has a regional partner to help focus its research.

IT Skills Demographics

2008-05-21T20:08:00.001-07:00

New data from IT job board Sapphire Technology reveals significant patterns in the availability of technology jobs in different regions in the United States. For example, more than 58 percent of all available tech jobs in Austin, Texas, were in software development, primarily due to the large number of startup companies in Austin. In Chicago, project management positions accounted for more than 52 percent of job listings, which Sapphire's Mike Giglio attributes to the large number of mergers that have occurred in recent years. Software development skills were also in high demand in Tampa and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the D.C. metropolitan area, and Sacramento, Calif. Meanwhile, one-third of available IT job listings for the Los Angeles area were for desktop support. In fact, there were more listings for help desk jobs than for any other type of technology work in Los Angeles. Giglio says that companies in the Los Angeles area are so fast-paced that if anything happens to the systems they are working on they need it fixed right away and they staff their companies accordingly.

Stealing Data Research

2008-05-21T20:07:00.000-07:00

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Saarland University in Saarbrucken, Germany, have found unconventional ways of stealing data. In Saarbrucken, the researchers have been able to read computer screens using reflections on objects such as glasses and teapots. Meanwhile, UCSB researchers have created Clear Shot, software that analyzes a video of hands typing on a keyboard to determine what was being written. Clear Shot was inspired by the movie "Sneakers," in which Robert Redford's character obtains a video of his potential victim typing in his password and says he is going to get a "clear shot." Clear Shot can analyze video of hand movements on a computer keyboard and transcribe them into text. UCSB graduate student Marco Cova says Clear Shot is accurate about 40 percent of the time. The software also suggests alternative words that may have been typed. Saarland University professor Michael Backes says his research began as a fun project to see if he could tell what other people were working on by watching windows near computer monitors. The researchers soon found that using a $500 telescope focused on a reflective object in front of a monitor could create readable images of Word documents. The researchers are now working on new image analysis algorithms and using astronomical cameras in the hopes of getting better images from more difficult surfaces such as the human eye.

Brain Monitoring System

2008-05-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

Researchers at Taiwan's National Chiao-Tung University and National Cheng-Kung University and the University of California, San Diego have designed a new bio-signal monitoring system that fits inside a baseball cap and detects and analyzes electroencephalogram (EEG) signals from the wearer's brain. The cap is capable of determining if someone is getting too tired to drive based on brain-wave patterns and could be configured to control TVs, computers, and other electronic devices. The wireless system can process and provide feedback in real time. The researchers say that measuring EEG signals enables the brain-computer interface system to monitor an individual's physiological and cognitive states. The system capitalizes on recent advancements in sensor and information technology to reduce power consumption and production costs. It can run on a lithium-ion battery for about two days before needing charging, and the researchers hope to increase the device's efficiency. The cap includes five embedded dry electrodes for the wearer's forehead and one electrode for behind the ear to read EEG signals. The system includes Bluetooth transmissions for distances up to 10 meters and RF transmissions for distances up to 600 meters.

MIT Research

2008-05-13T01:50:00.000-07:00

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ambient Intelligence Group scientists have developed Quickies, intelligent Post-it notes that combine artificial intelligence, RFID, and ink-recognition technologies. Quickies can communicate with PCs to relay any information written on them to a computer for display on a variety of electronic devices. The Quickie writer uses digital-pen hardware that translates the movement of the pen on the surface of the paper note into digital information. The information can be viewed at any time using Quickie software, which stores the notes as images and converts the handwritten notes into computer text using handwriting recognition algorithms. The Quickie software allows users to browse through their notes and search for specific information or keywords. Using a commonsense knowledge engine and computational AI techniques, the software analyzes the notes and categorizes them to provide users with reminders, alerts, messages, and relevant information. Each Quickie note has a unique RFID tag so it can be placed around a house or office, preventing users from losing a book or other object marked with a Quickie. Users can tell the software to remind them of important notes at specific times, and the software can synchronize Quickie to-do lists with task lists on mobile phones and laptops.

Xerox Palo Alto Research

2008-05-13T01:47:00.000-07:00

Researchers at the Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL) recently demonstrated the Seamless Documents project, mobile phone technology that can store a scanned document in a database and analyze its structure and content. The analysis is used to identify sections and paragraphs to automatically extract key phrases that summarize sections, enabling users to jump to a section labeled with a key word, or skip to the last paragraph on a page, when reading the document on a mobile phone. The software also automatically resizes images, section headers, and plain text when a user is scrolling through the document. The first part of the Seamless Documents project focuses on converting analog documents into digital information that can be stored in a database and accessed using the Internet and cell-phone networks. FXPAL software analyzes the document's structure to find paragraph breaks, pictures, and section titles. The software then automatically summarizes text and chooses key words and concepts from each section to highlight for the user. The second part of the project involves software that runs on mobile phones. The software opens the document and displays extracted information. The user can see a view of the document with key phrases in a large font, overlaid on top of paragraphs and segments.

