An expert on William Shakespeare at the University of London has used plagiarism-detection software to determine that Shakespeare co-wrote the unattributed play The Reign of King Edward III. Pl@giarism, developed by researchers at the University of Maastricht to detect whether or not students are cheating, enabled Sir Brian Vickers to compare language used in the play, published anonymously in 1596 when Shakespeare was 32, with other plays of the period. Plays with different authors tend to have up to 20 common phrases of three or more words. “The computer is picking out three-word sequences that could just be chunks of grammar,” Vickers says. “But when you get metaphors or unusual parts of speech, it is different.” Pl@giarism found 200 matches of phrases in the play with Shakespeare’s works published before 1596, with the matches coming from four scenes, or about 40 percent of the play. The software also found about 200 phrases that matched the language of the works of Thomas Kyd, another popular playwright during the period, in the remaining scenes, which indicates he wrote the other 60 percent of the play.

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A panel of researchers made a case for funding “high risk, high reward” research during a recent hearing of the U.S. House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education. The panelists told the subcommittee that grant proposals for funding agencies do not give researchers the freedom to pursue such projects, and they often lack the funding to investigate a potential return on the investment. The scientists said lawmakers should consider requiring federal agencies to set aside some grant funding for high risk research. “Breakthroughs often occur as total surprises,” said Rice University professor Neal Lane. “The research that was being done may strike us as somewhat routine, somewhat dull, and suddenly there’s a surprise that comes out of the research.” The panelists also said the agencies could provide money to promising investigators with no strings attached, which is the model used by the MacArthur “genius” grants and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “We’re not going to tell you what to do with the money,” said the Hughes Institute’s Gerard Rubin of the model. “We’re betting on you as an individual, and we’re going to win or lose that bet.” Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.) said the pending re-authorization of the National Science Foundation and competitiveness legislation would offer opportunities for strengthening funding for riskier projects.

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A recurring theme at Informatics Europe’s recent European Computer Science Summit 2009, which took place Oct. 8-9 in Paris, was the concern that the European scientific community does not appreciate computing as a research discipline by itself, writes Computing Research Association (CRA) executive director Andrew Bernat. Participants said that researchers often view it merely as a tool for studying other subjects. At the meeting they proposed methods of making computer science more accessible to researchers of other disciplines. Also at the meeting, Informatics Europe announced that it is conducting a survey similar to the CRA’s Taulbee Survey, monitoring departmental evaluation methods. Computing experts worry that they will be judged by a panel with little knowledge of the discipline that will hold them to arbitrary standards. Informatics Europe will contribute its own suggestions for a panel and evaluation method. Participants generally hoped that university computing departments would not be subject to a European ranking system.

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Governments around the world have put more of their data on the Web this year than previous years, and the United States and Britain have led the way, said Sir Tim Berners-Lee in an interview at a recent symposium on the future of technology in Washington, D.C. Berners-Lee, who is currently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, is enthusiastic about having traffic, local weather, public safety, health, and other data in raw form online. People will create exciting applications once the data and online tools are available, he said. For example, a simple mash-up that combines roadway maps with bicycle accident reports could help bikers determine the most dangerous roads. “Innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make,” he said. “But the openness, transparency, and new uses of the data will make government run better, and that will make business run better as well.” With regard to any regrets about the Web, Berners-Lee said that using the double slash “//” after the “http:” in Web addresses turned out to be unnecessary.

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A cost-effective computer system for identifying card counters and detecting dealer errors has been developed by a recent graduate of the University of Dundee. The Blackjack tracking system makes use of algorithms that employ methods such as contour analysis, template, and feature matching to recognize each card as it is dealt. “Computer vision was one of the options when it came to choosing subjects for our final year, and when it came to our final project, I started to think about combining what I was learning with something I was interested in,” says Dundee graduate Kris Zutis. A live feed of a game is captured by stereo cameras, which track the game as it progresses, monitor the cards along with the player, and track the betting patterns. The algorithms analyze the correlation between the player’s betting patterns and the game card count to determine that a player is card counting and alert the casino staff. Zutis is scheduled to present a research paper on the computer vision system at the International Conference on Computer Vision Systems in Liege, Belgium. “My system needs work to be commercially viable, but the potential has been demonstrated, and hopefully appearing at the event will help generate some interest in helping me to develop it further,” he says.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) plans to build a large cloud computing test bed in an effort to determine whether cloud computing can help meet scientists’ demand for computing resources. Approximately $32 million will be spent on the Magellan project, which will combine the commercial cloud offerings of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The project also will link the 100Gbps Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) to the Argonne National and Lawrence Berkeley National laboratories to rapidly transfer data between geographically dispersed clouds. ESnet will enable DOE scientists to access the computing resources regardless of their location. As DOE scientists use the Magellan system for their computations, performance-monitoring software will be used to analyze the kinds of science applications being run on the system and how well they perform on a cloud. The researchers say the project will help provide a better understanding of cloud computing’s potential as a cost-effective and energy-efficient tool for scientific discovery. “We know that the model works well for business applications, and we are working to make it equally effective for science,” says Argonne’s Pete Beckman.

