Participation in Animation10 should top the more than 800 schools across the United Kingdom that registered for last year’s competition, according to the University of Manchester. The organizers believe the animation competition will help attract more young people to computing. Students between the ages of seven and 19 will compete to create short, animated films, using the Alice, Scratch Adobe Flash, Greenfoot, or Serif software packages. Winners will receive prizes such as laptops, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Students have until April 1, 2010, to enter the contest, and Manchester will announce the winners on May 3. “We need to encourage the brightest and the best of the young generation to engage in the challenges facing computing–not just to use computers, but to invent the next generation of hardware and software,” says Manchester’s Toby Howard. “And we hope this competition will go some way to raising the profile of computer science amongst children in a fun and exciting way.”

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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering aggressive moves to claim its authority over consumer access to the Internet as part of the Obama administration’s plan to treat broadband Internet as a national infrastructure similar to phone lines or the broadcast spectrum. Recently, a federal appeals court questioned the limits of the FCC in a 2008 case involving the Internet and cable firm Comcast, bringing the issue to a head. The judges questioned whether the FCC had acted outside of its authority when it ordered Comcast to stop blocking subscribers from accessing specific file-sharing services. Although the case is still being heard, analysts predict the FCC will lose, derailing its attempts to oversee Internet access. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has been pushing for net neutrality, but a loss in the Comcast case could undermine his authority. “If the court removes the legal basis for the current approach to broadband, the commission may be compelled to undertake a major reassessment of its policy framework … or Congress will have to act,” says the FCC’s Colin Crowell. That could mean that the FCC will put broadband services back into a category with phones services, reversing policies from the past decade.

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The European Union-funded Bilateral Research and Industrial Development enhancing and integrating Grid Enabled technologies (BRIDGE) program links European and Chinese computing grids to enable researchers to carry out joint research. The BRIDGE program already has produced results in drug development, aircraft design, and weather prediction. The project was inspired by China’s rapid growth in research and development. “If Europe does not want to lose ground, the response can only be to synchronize with these developments,” says BRIDGE’s Gilbert Kalb. The BRIDGE researchers say the project has created a foundation for the kind of multinational cooperation that is required to solve global problems.

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A seminar hosted by Science|Business focused on what needs to be done to make information technology (IT) more environmentally friendly. The cross-pollination of various disciplines, including computer science, economics, and psychology, was deemed crucial. Cooperation and dialogue between industry, academia, policymakers, and consumers also is essential. Another need highlighted at the seminar is the provision of more accurate and consistent predictive models, while the European Investment Bank’s Juan Alario stressed the importance of information to make financing an “enabling instrument” for green IT and energy efficiency. The European Union’s plan to solve the economic crisis has recognized three sectors–the auto industry, construction, and manufacturing–deserving of research support to enhance energy efficiency. Meanwhile, the user-friendliness of IT products must be augmented if more energy-efficient technologies are to be widely adopted. The ubiquitous proliferation of computers creates the challenge of harnessing, organizing, and absorbing all the information they collect so that it can be applied productively.

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Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) researchers have developed SIMulator for Business Administration (SIMBA), business simulation software that can mimic how a market behaves as companies make different business decisions. “It can be utilized from a competitive point of view since different companies can compete against each other to improve their own results,” says UC3M’s Fernando Fernandez. SIMBA uses different variables, including products, markets, client segments, technology, languages, currency, and socio-economic environments, to create a realistic simulated business environment. SIMBA also can be used as a tool for students who are studying the business world. The companies involved in a simulation can be controlled by humans or by computer programs using artificial intelligence. “This increases the complexity of the simulated market and creates the possibility of carrying out multi-player simulations, where some players are human, but where others are controlled by computer programs built by artificial intelligence techniques,” Fernandez says.

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Users of touch-screen gadgets must contend with snoopers, and researchers at Britain’s Newcastle University and elsewhere are working on alternative input mechanisms to thwart shoulder surfing, based on touch screens that can detect multiple simultaneous touches. ColorRings, developed by Newcastle’s Paul Dunphy and Patrick Olivier in collaboration with colleagues at Northumbria University, is one such system. ColorRings is based on a user recalling a sequence of pictorial icons rather than numbers, and when entering this code, users are presented with a screen littered with icons, including their four secret ones. The users use their fingers to drag four different colored circles so that each surrounds the correct icon–and with each circle big enough to ring as many as six icons, it is impossible for snoopers to know which icon is part of the code. Meanwhile, an authentication system also developed by Olivier’s team requires the user to choose a different known face in each of a sequence of grids containing numerous faces. The method is designed to deter shoulder surfers by having the user place three fingers on each grid, highlighting three rows or columns of faces. Northumbria University’s David Kim says that users apply extra pressure to the row in which the known face is to make their actual choice, “so the user is not directly selecting each face.”

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Lehigh University professors Stefan Maas and Daniel Lopresti are engaged in a study on RNA editing. Lopresti has devised RNA Editing Dataflow Systems (REDS), a program that identifies the discrepancies that take place when DNA is transcribed into RNA, and then filters out those that are not induced by RNA editing. “We then take the data we obtain from the lab and feed it to our software to improve on our predictions,” Maas says. “The more data we obtain, the more our predictions can be based on machine learning.” Lopresti has created an algorithm designed to simulate RNA folding and correlate folding structures with editing sites. “The algorithm is not perfect, but it does rank all potential editing sites based on predicted folding because of structure,” he says. Maas says that more knowledge about RNA editing could yield insights on the underlying causes for certain diseases and their possible treatments.

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European researchers, coordinated by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, have developed a cognitive computational system using video cameras and software, which is able to recognize and predict human behavior. Human Expressive Graphic Representation of Motion and their Evaluation in Sequences (HERMES) analyzes human behavior based on three levels of video recording sequences. The information is processed by computer vision and artificial intelligence algorithms, which allow the system to recognize movement trends. The researchers say that HERMES uses two new ideas in the field of computer vision. First, it can describe the movement captured by the cameras in natural language using simple and precise phrases. Second, the system can analyze and discover potentially unusual behavior and give off warning signals. Researchers anticipate that HERMES can be used in several different fields, especially intelligent surveillance and accident and crime prevention, as well as marketing and psychology.

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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 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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