Teaching Mobile Computing

2008-04-21T22:41:00.001-07:00

Mobile computing will be the focus of research and teaching at the Mobility Research Center, a new facility that Carnegie Mellon University plans to open this fall at its Silicon Valley site. James Morris, dean of Carnegie Mellon West, says mobile computing makes sense as an academic discipline because billions of people around the world are being introduced to computation and the Internet because of handheld devices such as cell phones, rather than desktop or laptop computers. "The United States needs to have that perspective as we look at a global market for computing devices on the Internet," Morris says. Context-aware applications and services, serendipitous collaboration, and rich semantic information to enable novel data and media management, visualization, and access will be specific interests of the multidisciplinary program. "We have probably 30 faculty members who work in various areas--anything from antenna design [to] anthropology and psychology--and we're getting a lot of these people together into teams to perform research to look at the way people are going to use mobile devices in the future," Morris says.

IT Skills' Trend

2008-04-21T22:36:00.000-07:00

Advances in technology continue to create demand for new IT skills, while making other skills obsolete. HTML programming is a high-tech skill that will no longer boost the pay of IT professionals. Companies want Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, and expertise in AJAX and XML has increased salaries by 12.5 percent in the last six months of 2007, according to Foote Partners. Legacy programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran, PowerBuilder, and Jini noncertified skills were among the lowest-paying skills over the second half of last year. Demand for Novell's network operating system NetWare has been surpassed by interest in Windows Server and Linux skills. Non-IP network expertise and know-how in technologies such as IBM's System Network Architecture (SNA) is another low-paying skill. "For networking, IP skills have replaced SNA skills," says Foote Partners CEO David Foote. The demand for PC tech support skills is also in decline.

Future of the Web

2008-03-25T01:14:00.000-07:00

Google Australia engineering and site director Alan Noble says there are a couple of "pretty amazing" trends developing, including a move toward gadgets, mini-applications, and widgets. He says applications are being improved by gadgets by democratizing them and making it possible for developers to disaggregate applications in a completely new way. He says another major trend is a shift toward cloud computing, which he believes will have profound implications. He says Google has "taken a whole range of applications that users traditionally thought of as client-side applications and moved them online ... It basically means you have access to your applications anytime, anywhere." Noble says there are still a lot more applications that need to be moved to the cloud, but the trend towards cloud computing is clear. As for the future of Web content and rich content Web searchers, Noble admits that video and image searching techniques are rudimentary, but the technology is improving. Noble cites research at the University of Queensland in Australia that has been able to classify videos and detect similarities with other videos. He says the Internet is becoming richer and being able to search through rich content will be crucial.

Amsterdam Robot Conf

2008-03-25T01:11:00.000-07:00

A team of students from the University of Amsterdam won the top prize at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Amsterdam on March 15. The public voted "Phobot," which mimicked human phobia, as its favorite robot at the competition of seven teams from technical universities from around the world. During the demonstration, a menacing larger robot inspired fear in Phobot, which retreated and then spun in circles to display a sense of panic. To overcome this fear, the team exposed Phobot to small robots and then to larger ones. "This robot is there as a sort of buddy to help a child having any kind of actual fear, doing it step by step," says team member Ork de Rooij. A team from Carnegie Mellon University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology took second place and the jury's prize for developing "Pot Bot," which was designed to monitor potted plants and determine when they need more water or sunlight. The contestants used Lego robotics and software from National Instruments to build their robots.

US Military Networks

2008-03-25T01:09:00.000-07:00

Gen. Kevin Chilton, the top U.S. commander in charge of cyberspace, said the nation's military networks are being targeted by an increasing number of attacks. Chilton said there is evidence that links China to many of the incidents, though he did not formally accuse the Chinese government of involvement. A recent Pentagon report said that China was expanding its military power into cyberspace, which angered the Chinese. Although the People's Liberation Army repeatedly denies being behind the hacker attacks, the U.S. government has linked China to several cyber attacks, including the hacking of a Pentagon email system used by the Secretary of Defense's office. A 2007 Government Accountability Office report warned that the nation's infrastructure, including water-treatment and power plans, are at risk of being targeted by a cyber threat. Chilton said the military is concerned that the increasing number of "mining" attempts could just be the beginning of a growing cyber threat. He said hackers could eventually attempt to knock out classified networks or slow down the nation's government, media, and financial Web sites. "You don't shut the system down completely, but you slow it down," Clinton says. "I would consider that an attack."

