ACM’s International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), sponsored by IBM, challenges students to solve real-world problems using open technology and advanced computing methods in a very short time period. Last year’s competition attracted tens of thousands of students on 7,100 teams from universities in about 90 countries. “The world faces many daunting problems such as pandemic diseases, climate change, water pollution, food safety, finite energy resources, as well as issues with urban management and mass transportation,” says IBM’s Doug Heintzman, ICPC’s sponsorship executive. “At IBM, we believe we have a responsibility to help develop the next generation of technology leaders, help them to understand and tackle these complex business issues.” ICPC executive director Bill Poucher, a professor at Baylor University, says the contest gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their talents and present themselves to top recruiters. “The contest is also a forum for advancing technology in an effort to better accommodate the growing needs of the future,” Poucher says. “At the same time, the competition is a chance for students of similar interests to exchange ideas and peer educate.” Following the regional contests currently underway, finalists will attend the World Finals, which will take place in February 2010 in Harbin, China, hosted by Harbin Engineering University.

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Researchers in Barcelona are developing virtual reality spaces that incorporate touch-sensitive tiles and immersive animations. Pompeu Fabra University professor Paul Verschure says his research team has built an experience-induction machine as part of the PRESENCCIA project to understand how humans can exist in physical and virtual environments simultaneously. One of the project’s major challenges was creating a credible virtual environment, which required the researchers to understand how people’s brains construct a vision of the world. “Imagine what we see is sort of rapidly jumping about–that would not be a believable experience for us,” Verschure says. “So that means one thing we have really tried to engineer here also from a psychological perspective is how do I feed this continuity of expectations that our brain is generating about the world.” The researchers say the ultimate goal is to advance human-computer interaction beyond the traditional keyboard, screen, and mouse. “What we’re trying to do is to understand why people behave in a more or less natural way in a virtual reality,” says PRESENCCIA project coordinator Mel Slater. Petar Horki, a student at Austria’s Graz University of Technology, is using PRESENCCIA concepts to create a virtual reality system that uses mind control, allowing the user to simply think about an action to perform that action in the virtual world. “Actually, I’m not doing anything, I’m just imagining I’m doing a brisk foot movement, and by this imagination I can move at least in this virtual room,” Horki says.

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A scan of the Internet by Columbia University researchers searching for vulnerable embedded devices has found that nearly 21,000 routers, Webcams, and VoIP products are vulnerable to remote attack. They say there could be as many as 6 million vulnerable devices on the Internet. The scan also found that the devices’ administrative interfaces are viewable from anywhere on the Internet, and their owners have not changed the devices’ passwords from the manufacturer’s default. The study scanned networks belonging to the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in North America, Europe, and Asia, and vulnerable devices were found in significant numbers in all parts of the world. Since starting the project last December, the researchers have scanned 130 million IP addresses and found nearly 300,000 devices whose administrative interfaces were remotely accessible from anywhere on the Internet. Devices with default passwords are most vulnerable, but others are theoretically vulnerable to brute-force password-cracking attacks. The researchers have provided ISPs with their findings, but Columbia professor Salvatore Stolfo says product manufacturers are the real culprits. He says that they need to hide their administrative interfaces by default and give customers clear instructions on how to alter the configuration to protect themselves. Stolfo also says that vendors should be more vocal in encouraging customers to change default passwords.

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Studies done at Microsoft Research are using electroencephalograph (EEG) measurements to read users’ minds in order to help tag online images. The researchers say the mind-reading technique is the first step toward a hybrid human-computer data analysis system. The manual process for tagging images is often tedious and repetitive, but with the new method of EEG tagging, workers may be able to perform other tasks during the tagging process. Computers can recognize shapes and movements very well, but they have a harder time with categorizing objects in human terms, says Microsoft Research’s Desney Tan. During testing, researchers could determine if the subject was looking at a face, an animal, or an inanimate object with good results. The researchers found that no improvement was seen if the viewer was given more than half a second to look at each image. This leads researchers to think images could be displayed at that speed with no loss of accuracy.

