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August 2009
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Aug

Autonomous Machines Prompt Debate

by sparky3887

The United Kingdom’s Royal Academy of Engineering has released a report that calls on legislators and opinion-makers to start addressing how autonomous machines will affect society. The report says the technology needed to develop many autonomous systems is either already available or closer than many people think, and the legal system needs to catch up. “We’re very used to automatic systems, such as the braking assistance technology now standard in most cars,” says Southampton University professor Will Stewart, a contributor to the report. “But traditionally, engineers have designed these things so that they’re used with a human operator. As we move towards autonomous systems, we’re taking the human further and further away from the machine.” The report explores autonomous transportation, which the authors believe may be as few as 10 years away, and smart homes, particularly in regards to caring for the elderly. “We expect to see a new generation of systems that will become tools that are in some respects almost like people, but will also pose some of the same ethical and management issues as people do,” Stewart says. Report contributor Chris Elliot says a major problem is that the legal framework does not exist to handle potential problems, such as if an autonomous truck should malfunction and cause an accident. Elliot says the legal and ethical systems need to catch up, and the engineers developing these systems need guidance on how their machines are licensed and approved.

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Tags: Machines
Posted in Business Internet News

Aug

Wi-Fi via White Spaces

by sparky3887

The transition from analog to digital broadcasts has opened up radio spectrum that could be used to deliver long-range, low-cost wireless Internet service using white spaces, which are empty fragments of the spectrum scattered between used frequencies. White space frequencies could be used to provide broadband Internet access in rural areas and fill in gaps in city Wi-Fi networks. For example, Microsoft Research’s Ranveer Chandra says white space frequencies could be used to allow people to connect to their home network from up to a mile away. Last November, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that companies could build devices that transmit over white spaces, but also required that those devices should not interfere with existing broadcasts. Microsoft researchers have designed a series of protocols, called White Fi, to account for the restrictions involved in using white spaces. Chandra says wireless networking has traditionally used an open spectrum with all users being equal shareholders, but in white spaces some users are primary users. Chandra says his research team recently received an experimental license from the FCC allowing them to build a prototype White Fi system on the Microsoft Research campus. The researchers will send their findings to the FCC in the hope that the data will help establish future white-space regulations. The blueprints for a computer network that uses white spaces were presented at ACM’s SIGCOMM 2009 conference, which takes place August 17-21 in Barcelona, Spain.

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Tags: WiFi
Posted in Computer Science and Engineering News

Aug

Carnegie Mellon, Pitt Involved in $10 Million ‘Model Checking’ Research

by sparky3887

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $10 million grant to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the University of Pittsburgh, and six other institutions to develop computational techniques that could be used to save lives. CMU professor Christopher Langmead says the researchers will study extremely complex systems and identify the events that may result in mission-critical failures. The researchers will integrate the techniques of model checking and abstract interpretation, search for bugs in automobile and aerospace computer software, and examine the causes of pancreatic cancer and atrial fibrillation. Model checking explores all possible states of a system and looks for irregular or unusual conditions. However, sometimes too many states exist to find flaws, so abstract interpretation is used to simplify a system by grouping similar states together, says CMU professor and grant team leader Edmund M. Clarke, winner of ACM’s 2007 A. M. Turing Award. This type of analysis is particularly important in situations where software interacts with the real world, such as software that helps ensure the safety of vehicle brakes or the success of spacecraft launches, says project participant and University of Maryland professor Rance Cleaveland. The project also could help improve the diagnosis of some diseases because physicians could group cell proteins that perform similar functions to identify cancer cells that behave differently or stop growing. “Using a computational method, we hope to provide an answer to what’s happening at the very early stages,” says Langmead. Other schools involved in the effort include Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York university, and the City University of New York.

