A national cloud computing network will be made available to Australian researchers, as will $50 million toward the development of a petabyte supercomputer and data network within three to five years. “Everything is heading toward data-intensive science, and effective network access speeds will go through the roof,” says Lindsay Botten, director of the National Computational Infrastructure group. “The federal budget funds–$20 million for the data center and $30 million for the petascale computer–were allocated for the next two years to provide computer resources to specific research areas like climate change, which itself received substantial money.” Through these upgrades, scientists in many disciplines will be able to access–usually for free–the Australian computer networks without needing advanced information technology skills. Organizers also intend to strengthen the ties between Australia’s cloud research networks and the massive grids spread across the Northern Hemisphere, such as those employed in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Within five years, Australian and New Zealand scientists will jointly run under a trans-Tasman cloud network that promises to deliver greater simplicity, scalability, and standardization than the current grid. The Australian Research Collaboration Service will lead the effort, and it plans to expand its overseas grid connections that link Australian and New Zealand researchers to the major European and U.S. networks.
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China is using financial incentives and appeals to national pride to reverse the drain of top science and engineering talent to the West. China’s spending on research and development (R&D) has steadily increased over the last 10 years and now amount to 1.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). The United States spends 2.7 percent of its GDP on R&D, but China’s share is much higher than most other developing countries. Although China excels in certain scientific fields, such as nanotechnology, it struggles in other areas and has never had a Nobel Prize winner for research conducted in mainland China and ranked only 10th in the number of patents granted in the United States in 2008. Chinese students have been leaving at an increasing rate for several years. Almost 180,000 scientists left in 2008, nearly 25 percent more than in 2007. Those who obtained science or engineering degrees were among the least likely to return to China. However, China has been able to draw some prominent scientists back. Many scientists are lured by their patriotism, their desire to affect change, and their belief in the Chinese government. “I felt I owed China something,” says Shi Yigong, a molecular biologist who left Princeton University and returned to China last year. Many Asian scientists also confronted a glass ceiling in the United States, Shi says. Since his arrival in China, Shi has been actively recruiting more scientists to leave the West. In less than two years, he has recruited about 18 post doctoral fellows, almost all of them coming from the United States.

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European researchers have developed argumentative agent technology that relies on artificial intelligence to make reasoned decisions. The project, known as the Argugrid project, can browse the Internet for a certain product, evaluate prices, and compare quality or shipping times. The agents can enter into negotiations with other agents representing other parties in the online marketplace and haggle with them to make the best deal. “You might describe them as proxies for companies and people in electronic marketplaces,” says Imperial College London’s Francesca Toni. Argumentative agents represent a solution to the problem of needing faster, cheaper, more efficient electronic marketplace transactions. The system uses a peer-to-peer framework known as PLATON and an integrated distributed platform known as GOLEM, which supports the software agents. Although the underlying software uses several different, complex technologies, the argumentative processes are simple for users to understand. Rather than using mathematics and numbers to evaluate products, Argugrid uses text-based arguments. “People can follow and understand what is going on at any stage of the process,” Toni says. “If they wanted to it would also be possible for them to intervene and provide their own input to the decision-making and negotiating processes.” The agents also can evaluate the trustworthiness of potential business partners. The Argugrid team suggests the system can be used for other purposes such as earth observation and evaluating customer needs.

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India is making the transition from a global outsourcing center to a global innovation nexus, but lingering challenges include persistent infrastructure difficulties and an educational system in need of improvement. Still, the establishment of multinational research and development (R&D) facilities in India and China is a significant step forward, according to General Electric chief innovation consultant Vijay Govindarajan. “We are at the cusp of a new paradigm in which innovation will happen in India and China first and then it’ll go to the rich countries,” he says. More than 200 multinationals currently have India-based R&D centers that plan to harness the ability of the vast pool of homegrown engineers and expatriate Ph.Ds working in the West who are eager to come home. These R&D facilities initially supported their Western equivalents, but recently they have been entrusted with R&D of products for the global market. Google India’s Prasad Ram notes that there is an opportunity inherent in the difficulty of solving technical problems related to product development in India due to the country’s diversity and infrastructure shortcomings. “If I can solve challenges in a systemic way here, then I can extend the solution to the rest of the world,” he says. Nevertheless, analysts say the day when India outpaces the global innovation of the United States, Europe, or Japan will not come until the country starts offering large-scale, high-quality master’s and Ph.D courses in sufficient numbers.

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A new White House report says the U.S. government needs better information technology (IT) to counter potential terrorist attacks, such as the recent attempt to detonate an explosive device on an airplane. The report outlines a failure by the U.S. intelligence community to “identify, correlate, and fuse into a coherent story all of the discrete pieces of intelligence held by the U.S. government.” Information technology within the counter-terrorism community “did not sufficiently enable the correlation of data that would have enabled analysts to highlight the relevant threat information,” the report says. The report called on the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to accelerate IT enhancements in areas such as knowledge discovery, database integration, and cross-database searches. The report also called for better technology linking biographic information with terrorism-related suspects. The DNI has attempted to address these IT issues by standardizing technology acquisition, says DNI’s James Lewis. The incident also highlights the intelligence community’s culture of secrecy as opposed to information sharing, says Gartner analyst John Pescatore. The intelligence community was programmed to fight the Cold War, where secrecy was paramount, but now more openness is needed to combat terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, says security analyst Bruce Schneier. “Our intelligence organizations need to trade techniques and expertise with industry, and they need to share information among the different parts of themselves,” he says.

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