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.
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

Cornell University computer scientists have developed a method for generating the crashing and rumbling noises of objects made from thin harmonic shells such as cymbals and garbage can lids. The method, developed by professor Doug James and graduate students Jeffrey Chadwick and Steven An, will be presented at ACM’s SIGGRAPH Asia conference, which takes Dec. 16-19 in Yokohama, Japan. When a thin-shelled object falls or is struck, the metal or plastic slightly deforms and then snaps back into place, creating a vibration. Previous methods of synthesizing these noises did not account for the coupling effect that occurred when energy transfers from one vibration to another and back again, which resulted in a clean, clear sound that is more appropriate for a bell or chime. The new method accounts for this interaction and maps how the sound waves radiate to determine how the event will sound to a listener in any particular location. The researchers say that although their method is significantly faster than existing systems, the computations for a simple demonstration still take about an hour on a laptop. However, the researchers are hopeful that the simulation process can be accelerated by making some approximations. Their research is part of a larger project to synthesize various sounds, including dripping and splashing fluids, small clattering objects, and shattering glass.

View Full Article

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

At the second annual ACM SIGGRAPH Asia conference, which takes place December 16-19 in Yokohama, Japan, computer graphics professionals and researchers will demonstrate the most recent developments in graphics. For example, Seoul National University researchers will use high-speed, high-resolution photography to reveal how water breaks into sheets and droplets as it splashes over an object. The researchers built a computer model that focuses on the interface between air and water, allowing it to simulate the complex dynamics of the interface. A team from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has developed a new take on shadow art, which presents users with a seemingly random assortment of objects that, when lit in a certain way, creates a recognizable two-dimensional (2D) shadow. The 2D shadow art uses a computer model to calculate the object shape needed to cast up to three distinct shadows simultaneously. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics say they have developed a program that makes creating reflections far easier than existing methods. Current models produce reflections by tracing the path that virtual light rays take through a model’s three-dimensional space. The Max Planck program enables users to manipulate those rays so the desired effect is created. Meanwhile, researchers at China’s Tsinghua University have developed a photo-editing program that requires users to just roughly sketch and describe images they want to combine and the system then searches through online photo libraries to find, isolate, and reproduce the desired images in a new combined image.

View Full Article

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

ACM announced that it is providing institutional library customers with advanced electronic archiving services to help preserve their electronic resources. The services, which will be provided by Portico and CLOCKSS, address the scholarly community’s need for long-term solutions for reliable, secure, and deliverable access to their growing collections of digital content. ACM is providing these services to protect the online collection of resources in its Digital Library, which is used by more than 1 million computing professionals and students around the world. “By partnering with Portico and CLOCKSS, we are able to meet a growing demand in the library community for a trusted, reliable third-party archive, and to ensure that digital collections remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students,” says ACM Group Publisher Scott Delman. “Scientific discovery and the educational process are not possible without reliable access to the accumulated scholarship of the past and secure preservation of the scholarly record, and these agreements are a clear step forward with the relationship between the ACM and the library community.” ACM hopes that the long-term digital preservation of content will make it easier for libraries to free up resources invested in print collections in favor of innovative electronic products and services. Portico preserves material through migration, which involves transitioning content from one file format to another as technology advances and file formats become obsolete. CLOCKSS uses Archive Nodes, which are stored at libraries chosen to be the custodians of the archived materials, and are located throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.

View Full Article

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

University of Washington researcher Babak Parviz has embedded nanoscale-sized circuitry into a contact lens in an effort to create a new kind of heads-up-display (HUD). The lens harvests radio waves to power a light-emitting diode (LED), which would be used to project floating images in front of a user’s eyes. Parviz says that one of the limitations of current HUDs is their limited field of view, but a contact lens could provide a much wider field of view. The circuitry for the contact lens requires 330 microwatts, but does not need a battery. Instead, a loop antenna receives power from a nearby radio source. Parviz says future version of the contact lens could harvest power from a user’s cell phone, potentially as the phone sends information to the lens. Advanced lenses also will have more pixels and an array of microlenses to focus the image so it appears suspended in front of a user’s eyes. He says the lens could be used to view subtitles when someone is speaking a foreign language, directions for an unfamiliar area, captioned photographs, or information for pilots. “A contact lens that allows virtual graphics to be seamlessly overlaid on the real world could provide a compelling augmented reality experience,” says Human Interface Technology Laboratory director Mark Billinghurst.

View Full Article

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