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October 2009
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Oct

UIC Researchers Probe Computer ‘Commonsense Knowledge’

by sparky3887

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) researchers Robert Sloan and Gyorgy Turan have received a three-year, $500,000 U.S. National Science Foundation grant to develop artificial intelligence algorithms that can process new pieces of information and evolve from them–essentially, an artificial form of common sense. “It’s been the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence research since its early days to answer questions that a young child can answer about the world,” Sloan says. “We’re still a long way from that.” Sloan and Turan will examine the construction of knowledge-based systems such as Cycorp’s Cyc and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open Mind Common Sense. Users of these systems can enter any data they like into the algorithms. The researchers plan to work out how to key in conflicting data, how to store new data quickly, and how a machine can also evolve from this knowledge. “Our task is to understand the problem, find useful mathematical models, understand the basic mathematical properties and, hopefully, provide some efficient computational methods and algorithms in those models,” Turan says. The researchers plan to study common sense knowledge bases and the mathematical methods that can support them.

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Tags: Computer
Posted in Business Internet News

Oct

E-Infrastructures Give Real Boost to Virtual Observatories

by sparky3887

Astronomers are being enabled to access data centers from anywhere in the world thanks to virtual observatories (VOs) developed by the Euro-VO Data Center Alliance (DCA) project. Astronomical data has long been warehoused in specialized data centers that are often incapable of interoperating. Euro-VO DCA sought to remove that obstacle. “Some data centers use grid-based systems, which use their own standards,” says project coordinator Francoise Genova. “We needed to develop a way that they could connect and exchange data with the broader VO standards.” The Euro-VO Astronomical Infrastructure for Data Access project took up the earlier initiative’s work, and its goal is to unify the digital data collections of European astronomy facilities, combining their access mechanisms with evolving e-technologies and augmenting the science yielded from the information. Many new science projects and novel ways of using astronomical data are supported by more and more data centers joining the VO community and sharing their data interoperably.

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Tags: Virtual
Posted in Business Internet News

Oct

A Report From the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

by sparky3887

The 1,600 attendees at the ninth Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, which took place in Tucson, Ariz., from Sept. 30-Oct. 3, are evidence that gender equality in computer science could be right around the corner, writes Harvey Mudd College professor Christine Alvarado. Many high-profile women were invited to speak at the conference, including Google vice president Megan Smith and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Fran Berman. College-level finalists from the ACM student research contest demonstrated their original projects at the conference. An Amazon.com booth encouraged students to compete in a coding contest to see who would be christened a “Ninja Coder.” Female students wore shirts emblazoned with the words “I code like a girl, and I’m proud of it!” The conference also organized two dance parties for participants and hundreds attended.

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Tags: Computing
Posted in Computer Science and Engineering News

Oct

ACM Group Taps Visionary in Multimedia Research for Top Award

by sparky3887

The ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) has named Lawrence A. Rowe the winner of its prestigious technical achievement award. Rowe, currently president of FX Palo Alto Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, will receive the 2009 SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications for his research in media software systems and leadership in the multimedia research community. Rowe led the development of the Berkeley Webcasting System; the Berkeley MPEG1 Tools software; the Berkeley Multimedia, Interfaces, and Graphics (MIG) Seminar Internet Webcast; and the Open Mash Streaming Media Toolkit. He is a past chair of SIGMM and an ACM Fellow. SIGMM will honor Rowe at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2009, which takes place Oct. 19-24 in Beijing, China.

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Tags: Multimedia
Posted in Business Internet News

Oct

Expeditions in Computing Continue to Break New Ground

by sparky3887

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering recently created three new Expeditions in Computing. Each of these projects will receive $2 million in funding per year over five years to bring their concepts to fruition. “This year’s Expeditions projects are driven by challenge problems that arise from the most pressing issues facing our society today–groundbreaking research shaped by societal needs,” says Expeditions program officer Mitra Basu. One of the projects is a collaborative venture between Harvard and Northeastern University researchers to create robotic bees that mimic real bees in their ability to fly autonomously and coordinate activities amongst themselves and the hive. The scientists intend to focus on the development of compact high-energy power sources, extremely low-power computing, and distributed algorithms for multi-agent systems. The RoboBees will be designed to yield novel insights into how nature addresses complex problems in an elegant way. Another Expedition project, under way at UCLA, seeks to improve energy efficiency, development effort, time-to-solution, cost, and general productivity by an order of magnitude through customizable domain-specific computing. The UCLA researchers are concentrating on developing a customizable heterogeneous platform featuring a broad spectrum of customizable computing components, customizable and scalable high-performance interconnects founded on RF-interconnect technologies, automated compilation instruments and runtime management systems to facilitate swift development and implementation of domain-specific computing systems, and a reusable mode for reproducing success in different application domains.