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The Perception-on-Purpose (POP) project is an effort by European researchers to develop technology enabling a robot to integrate visual and audio data to facilitate purposeful perception. “It is not that easy to decide what is foreground and what is background using sound alone, but by combining the two modalities–sound and vision–it becomes much easier,” says project coordinator Radu Horaud. “If you are able to locate 10 sound sources in 10 different directions, but if in one of these directions you see a face, then you can much more easily concentrate on that sound and throw out the other ones.” The researchers followed this strategy in their development of algorithms that allowed their robot, Popeye, to reliably identify speakers. “Most often, sound research is conducted in specialized labs, with arrays of microphones and a very controlled acoustic environment,” Horaud says. “But we integrated our two microphones and two cameras onto the head of our Popeye. The idea is to have an agent-centered cognitive system.” Horaud believes there is a link between multi-sensory perception and cognition, and that some modern artificial intelligence applications are constrained by their inability to learn from their environment.

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The computer industry had an opportunity to learn about the technical details of Google’s infrastructure during LADIS 2009, ACM’s recent SIGOPS International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware. Jeff Dean, a Google engineer who was one of the keynote speakers, also talked about Spanner, a new storage and computation system for automating the management of services across multiple data centers. Spanner, which will have a scale of 1 million to 10 million servers in the future, would be capable of automatically allocating resources across “entire fleets of machines,” Dean says. The goal will be “automatic, dynamic, worldwide placement of data and computation to minimize latency or cost.” Spanner also would offer a cost management strategy for addressing regional differences in bandwidth and power costs. Google would have energy management opportunities because Spanner can seamlessly shift workloads between data centers. Automated capacity management also would enable Google to route around failures or data center downtime as well as plan more energy-efficient facilities.

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The United States remains the world’s leader in science and technology, based on factors such as gross dollars spent, relative spending on research, research articles published, and patents granted, according to the National Science Board’s biennial report on science and engineering. The report says the U.S. accounted for nearly one third of the $1.1 trillion spent on research and development (R&D) worldwide in 2007. From 1998 to 2007, R&D spending grew between five and six percent annually in the United States, Japan, and the European Union. However, R&D spending in India, South Korea, and Taiwan grew an average of nine to 10 percent per year during that period, and Chinese spending grew by more than 20 percent per year. Out of approximately 760,000 research articles published in 2008, 25 percent were written by U.S. researchers. Chinese scientists published about eight percent of the research articles, up from one percent in 1988. U.S.-based inventors accounted for 49 percent of the patents granted in 2008, down from 55 percent in 1995.

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Researchers at the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland have studied the characteristics of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls in an attempt to gain a better understanding of ordinary traffic. Security remains an issue for VoIP calls, which can be hijacked and used to send confidential information over the Internet. Wojciech Mazurczyk and colleagues decided to study ordinary VoIP calls so experts would have a way to compare and contrast regular calls with those that have been embedded with stolen data. VoIP calls can be compromised by changing the order in which the digital packets are sent, or by deliberately delaying certain packets that have embedded data, a technique known as Lost Audio Packet Steganography (LACK). The team’s research shows that packets are not normally re-ordered in a way for hiding data, so attacks that re-order data are not a real threat. However, LACK attacks would be difficult to spot because of the routine loss of data packets.

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A panel of experts told U.S. senators at a recent hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that the United States would be defeated in an all-out cyberwar, and reducing this vulnerability will not occur until the government takes a more active interest in safeguarding the nation’s network. Former director of national security and national intelligence Michael McConnell warned that greater government involvement may not happen until after a “catastrophic event” transpires. The focus of the hearing was the Cyber Security Act of 2009, which would oversee organizations and companies that supply critical U.S. infrastructure, mandate licensing and certification for cybersecurity professionals, and sponsor grant and scholarship programs.

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Oxford University researchers have developed the Parallel Tracking and Mapping (PTAM) program, a camera-tracking system for fusing real and three-dimensional (3D) computer-generated visuals. PTAM enables users to project virtual objects or characters into a video stream that appears on real world surfaces. “The blending of real and virtual worlds is common enough in films and television, but is usually achieved by extensive processing of the recorded images or by filming in studios with known objects at fixed locations,” says Oxford professor David Murray. “The PTAM software allows developers to augment a camera’s video stream in real time and in everyday locations.” PTAM builds a map of thousands of features from objects and scenes, tracks accurately and at a standard frame rate, and calculates the camera viewpoint and angle. The technology also could improve global positioning systems and digital compasses, and provide support for satellite, 3G, and Wi-Fi signals.
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