Microsoft Live Labs researchers have developed Pivot, a tool designed to visually organize large data sets. Pivot presents data in the form of several images accompanied by textual data. Users can zoom into the images to study individual pieces of data, or zoom out to see items grouped according to certain criteria. Data collections can contain a few images with static data attached, or they can be large and connected to a feed of changing data. Pivot is based on Microsoft’s Seadragon, software designed for manipulating large amounts of visual information. Users can make their own collections of data by converting images to the Deep Zoom format used by Seadragon, and annotate them using a format based on extensible markup language. Pivot also could provide a better way to sort through Internet search results, because users could sort through thousands of results visually, instead of just looking a list of the top 10 search results.
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Nagoya University researchers have developed a light-activated switch to turn nanomachines on and off. The team used tiny triggered tweezers made of DNA to open and close in response to ultraviolet (UV) and visible light. “We are designing DNA nano-robotics that are mechanically operated by light rather than chemical fuel,” says Nagoya researcher Hiroyuki Asanuma. The researchers focused on a loop of DNA that looks like a hairpin with two arms. At the end of each arm, azobenzene groups are integrated into the DNA sequence. Under visible light, the azobenzene groups adopt the trans isomer, allowing the base pairs to join together. When UV light is applied, the azobenzene groups switch to the more sterically-constrained cis isomer. The system is fully reversible, allowing it to have great potential to be applied to other nanotechnologies that use DNA. “To be able to switch biomolecular conformational changes is of considerable interest for many applications in biomedicine and bionanotechnology,” says Technical University of Munich’s Friedrich Simmel.
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Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) researchers working on the eMadrid project are studying how to use three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds for teaching. Three-dimensional virtual worlds must include teaching elements such as a training program, with a sequence of activities for students to acquire knowledge, as well as a methodology to evaluate previously defined learning results, to become a learning platform, says UC3M professor Carlos Delgado Kloos. “The 3D learning environments are not only appropriate for transmission of knowledge, but also for teaching competencies, and if they also include augmented reality elements for the manipulation of a three-dimensional world with real physical elements, even better results are obtained, as the barrier of a fictional world immersion is reduced,” Kloos says. The eMadrid project is working to achieve these standards by collaborating with researchers from other universities, including Autonoma, Complutense, Politecnica, Rey Juan Carlos, and the National Distance Education University of Spain. The researchers are developing defined standards and best practices for implementing teaching environments in 3D virtual platforms.
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At the recent Usenix Annual Technical Conference, Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Vytautus Valancius described Transit Protocol, a system that would let cloud users customize the path their data takes as it travels through cloud computing platforms. Valancius says Transit Protocol enables users to set a path that matches the needs of a specific application. For example, he says Transit Protocol could let cloud providers connect to a variety of Internet service providers, and create a specially designed interface for customers to manage their access. Valancius says Transit protocol is currently being used to power several academic experiments at sites across the United States. “As cloud platforms mature to host increasingly complex and demanding applications, customers will want a greater degree of flexibility and control over these resources,” notes University of British Columbia professor Andrew Warfield.
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Inspired by the sandfish lizard, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are collaborating with Northwestern University’s Paul Umbanhowar to develop a snake-like robot that can swim through sand. When the sandfish lizard is submerged in sand, the animal tucks its limbs into its sides and moves forward by wiggling from side to side. The researchers created a computer model of the sandfish lizard that showed a snake-like robot with seven body segments that could travel through a granular medium such as sand. The researchers built a robot that is 35 centimeters long and features seven aluminum segments linked by six motors, which are covered in spandex to prevent the motors from becoming jammed. When the robot undulates its body at a frequency similar to the lizard, it can move forward at speeds of up to 0.3 body lengths per wave cycle. The team would have to add more jointed segments to match the 0.4 body lengths per cycle that a submerged lizard can achieve.
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Malicious content on the Web can be very difficult to stop, said security experts at the recent Source Boston computer security conference. The difficulties involved in stopping malicious Web content can be seen in the 2008 shutdown of the malicious hosting company McColo, which at one point was responsible for more than 66 percent of the spam on the Internet. Although that spam stopped when McColo was shut down, botnets, such as the Grum, have taken its place, according to FireEye security researcher Alex Lanstein. He says that he has tried and failed to shut down SteepHost, the Ukraine-based company that is hosting the block of IP addresses that Grum uses for its attacks. But even if malicious hosting companies such as SteepHost were shut down, another company would quickly replace it, Lanstein says. An additional obstacle involved in stopping malicious Web content is the fact that IP addresses cannot be confiscated as long as their owners have paid for them, Lanstein says. Rapid chief security officer HD Moore says that it will continue to be difficult to shut down malicious hosting companies after IPv6 is introduced, since the implementation of the protocol would enable companies to purchase large blocks of IP addresses in order to evade tracking.
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Finding young women to fill tech jobs continues to be a problem for the German information technology (IT) industry, according to a new study from German technology and telecoms association Bitkom and research firm Forsa. Women accounted for 9 percent of the 40,500 trainees in the sector in 2009, down from 14 percent in 2001. Meanwhile, just 15 percent of students pursuing computer science studies at universities last year were women. The industry still has to contend with negative perceptions, such as those about the workload and opportunities for advancement, says Bitkom’s August-Wilhem Scheer. “Many preconceptions can be easily corrected,” Scheer says. “The image of the lonely programmer who spends his nights in a basement and cannot find a partner is really dated.” The industry continues to hold Girls’ Days to get more young women interested in IT and communication technology, and companies have begun to implement their own programs for attracting female employees.
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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have developed Minput, a proof-of-concept miniature input device that provides mouse control and optical tracking for handheld devices. Minput features a 1.5-inch liquid-crystal display taken from a wristwatch originally developed to allow users to watch TV or movies, and two optical sensors. The researchers say Minput can be operated anywhere, including the surface of a table, on a user’s leg, or on the palm of a user’s hand. Users can manipulate Minput and control different programs via gestures such as flicking and twisting. For example, turning it like a knob would adjust the volume and sliding it left and right would change songs. Another modality functions like a virtual window, and users can slide Minput over photographs, text documents, and Web pages to interact with them. Minput also offers cursor control, which functions like a mouse for playing simple games.
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The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s John Shalf describes parallel programming languages as tools designed to program systems with multiple processors and thus multiple concurrent instruction threads. He projects that all future computer speed upgrades will be derived from parallelism, as chips’ clock frequencies are no longer increasing. Shalf says that a program that runs in parallel can be created using a sequential programming language, and notes that some of the most commonly used parallel programming strategies exploit the syntax of existing sequential languages. He is concerned “that serial languages do not provide the necessary semantic guarantees about locality of effect that is necessary for efficient parallelism. Ornamenting the language to insert the semantics of such guarantees … is arduous, prone to error, and quite frankly not very intuitive.” Shalf expects a resurgence in implicit parallelism and constructs formulated from functional languages, and says the most important development looking ahead is the migration of parallelism notions from an academic problem to a mainstream challenge. “This means it is even more imperative that we train future computer scientists to solve problems using parallelism from the get-go,” he says.
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Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have made a breakthrough in the effort to uniformly control the orientation of liquid crystal molecules by developing a stable, rewritable memory device that takes advantage of the “anchoring transition” property of liquid crystals. The team was able to align rod-like liquid crystal molecules in a polymer using a laser beam or electrical field. The liquid crystal can store and erase data, and be used repeatedly. “This is the first rewritable memory device utilizing anchoring transition,” says lead researcher Hideo Takezoe. The device also is bi-stable–the liquid crystals retain their orientation in one of two directions–and does not need power to keep images, Takezoe says.
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