02Jul Embedded Electronics–Cars Get Cooperative
The European EMMA project has developed a new middleware platform for embedded sensors called EM2P that acts as an interface between designers and the electronics. The project’s researchers say that EM2P could lead to thousands of new applications in a variety of industries, starting with in-car electronics. Embedded sensor systems are often designed for a single task, but that functionality, such as detecting a sudden deceleration, could be used for a variety of other purposes and used with other sensors to create new applications. “We sought to hide the underlying complexity of in-car embedded sensors so that developers could quickly design new applications with existing electronics,” says EMMA coordinator Antonio Marques Moreno. “EMMA will foster cost-efficient ambient intelligence systems with optimal performance, high reliability, reduced time-to-market, and faster deployment.” Project participants hope that hiding the complexity of the infrastructure will open up interfaces to third parties. The EMMA project focused on transportation to test its system, since vehicles offer numerous opportunities to enhance road safety, such as creating communication channels between sensors within a car and other cars or street signs. Marques says one of EM2P’s major strengths is scalability, since it has been designed to be able to work with an entire city’s vehicle population.
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02Jul The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Motorola Foundation Partner to Inspire Tomorrow’s Innovators
The Anita Borg Institute (ABI) for Women and Technology recently announced that the Motorola Foundation has awarded the institute a $30,560 Innovation Generation grant, which will fund a K-12 Computer Science Teacher Workshop at the 2009 Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing Conference. Conference attendees will discuss generating and implementing solutions based on teacher perspectives with community and national leaders. The Motorola Foundation’s Innovation Generation grants support programs that engage students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to help students build the confidence and skills needed to succeed. ABI, working with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the University of Arizona, will use the 2009 Grace Hopper Celebration to implement a new program designed to increase K-12 teachers’ access and visibility to organizations and individuals in industry and academia dedicated to improving STEM education. The CSTA will provide best practices, workshop content, and resources to increase the success of K-12 teachers’ efforts to interest girls and minority students in computer science, and the University of Arizona will provide a meeting place and increase community outreach efforts. The conference takes place September 30-October 3, in Tucson, Arizona.
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02Jul Organic Traffic Lights
Researchers in Germany believe organic computing has the potential to solve the problems of urban traffic systems, which rely on sensors and controllers. Using an organic approach, Holger Prothmann of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and colleagues have developed a decentralized traffic control system. “The organic approach is based on industry-standard traffic light controllers,” Prothmann says. The researchers developed an observer/controller architecture, which enables the traffic light to respond to traffic flow and to forward information to traffic lights on nearby roads. Current systems use fixed timers that are unable to respond directly to traffic, and centralized systems are unable to respond optimally to changes in traffic on the roads. Working with colleagues at Karlsruhe and at Leibniz Universitat Hannover, Prothmann tested the decentralized traffic control system on roads in Hamburg, and found that it can reduce vehicle stops, delays, and the time needed to reach destinations. “The environmental and economic importance of traffic control systems combined with the distributed nature of traffic nodes and their constantly changing traffic demands make traffic light control an ideal test case for organic computing approaches,” Prothmann says.
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01Jul A Robot That Navigates Like a Person
European scientists have developed a new robot that navigates using human-like visual processing and object detection as a tool for investigating how the brain responds to its environment while the body is moving. “It seems to be a trend, from neuroscience to computer science, to look at the brain for designing new systems,” says Tomaso Poggio of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Biological and Computational Learning. The wheeled machine features a movable head that sees stereoscopically with a pair of cameras, and is controlled by algorithms designed to imitate different components of the human visual system. The device employs a simulated neural network to update its position relative to its surroundings, continually adjusting to each new input in a mimicry of human visual processing and movement planning. The robot mirrors object recognition, motion estimation, and decision making to navigate around a room, moving toward specific targets while evading walls and impediments. Heiko Neumann with the University of Ulm’s Vision and Perception Lab says neuroscientists typically concentrate on a specific aspect of vision and motion, but the creation of a real, human-like computer navigation model requires the integration of these various aspects into a “coherent model architecture.” Project coordinator Mark Greenlee of Germany’s University of Regensburg says that potential applications of the robot’s technology could include intelligent wheelchairs capable of easy indoor navigation. Poggio says that we are “on the cusp of a new stage where artificial intelligence is getting information from neuroscience.”
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01Jul Scientists Create First Electronic Quantum Processor
Yale University researchers have led a research effort to develop the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, a major step toward the creation of a quantum computer. The researchers used a two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run simple algorithms, including a search, marking the first demonstration of quantum information processing with a solid-state device. “Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms, and photons,” says Yale professor Robert Schoelkopf. “But this is the first time they’ve been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor.” Yale postdoctoral associate Leonardo DiCarlo, the lead author of a paper on the discovery, says the key that made the two-qubit processor possible was getting the qubits to rapidly switch between the on and off states so they exchanged information quickly but only when the researchers wanted them to do so. This has not been possible using solid-state qubits because scientists could not get the qubits to maintain a specific quantum state long enough. The first qubits created about a decade ago were able to maintain specific quantum states for about a nanosecond, but the new qubits can maintain theirs for a microsecond, a thousand times longer. The researchers are now working to increase the amount of time the qubits maintain their quantum states so they can run more complicated algorithms. Schoelkopf says processing power increases exponentially with each qubit added, so the potential for advanced quantum computing is huge. However, he says it will still be a while before quantum computers can be used to solve complex problems.