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Tags: Research
Posted in Business Internet News

Aug

Internet ‘Immune System’ Could Block Viruses

by sparky3887

A system that fights highly infectious computer viruses by embedding defense mechanisms in key parts of the Internet has been developed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher Scott Coull and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Boleslaw Szymanski. The modus operandi of computer worm infection is malware scanning the Internet for vulnerable computers and transferring itself to those systems. Coull and Szymanski say the isolation of worms entails coaxing the Internet’s core computers or autonomous systems to collaborate, and each system is managed by an Internet service provider (ISP). In their model, the researchers imbued each system with the ability to spot a compromised computer, which may announce itself by making a series of random requests to link to other computers, the majority of which will fail. Once a threat within the autonomous system’s network is detected, the system stops receiving and forwarding messages from the infected computer, and also notifies its peer autonomous systems about the identity of the threat. Upon the recognition of a genuine threat, all autonomous systems can contain the compromised computer or computers and halt the worm’s spread. Coull and Szymanski’s model indicates that the viability of this strategy depends on cooperation between about 30 percent to 35 percent of the autonomous systems in the Internet. Collaboration and trust between the ISPs running the systems would be essential, Coull says.

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Tags: Internet
Posted in Computer Science and Engineering News

Aug

Harvard Research Team Receives $10M NSF Grant to Develop Small-Scale Mobile Robotic Devices

by sparky3887

A Harvard University-led, multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers, and biologists have received a $10 million National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing grant to develop small-scale robotic devices based on the biology of a bee and the insect’s hive behavior. The researchers hope to advance the field of miniature robotics and the design of compact, high-energy power sources, as well as create new ultra-low-power computing and smart electronic sensors, and improve coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines. “Nature has bred astonishing solutions to complex real-world challenges,” says Harvard professor Robert Wood, the principal investigator of the project. “This research aims to understand the biology of bees and use this understanding to advance multiple topics in computer science and engineering.” Wood and his colleagues say that nature-inspired research could lead to the development of novel methods for designing and building an electronic surrogate nervous system capable of sensing and adapting to changing environments, and advance the field of small-scale flying mechanical devices. The five-year project could lead to technological advances in robust, bio-inspired computer systems that coordinate complex behavior using input from multiple independent parts, smart materials, and novel, miniature power sources that could be used in a variety of devices. The researchers also will work with the Museum of Science in Boston to create an interactive exhibit to educate and inspire future scientists and engineers.

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Tags: Robotic
Posted in Computer Science and Engineering News

Aug

New Carnegie Mellon U. Project Will Build Online Community-College Courses

by sparky3887

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is adding a community college component to its Open Learning Initiative, which gives about 300 classrooms around the world access to software-enhanced, college-level online course material in a variety of subjects. Human-computer interaction specialists will team up with software engineers, scientists who study how people learn, and community college faculty experts to develop courses for the Community College Open Learning Initiative. The Open Learning Initiative makes use of digital environments that are capable of tracking the progress of students, providing feedback, and notifying professors about the specific areas of struggle for students. CMU hopes to improve the completion rates for courses by 25 percent. The community college version of the Open Learning Initiative will make use of a hybrid model that combines online teaching with time in a traditional classroom. CMU has secured $4.5 million in funding for the project, which could reach 40 community-college partners within three years.

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Tags: Online
Posted in Business Internet News

Aug

Experimental Tech Turns Your Coffee Table Into a Universal Remote

by sparky3887

The recent ACM SIGGRAPH conference offered a video demonstration of Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces (CRISTAL), a multitouch tabletop display that acts as a universal remote. Australian researcher Christian Muller-Tomfelde, who is currently writing a book on research in tabletop displays, says CRISTAL is easy to use. “It is a clever use of the tabletop as a ‘world-in-miniature’ interface to control room elements,” he says. CRISTAL uses a camera to deliver a streaming video view of the room, including the TV, radio, DVD player, lamps, and digital picture frames, on the tabletop. The video image of a device acts as the interface, so the user could make a sliding motion on the TV to adjust the volume. The user also could drag the image of the cover of a movie on the multitouch screen and drop it on the image of the TV to watch it. The team behind CRISTAL says such a tabletop remote could cost $10,000 to $15,000, and could reach consumers in a few years if it is combined with Microsoft’s Surface multitouch display. “We wanted a social aspect to activities such as choosing what to watch on TV and we wanted to make the process easy and intuitive,” says the University of Waterloo’s Stacey Scott, who worked on the CRISTAL project.