Intl Animation Competition

2008-03-25T01:07:00.000-07:00

Animation teams can upload animation reels to the ACM SIGGRAPH Web site for FJORG!, its International Animation Contest, until May 7, 2008. Sixteen teams of 3D and 2D animators will be chosen to compete over 32 hours before a live audience to create a 15-second, character-driven animation that adheres to specific themes, and they will be judged by an expert panel of representatives from leading graphics, feature film, animation, and gaming companies. FJORG! was a success a year ago, but the organizers of the contest have decided to make some changes. Solo animators will be able to qualify and will be organized into additional teams for a "Pot Luck" submissions category. And a "Vikings vs. Pirates" division has been created to give students an opportunity to compete with professionals. "Our goal is to build on the resounding success of the competition's first year that resulted in new friendships and prizes for many of our participants," says Patricia Beckmann-Wells, SIGGRAPH 2008 FJORG! Chair from Walt Disney Animation Studios. FJORG!, which will take place during the SIGGRAGH conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 11-15, could be a tremendous benefit for participants, says DreamWorks animator W. Jacob Gardner, who was a member of last year's winning team. "Professionally, I know that I wouldn't be where I am today without the experience and connections my team and I gained through the FJORG! competition," he says.

Collaborative eLearning

2008-03-06T19:18:00.001-08:00

Collaboration between geographically dispersed student teams is the focus of a European project that has devised an online platform that combines e-learning, social networking, and project management components to help virtual teams fully leverage their practical experience. "Collaborative learning through teamwork projects need an entire project management system, but with e-learning functionality built in," says Germany L3S Research Center researcher Xuan Zhou, who is a member of the COOPER project. The project's platform delivers a virtual environment that far-flung teams can use to converse, get in touch with tutors, establish project workflows, and submit documents. The COOPER platform's flexibility is facilitated by a method known as Dynamic Process, which is mated with the WebML modeling language to allow project teams to construct their own, specially tailored project management system and workflows. The platform also integrates voice over IP and videoconferencing systems, enabling team members to speak with one another, conduct virtual meetings, or leave messages for tutors or other team members. To address the impact assessment problem inherent in project-based learning, the COOPER project's research partners are devising tools that follow a system from the Central Institute for Test Development and the Open University of the Netherlands, which includes long-term evaluation schemes. COOPER invests project results with additional value by analyzing and archiving all project output to compile a "project memory bank" that can be utilized to augment study programs and for institutions to supply public information about their curricula and innovative initiatives. Most of the COOPER platform will be freely downloadable over the Web once the project concludes in March.

Microsoft Research '08

2008-03-06T19:13:00.000-08:00

At Microsoft's seventh annual TechFest, the company demonstrated some of its research projects that go beyond the next Windows operating system or Internet Explorer browser. One of the research projects on display was the 10TB World Wide Telescope project, which aims to combine images and information from major telescopes, scientists, and astronomical organizations from around the world, including NASA. Also on display was a new programming language to study cell biology, work on new AIDS vaccines, software to monitor and predict global epidemics, and sensors that monitor the melting of glaciers in the Alps. Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie says that Bill Gates has encouraged the company to invest some of its assets in projects that will make a difference even if they do not relate directly to a company product or brand. "That's partly been the motivation to go beyond using computer science to just benefit us as a company," Mundie says. "It's important that we not just make money, but that we contribute to working on these other problems."

Google Mobile in Japan

2008-02-22T18:59:00.000-08:00

Japan's widespread use of wireless broadband has made the country a sort of unofficial testing lab for Google as it tries to refine mobile search technology. Japan's 100 million cell phone users represent the most diverse group of mobile subscribers. Google tests in a variety of locations, but the Japanese are often the most critical because they are just as likely to use a phone to access the Internet as a PC, and at speeds that rival fixed-line broadband. Japanese carriers have also offered such services for years, and many Web sites in Japan are formatted for cell phones. Google is working with the two top Japanese wireless operators, which have a combined subscriber base of 82 million. "Our fundamental strategy is to take ideas from Japan and apply them to other markets," says Google's Emmanuel Sauquet. Japan's influence is why Gmail users will soon be able to include "emoji," or small animated cartoons and emoticons, in their messages. Google relies on user-experience groups to determine what mobile Web surfers like. Participants are given phones with Internet access and asked to complete simple tasks, either in Google's lab or on the streets of Tokyo. Google also conducts what it calls 1 percent tests, which is when a small portion of users see different layouts, fonts, and other features. The goal is to determine what changes make the service easier to use. For example, Google found that letting users choose a default neighborhood can make searching faster.