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During ACM’s recent Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Intel Labs Pittsburgh (ILP) won the best paper award for their article on Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN), a server architecture that can handle data-heavy applications with greater speed and efficiency than current systems. To create FAWN, CMU computer scientist David Anderson and colleagues collaborated with ILP to integrate netbook processors with flash memory. Flash memory works more quickly than hard disks, costs less than DRAM chips, and is the most energy efficient option available. To test the server architecture, the researchers constructed a FAWN computing cluster out of 21 nodes, each equipped with a low-cost, off-the-shelf processor and a four-gigabyte flash card. They discovered that the FAWN cluster could manage 10 to 100 times more requests than a disk-based one while using the same amount of energy. Researchers are now constructing a FAWN cluster that uses Intel’s Atom processor. “FAWN systems can’t replace all of the servers in a data center, but they work really well for key-value storage systems, which need to access relatively small bits of information quickly,” Anderson says. He says that in the future the researchers hope to use FAWN for data analysis.

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Microsoft and researchers from the University of Konstanz in Germany are collaborating to create Videomap, navigation software that incorporates videos of driving routes. The program gives drivers visual cues by highlighting landmarks and emphasizing one side of the road before a turn. Videomap uses algorithms for “turn anticipation”–essentially, the video slows before a turn and points out key images where the turn must be made. The program points out landmarks in the same way. “As we pass a landmark, the field of view will expand to encompass that landmark and create a landmark thumbnail,” says Microsoft’s Billy Chen. The image is held for a few seconds so that the driver can commit it to memory. Video speed varies depending on whether the driver wants to note landmarks or get an idea of the length of the trip. To test the system, 20 volunteers read normal driving instructions for five minutes. Then they were shown a simulation of the route and were asked several times to state where the car would turn next. The second time participants used Videomap instructions. With normal directions, the drivers were correct 60 percent of the time; with Videomap, the number rose to 80 percent. Chen calls the study “pretty conclusive,” and points out that drivers relied less on text instructions after using Videomap and most of them preferred the software. Chen plans to test participants a second time using a new video simulation to see how the program holds up in different environments. He also wants to develop the program so that users will look only at the video when it covers a landmark, rather than looking equally at both the moving map and video. University of Zurich researcher Arzu Coltekin says that Videomap could potentially be useful for bikers and pedestrians as well.

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University of California, Santa Barbara professor Jeff Dozier has received Microsoft Research’s second annual Jim Gray eScience Award. The award was created to honor the memory of the late Microsoft visionary in data-intensive computing, and Dozier was recognized because of the impact that his research in remote sensing, water resources, and climate change has had on environmental science and computer science. “Jeff Dozier’s work epitomizes what the Jim Gray eScience Award is all about … using data-intensive computing to accelerate scientific discovery and, ultimately, to help solve some of society’s greatest challenges,” said Microsoft’s Tony Hey, who presented the award during the recent 2009 eScience Workshop at Carnegie Mellon University. Dozier said he first met Gray while serving on a National Academy committee in the early 1990s. He noted that he was interested in taking advantage of large data streams back when he served as senior project scientist in the early days of NASA’s Earth Observing System. “Over the years, we had many fruitful exchanges about current technology and the likely computing future,” Dozier said.

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DC predicts that by 2013, jobs in information technology (IT) will expand by 5.8 million worldwide, and that 75,000 new businesses will be created during that time. IDC says that growth in software and cloud computing will be major factors in new business and job creation, and expects new cloud-based businesses to generate $800 billion in revenues by 2013. IDC also predicts that IT spending will increase to $1.7 trillion annually by 2013, up from $1.41 trillion in 2009, in the 52 countries covered in the report. The rate of increase in IT spending will be more than three times the expected rate of gross domestic product growth in the 52 countries. “The advantages of a growing IT sector are more extensive than the raw numbers alone suggest,” the IDC report says. “IT jobs tend to be higher skilled than most others, particularly in emerging economies, and countries with higher computerization can be more competitive in world markets.” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation founder Robert D. Atkinson says the past 20 years have shown how investments in IT innovations foster economic growth. Atkinson says that continued IT innovation and investment will help to jump-start the economy out of the current recession and will significantly contribute to job and new business creation.

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