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01Jul Chinese Delay Plan for Censor Software
The Chinese government has postponed its mandate that manufacturers embed Web-filtering software in all new PCs sold in the country, in the wake of fervent opposition inside and outside China. The Xinhua news agency quoted a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology representative as saying that some PC makers claimed they did not have sufficient time to meet the July 1 deadline, in which case a delay was permissible. The postponement alleviates global PC companies’ worries that complying with the rules would make them susceptible to legal liability and allegations of aiding censorship, yet they also were reluctant to openly challenge China’s government, given the heavy concentration of both PC production and PC sales in the country. The Chinese government has said the purpose of implementing the Web-filtering software is to prevent youngsters from viewing online pornography and other “harmful content,” and it insists that the software “definitely has no capability for collecting users’ information or monitoring their Internet behavior.” Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) president Dean Garfield says the computer industry is in favor of enabling parents to block access to objectionable online material, but is against any requirement that specifies a particular company’s product. Isaac Mao with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society says the Chinese initiative “has lost legitimacy” and that the government’s enforcement of the rule would be impossible. There also are indications that the plan has broadened public interest in China regarding questions about government inquisitiveness and censorship. The postponement does not signal the end of the issue, and a Hewlett-Packard representative said the company is collaborating with the ITIC “to seek additional information, clarify open questions, and monitor developments on this matter.”
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30Jun Holt: When it Comes to Voting, a Paper Ballot System Is a Must
New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt (D) recently reintroduced the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, a bill that would create a national voting standard that would require paper-ballot voting systems and accessible ballot-marking devices coupled with routine random audits of electronic voting tallies. “Congress should pass a national standard ensuring that all voters can record their votes on paper and requiring that in every election, randomly selected precincts be audited,” Holt says. In every federal election since 2003, when the Help America Vote Act was enacted, citizen watchdog groups have collected information on voting machine failures. In 2004, the Election Incident Reporting System received more than 4,800 voting machine complaints from all but eight states, and in 2006 a sampling of voting machine problems gathered by election integrity groups and the media exposed more than 1,000 incidents in more than 300 counties in all but 14 states. In 2008, the Our Vote Live hotline received almost 2,000 voting machine problem reports in all but a dozen states, and 19 states conducted completely unauditable elections. Paperless electronic voting is preferred by many election officials, but it is unverifiable and unauditable, and computer scientists say that computers are unreliable without an independent audit mechanism. “The clear trend is towards paper ballots,” says Holt. “In fact, every jurisdiction that has chosen to change its voting system since 2006 has chosen to use paper ballots with optical scan counting. That should be the standard.”
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30Jun The Grill: Using Computer Models to Predict War
New York University professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has developed a computer model that can forecast the outcomes of international conflicts, and the U.S. Defense Department has found the model very useful. De Mesquita says the model begins by assuming that everyone is interested in two dimensions on any policy issue–getting the outcome as close to what they desire as possible, and getting credited as playing an essential role in reaching or thwarting an agreement. “The model estimates the way in which individual decision-makers trade off between credit and policy outcomes,” he notes. De Mesquita says the model has been generally welcomed by people more oriented toward quantitative modeling, while those who tend to focus on area studies or historical case study analysis have been less receptive. “The problems I look at with my model typically involve many dozens of players, sometimes more than 200,” he says. “There is no way to construct biased data to produce a desired outcome except to make the data appear transparently wrong to anyone looking at the data.” The model is founded on game theory, and De Mesquita points out that advances in computing power have made this kind of modeling unrestrained by memory or processing limitations.
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30Jun Graduate Science Enrollment Rises, Bringing More Diversity
Enrollment in graduate science and engineering (S&E) programs has risen to new levels, including greater percentages of non-White ethnic groups and women, according to a new National Science Foundation (NSF) report. The report says the recent growth toward ethnic and racial diversity represents the largest change in the demographic composition of S&E graduate students in the United States. White, non-Hispanic students accounted for 71 percent of all U.S. citizens and permanent residents enrolled in these programs in 2000, according to the report, but only 66 percent in 2007. The NSF report also says that enrollment in U.S. S&E programs grew by about 3.3 percent in 2007, the largest annual growth rate since 2002, and almost double the 1.7 percent growth rate in 2006. The number of post-doctoral appointments at academic institutions also reached a new record, about 36,000, up from about 30,000 in 2001. The proportion of men to women among U.S. citizens and permanent residents enrolled in U.S. S&E programs was divided 52 percent to 48 percent, and among foreign students men outnumbered women 66 percent to 34 percent. U.S. citizens and permanent residents represented the majority of graduate students, according to the report, but the majority of postdoctoral appoints, 58 percent, were given to temporary visa holders.
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29Jun U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace
The United States and Russia disagree about the best way to shield computer systems and the Internet from the growing menace of cyberattacks, with Russia favoring an international pact akin to those negotiated for chemical weaponry and the United States preferring better cooperation between international law enforcement organizations. Russia’s proposed treaty would prohibit a country from clandestinely incorporating malicious codes or circuitry that could be later triggered remotely in the event of war. “We really believe it’s defense, defense, defense,” says an anonymous official of the U.S. State Department. “They want to constrain offense.” U.S. officials are particularly opposed to agreements that would permit governments to censor the Internet, arguing that they would provide cover for repressive regimes. They also are concerned that a treaty would be ineffective because determining if a cyberattack is perpetrated by a government, a hacker loyal to that government, or an independent rogue agent is nearly impossible. U.S. officials say the discord over the proper cyberdefense approach has impeded global law enforcement cooperation, especially since a substantial number of the assaults against U.S. government targets originate from China and Russia. The Russians, meanwhile, perceive the lack of an accord as encouraging a cyberarms race. The Pentagon intends to set up a military cybercommand to get ready for both offensive and defensive cyberwarfare.
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