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Tags: tech
Posted in Business Internet News, Computer Science and Engineering News

Aug

Doing What the Brain Does–How Computers Learn to Listen

by sparky3887

Researchers at Germany’s Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London have developed a mathematical model that could significantly improve computers’ ability to automatically recognize and process spoken language. The researchers say their new language processing algorithm could eventually imitate brain mechanisms and help machines perceive and understand the world around them. The researchers created a mathematical model that was designed to imitate, in a highly simplified manner, the neuronal processes that occur during human speech comprehension. The neuronal processes were described by algorithms that processed speech at several temporal levels. The model was able to recognize individual speech sounds and syllables and was able to process accelerated speech sequences. Additionally, the system had a brain-like ability to predict the next speech sound, and if the prediction was incorrect because the speaker made an unfamiliar syllable out of familiar sounds, the system could detect the error. “The crucial point, from a neuroscientific perspective, is that the reactions of the model were similar to what would be observed in the human brain,” says the Max Planck Institute’s Stefan Kiebel.

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Tags: Brain
Posted in Business Internet News

Aug

Energy-Aware Internet Routing

by sparky3887

A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University, and Akamai indicates that an Internet-routing algorithm that tracks electricity price fluctuations could save major Internet companies millions of dollars each year. Such an algorithm could reduce energy use by as much as 40 percent by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are the lowest for that particular day. MIT Ph.D. student Asfandyar Qureshi first outlined the concept of a smart routing algorithm capable of tracking electricity prices in a paper in October 2008, and this year Qureshi and colleagues approached Akamai researchers to obtain the real-world routing data needed to test the concept. The researchers analyzed 39 months of electricity pricing data for 29 major U.S. cities and noted a surprising amount of volatility, even among geographically close locations. The team then created a routing scheme to take advantage of daily and hourly fluctuations in electricity costs around the country, creating an algorithm that compares the physical distance needed to route information, which also increases cost, against the likely cost savings from reduced energy consumption. The routing scheme was tested on nine Akamai servers over 24 hours, and the researchers found that in the best scenario a company could cut energy use by 40 percent.

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Tags: Energy
Posted in Computer Science and Engineering News

Aug

The Corporate Lab as Ringmaster

by sparky3887

The advent of the Internet era is shrinking the role of corporate research and development (R&D) laboratories in the innovation process, according to experts. Michael Schrage with the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology forecasts that the idea-production process will continue its migration from large corporate labs’ centralized model and toward “populist innovation.” He says that a great deal of traditional corporate R&D has been subsidized by profits that face more and more Internet-era economic pressures. Corporate R&D’s best option at this point is to embrace a federated model that takes advantage of all the work by outsiders in learning institutions, startups, business partners, and government labs, with the corporate lab functioning as an innovation coordinator and integrator, Schrage says. The federated strategy has been taken up by Hewlett-Packard (HP), with HP Labs devoting greater resources to fewer projects, while also systematically seeking outside ideas via an annual contest that solicits grant proposals from universities across the globe. “We are tapping the collective intelligence, selectively, of leading academics around the world,” says HP’s Prith Banerjee. One such academic is University of Southern California electrical engineer Alan E. Willner, whose project with HP Labs is an attempt to reduce power consumption and raise data-transmission speeds between computers in data centers and eventually even within chips. Although a federated approach works for certain problems, experts say corporate lab R&D is unmatched when focused on multidisciplinary challenges in projects soon going to market.

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Tags: Lab
Posted in Computer Science and Engineering News