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Tags: Computing
Posted in Business Internet News

Oct

IT to Create 2.8 Million Jobs in the Asia Pacific by 2013

by sparky3887

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.

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Posted in Computer Science and Engineering News

Oct

What’s Next for the Netflix Algorithms?

by sparky3887

Experts will convene at the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, which takes place Oct. 22-25 in New York City, to discuss what insights have been gleaned from the Netflix Prize, a $1 million competition to improve the accuracy of the movie rental company’s in-house recommendation system by 10 percent. Ces Bertino, a member of one of the teams that competed for the Netflix Prize, says the contest had value in forcing participants to apply all algorithms to the same set of uneven real-world data rather than choosing the datasets. “Because people had to use a fixed dataset, they needed to deal not only with the advantages of a particular method, but also the weaknesses of it,” Bertino says. “You could not escape it.” Another contestant, Gavin Potter, says the winning algorithms succeeded through the recognition that combining various strategies generated the best results. University of Minnesota professor John Riedl says the winning models imply that integrating many algorithms with machine-learning methods could conceivably be a solid general strategy for handling large datasets. He believes it is time for people in the field of recommendation systems to focus on neglected system elements that could benefit the industry. The winning algorithms also could find application in areas that include fraud detection, market trading, fighting spam, and computer security, says Nicholas Ampazis at Greece’s University of the Aegean.

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Tags: Algorithms, Netflix
Posted in Business Internet News

Oct

Prizes Aside, the P-NP Puzzler Has Consequences

by sparky3887

The frenzy of downloading that accompanied the September cover article in the Communications of the ACM when it was issued online reflects the intense interest in the subject of the article–the progress, or lack thereof, on solving the P vs. NP challenge. P represents the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time, while NP represents the class of problems that can be confirmed in polynomial time. It is theorized that if P equals NP, some of the most complex real-world computing problems, such as optimizing the layout of transistors on a computer chip, could be addressed, triggering an acceleration of technological and economic productivity. Cracking computer codes raises a similar challenge. Such tasks share the common characteristic that an increase in the size of a problem is accompanied by an exponential increase in the computer time needed to solve it. Progress on meeting the P vs. NP challenge has been slow, but Lance Fortnow of the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University believes the theory might be proved or disproved through algebraic geometry.

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Posted in Business Internet News

Oct

Georgia Tech Broadens, Diversifies Computing Education

by sparky3887

The Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing has received a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue its Georgia Computes! program, which promotes computer science to both students and teachers across the state. The program’s initiatives include encouraging women, minorities, and people with disabilities to participate in computer science programs, doubling the number of schools that provide Advanced Placement computer science classes and the number of Hispanics that take the exam, designing eight summer computing camps, and improving 25 percent of the computing programs in George at the university level. Elementary and high school students are guided by mentors from a variety of backgrounds, including high school students, undergraduates, or members of youth organizations. Students ages 10 to 18 can attend summer computing camps, while high school teachers can attend computing workshops. Undergraduate students can attend computing workshops as well, and can serve as mentors to elementary and high school students. Researchers are studying why there is less interest in computer science at the undergraduate level. Graduate students can work as mentors and also chart the number of computer science majors in Georgia. In the future, Georgia Computes! will add computer centers to Columbus State and Armstrong Atlantic State University and will provide online access to computing workshops and classes. The program also will study state university computer science programs and will chart the course students take from secondary school-level summer camps, workshops, and classes to their current majors.

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Tags: Computing, Education, tech
Posted in Computer Science and Engineering News

Oct

IBM Joins Pursuit of $1,000 Personal Genome

by sparky3887

IBM plans to disclose technical details of its initiative to reduce the cost of personal genome sequencing from between $5,000 and $50,000 to $1,000 or less, and its ultimate goal is to make the procedure cost no more than $100. IBM researchers plan to employ the company’s proficiency in semiconductor manufacturing, computing, and material science to develop an integrated sequencing machine that is able to reduce sequencing costs while also upgrading speed and accuracy. In doing so, IBM is joining a number of international competitors racing to achieve a similar aim. IBM is banking on a DNA transistor designed to sequence genomes by reading DNA pulled through an atomic-size hole called a nanopore. The company says the objective is the construction of a machine capable of sequencing an individual genome of as many as 3 billion nucleotides in just a few hours. The system’s core is comprised of a mechanism that repeatedly pauses a negatively-charged DNA strand as an electric field pulls the strand through the nanopore. Although this mechanism is reliable, the research team says the sensing technology to control the rate of movement and to read the specific nucleotides has not yet been demonstrated. The capability to read longer sequences is a critical advance needed for the improvement of DNA analysis quality. Harvard geneticist George M. Church says the system will need to read sequences as long as 1 million bases, while current technology can only read 30 to 800 bases.

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Tags: IBM
Posted in Computer Science and Engineering News