Foreign Language Translation

2008-02-22T18:58:00.002-08:00

METIS II is a European-based machine-translation project that has demonstrated an inexpensive technique for translating documents from Dutch, German, Greek, or Spanish to English. Machine translation currently works best for formal texts in specialized areas with unambiguous vocabulary and limited sentence patterns. The European Union has been supporting research in this field since the large Eurotra project in the 1980s, which used a rules-based approach that taught a computer the rules of syntax and applied them to translate texts from one language to another. However, starting in the early 1990s, a new concept of statistical translation has gained in popularity. Statistical translation replaces rules with statistical methods that are based on a text corpus--a large body of written material, up to tens of millions of words--that is intended to be representative of a language. Parallel corpora contain the same material in two or more languages that the computer uses to compare corpora and learn how words and expressions in one language translate to another. Parallel corpora are expensive and rare and exist only in a very few languages. METIS II researchers are employing statistical machine translation without a parallel corpora resource by using monolingual corpora for the target language. Using a single corpus requires using a dictionary for the vocabulary and a way of understanding syntax. METIS II matches patterns at the "chunk" level by matching phrases or fragments of a sentence instead of the entire sentence, which makes the pattern matching more efficient.

AtGentive's eLearning

2008-02-22T18:58:00.001-08:00

European researchers working for the AtGentive project have developed two new software platforms that incorporate artificial intelligence and social networking into their approach toward e-learning. AtGentive coordinator Thierry Nabeth says the first generation of e-learning platforms focused on replicating the classroom experience, but student's often had difficulty staying motivated and the learning program failed to keep their attention. To overcome this problem, one of the AtGentive platforms uses techniques similar to those found on Web sites such as Facebook that make them so popular as a means of staying in touch with others. The platforms also use artificial intelligence to keep students interested. "Artificial agents are autonomous entities that observe users' activities and assess their state of attention in order to intervene so as to make the user experience more effective," Nabeth says. "The interventions can take many forms, from providing new information to the student, guiding them in their work, or alerting them when other users connect to the platform." The artificial intelligence agents provide a smart form of proactive coaching for students by assessing, guiding, and stimulating them. The agents can alert students when others have read their articles, or when they receive feedback on their contributions to a collaborative project. The agents are also able to detect when students are not interacting with the system and try to get them to rejoin the lesson.

Microsoft's DreamSpark

2008-02-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

Microsoft has announced DreamSpark, a program that will provide students with free access to some of the company's most popular software development tools. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says past efforts to create education discounts limited the number of students that could use the programs, but DreamSpark could reach as many as 1 billion students. DreamSpark will allow students to download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program; SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition; and Windows Server Standard Edition. "It's a brilliant strategic move on the part of Microsoft," says analyst Chris Swenson. "This is one of the core audiences you have to hit if you really want to make a difference in the rich Internet application market going forward." Analysts say that distributing free copies of its tools increases the chances that a Microsoft product will be used to develop the next big Web 2.0 craze, and could also help convince a generation of programmers to move away from open source software. DreamSpark will be made available to high school students around the world starting in the fall, and to college students in other countries starting next year.

Computer Science Curricula

2008-02-15T19:12:00.000-08:00

Computing Research Association chair Dan Reed writes that new approaches to computing education are needed to reverse declining enrolment in computer science. He says that little has changed in computer science curricula in the past 30 years. Its core elements remain centered on formal languages and theory, data structures, programming languages and compilers, operating systems, and computer architecture. Successive layers have been added to the computing curriculum onion, including graphics and human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, mobile and embedded devices, computational geometry, networks and distributed systems, numerical and scientific algorithms, parallel computing, databases and data mining, among others. Reed says that as the computing curriculum onion grows larger and more complex, the number of students will continue to approach zero as the knowledge and degree expectations nears infinity. He says that most graduates solve problems using computers rather than working in core computing technologies and computing as a problem-solving process needs to be accepted and introduced into education through technically challenging and socially relevant problem domains. "This does not mean we should eviscerate the intellectual core of computing," Reed writes, but that education must emphasize relevance and introduce computing as a means to solve problems.

Java & Open Source

2008-01-30T20:07:00.001-08:00

Sun Microsystems fellow James Gosling, creator of the Java programming language, says in an interview that he expected Java to go open source, recalling that the development of the language followed a model that was very similar to open source. Gosling notes that all of the source code is published and community interaction is very collaborative, and he is confident that the new open source status of Java will permit other open source communities to bundle Sun's Java implementation. Gosling describes JavaFX as "a really strong, coordinated set of client-side technologies" that will feature JavaFX Mobile, a deployment of the cell phone stack along with the cell phone hardware. He says cell phones are evolving into desktop computers, pointing out that a pretty small number of activities--email, Web browsing, etc.--comprise the majority of desktop applications used. "Those apps all work really well on cell phones, and there have been cell phones that do this for years," Gosling says. He says Java is a platform for building rich and sophisticated Internet applications, and easing the difficulty of building such applications is what most of his efforts have been focused on. Gosling laments the low student enrollment in computer science, which he chiefly blames on both the media's exaggeration of the IT outsourcing trend and the dot-com crash, which he says simply represented the collapse of companies whose ideas were bad.