ACM’s International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), sponsored by IBM, challenges students to solve real-world problems using open technology and advanced computing methods in a very short time period. Last year’s competition attracted tens of thousands of students on 7,100 teams from universities in about 90 countries. “The world faces many daunting problems such as pandemic diseases, climate change, water pollution, food safety, finite energy resources, as well as issues with urban management and mass transportation,” says IBM’s Doug Heintzman, ICPC’s sponsorship executive. “At IBM, we believe we have a responsibility to help develop the next generation of technology leaders, help them to understand and tackle these complex business issues.” ICPC executive director Bill Poucher, a professor at Baylor University, says the contest gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their talents and present themselves to top recruiters. “The contest is also a forum for advancing technology in an effort to better accommodate the growing needs of the future,” Poucher says. “At the same time, the competition is a chance for students of similar interests to exchange ideas and peer educate.” Following the regional contests currently underway, finalists will attend the World Finals, which will take place in February 2010 in Harbin, China, hosted by Harbin Engineering University.

View Full Article

For More Information:http://www.cpccci.com

Researchers in Barcelona are developing virtual reality spaces that incorporate touch-sensitive tiles and immersive animations. Pompeu Fabra University professor Paul Verschure says his research team has built an experience-induction machine as part of the PRESENCCIA project to understand how humans can exist in physical and virtual environments simultaneously. One of the project’s major challenges was creating a credible virtual environment, which required the researchers to understand how people’s brains construct a vision of the world. “Imagine what we see is sort of rapidly jumping about–that would not be a believable experience for us,” Verschure says. “So that means one thing we have really tried to engineer here also from a psychological perspective is how do I feed this continuity of expectations that our brain is generating about the world.” The researchers say the ultimate goal is to advance human-computer interaction beyond the traditional keyboard, screen, and mouse. “What we’re trying to do is to understand why people behave in a more or less natural way in a virtual reality,” says PRESENCCIA project coordinator Mel Slater. Petar Horki, a student at Austria’s Graz University of Technology, is using PRESENCCIA concepts to create a virtual reality system that uses mind control, allowing the user to simply think about an action to perform that action in the virtual world. “Actually, I’m not doing anything, I’m just imagining I’m doing a brisk foot movement, and by this imagination I can move at least in this virtual room,” Horki says.

View Full Article

For More Information:http://www.cpccci.com

A scan of the Internet by Columbia University researchers searching for vulnerable embedded devices has found that nearly 21,000 routers, Webcams, and VoIP products are vulnerable to remote attack. They say there could be as many as 6 million vulnerable devices on the Internet. The scan also found that the devices’ administrative interfaces are viewable from anywhere on the Internet, and their owners have not changed the devices’ passwords from the manufacturer’s default. The study scanned networks belonging to the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in North America, Europe, and Asia, and vulnerable devices were found in significant numbers in all parts of the world. Since starting the project last December, the researchers have scanned 130 million IP addresses and found nearly 300,000 devices whose administrative interfaces were remotely accessible from anywhere on the Internet. Devices with default passwords are most vulnerable, but others are theoretically vulnerable to brute-force password-cracking attacks. The researchers have provided ISPs with their findings, but Columbia professor Salvatore Stolfo says product manufacturers are the real culprits. He says that they need to hide their administrative interfaces by default and give customers clear instructions on how to alter the configuration to protect themselves. Stolfo also says that vendors should be more vocal in encouraging customers to change default passwords.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

The Perception-on-Purpose (POP) project is an effort by European researchers to develop technology enabling a robot to integrate visual and audio data to facilitate purposeful perception. “It is not that easy to decide what is foreground and what is background using sound alone, but by combining the two modalities–sound and vision–it becomes much easier,” says project coordinator Radu Horaud. “If you are able to locate 10 sound sources in 10 different directions, but if in one of these directions you see a face, then you can much more easily concentrate on that sound and throw out the other ones.” The researchers followed this strategy in their development of algorithms that allowed their robot, Popeye, to reliably identify speakers. “Most often, sound research is conducted in specialized labs, with arrays of microphones and a very controlled acoustic environment,” Horaud says. “But we integrated our two microphones and two cameras onto the head of our Popeye. The idea is to have an agent-centered cognitive system.” Horaud believes there is a link between multi-sensory perception and cognition, and that some modern artificial intelligence applications are constrained by their inability to learn from their environment.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

The computer industry had an opportunity to learn about the technical details of Google’s infrastructure during LADIS 2009, ACM’s recent SIGOPS International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware. Jeff Dean, a Google engineer who was one of the keynote speakers, also talked about Spanner, a new storage and computation system for automating the management of services across multiple data centers. Spanner, which will have a scale of 1 million to 10 million servers in the future, would be capable of automatically allocating resources across “entire fleets of machines,” Dean says. The goal will be “automatic, dynamic, worldwide placement of data and computation to minimize latency or cost.” Spanner also would offer a cost management strategy for addressing regional differences in bandwidth and power costs. Google would have energy management opportunities because Spanner can seamlessly shift workloads between data centers. Automated capacity management also would enable Google to route around failures or data center downtime as well as plan more energy-efficient facilities.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

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.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

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.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Researchers at the Chinese Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) have built a supercomputer using only home-grown microprocessors. The supercomputer, known as the Dawning 6000, will run Linux and will be completed by mid 2010 at the latest, says ICT’s Weiwu Hu. The Dawning 6000 is part of ICT’s Loongson family of computers, which all will use chips based on the MIPS instruction set. The new supercomputer uses Loongson 3 chips in clusters of up to 16 cores. “This is a very high-performance MIPS architecture where, when it’s run in a cluster configuration, it becomes very powerful,” says MIPS Technologies’ Art Swift. Some analysts estimate this configuration could require as few as 782 16-core chips. The main differences between the Loongson 3 chip and earlier versions is it includes hardware translation of x86 instructions and it uses multiple cores, each capable of processing commands independently. One component not included in the Loongson 3 is multithreading, which allows a single core to execute multiple instructions simultaneously, and is included in some Intel and Sun chips. The Loongson 3 could be used in everything from desktop computers to set-top boxes.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

A team at the University of Southampton is working on a toolbar that promises to make the Web more accessible. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) TechDis toolbar is designed to read text aloud and check spelling. It also offers a dictionary, text enlargement, color, and font changes. Moreover, users do not need specially installed assistive technologies to use the JISC TechDis toolbar with Web services such as wikis, blogs, social networks, and Twitter. “The toolbar, which is quick and easy to install, will make Web sites a lot easier for people to use,” says toolbar developer Sebastian Skuse. “For example, a visually impaired user can switch any Web page into a high contrast mode, increase the text size, or have the page read to them.” The team will now pursue beta testing of the toolbar, which can be downloaded for free and works with any platform. Skuse says the team also is considering extending the toolbar for use on mobile devices.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

A consortium of research institutes has developed network-centric middleware for group communications and resource sharing across heterogeneous embedded systems (MORE), new middleware that is applicable to the entire spectrum of wireless standards. MORE was designed to make network creation quicker and easier, and also enables the efficiency of many types of machinery and systems to be constantly monitored. While other middleware platforms aim to simplify one area of wireless technology, MORE tries to unify all approaches, says project coordinator Stefan Michaelis. MORE is designed to deal with the limitations of embedded systems, such as wireless sensors. These sensors are often bogged down by Web services based on service-oriented architecture protocol (SOAP). MORE transcodes SOAP messages into purged binary messages, which Michaelis says greatly reduces the support data required for communication.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com