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.

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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unanimously voted to start drafting rules to support Internet neutrality. “It’s hard to imagine anything more important to the future of the success of our economy than a healthy and vibrant Internet, and there is no question that the openness of the Internet is the secret sauce to its success,” said FCC chairman Julius Genachowski following the vote. He also noted that the FCC has a core agenda to drive investment, innovation, and opportunity in 21st century communications. In addition to providing their customers with consistent Web traffic, Internet service providers (ISPs) would need to detail their network traffic management operations to ensure no wrongdoing. The U.S. government’s previous stance on the Web regulation issue was one of non-involvement, but it changed its position as worries mounted that ISPs could begin to exhibit favoritism toward their products and services. Crafting the rules will be a long, contentious process as wireless carriers, telecommunications firms, and other industry players and participants sound off on the benefits and drawbacks. The FCC’s Democratic commissioners are vocal advocates of net neutrality rules, while the agency’s Republican commissioners argue that such regulations are unnecessary. Critics are concerned that Web regulation will have an adverse effect on innovation in the Internet sector. However, Genachowski disagrees that the rules would hamper investment in broadband networks. “I reject the notion that we must choose between open Internet rules and investment by service providers in their networks,” he said during the meeting.

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University of Edinburgh researchers used low-energy lasers to make salt crystals in gel, which could make it possible to store a terabyte of data in a space the size of a sugar cube within the next 10 years. The researchers focused two overlapping low-energy laser beams on a salt solution, which provided the exact right amount of energy to form a temporary crystal. Edinburgh professor Andy Alexander says the process could be used to improve on traditional methods of optical data storage such as CDs. In comparison to the two-dimensional surface of a CD, three-dimensional (3D) optical data storage contains far more layers, and tiny crystals could act as storage points. Information would be stored by making marks in a pattern and read using light. Alexander says that 3D, crystal-based devices could be available within 10 years and would enable users to easily store, access, and move massive amounts of data. “This research builds on a discovery that was made by accident many years ago, when it was found that light can be used to trigger crystal formation,” he says. “We have refined this technique and now we can create crystals on demand. There is much work to be done before these crystals can be used in practical applications such as optical storage, but we believe they have significant potential.”

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Susan Hockfield notes that the majority of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners for physics, chemistry, and medicine are immigrants who came to the United States as scientists or as graduate or post-doctoral students. She writes that they were drawn by the openness and prestige of the U.S. system of higher education and advanced research, but “that openness stands in sharp contrast to arcane U.S. immigration policies that discourage young scholars from settling in the U.S.” Student immigrants play a vital role in job creation, and Hockfield notes that foreign MIT graduates have started 2,340 active U.S. businesses in which more than 100,000 people are employed. She points out that U.S. immigration statutes require that students go back to their homelands after graduation and then apply for a visa if they wish to return and seek employment in the United States. “It would be hard to invent a policy more counterproductive to our national interest,” Hockfield says. She advocates the creation of a wider-ranging immigration policy that would allow foreign students who earn advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math to easily obtain legal permanent residence. Also critical is the aggressive cultivation of more domestic talent, especially Ph.D.s in the sciences, as other countries’ graduation rates are outpacing those of the United States. “To be part of [the] global creative network we must inspire more young Americans to pursue scientific careers, and we must rapidly reform U.S. immigration policies that drive away talented young scholars who would otherwise decide to live, work, and innovate here,” Hockfield concludes.

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A project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and led by University of Nottingham researchers is developing a new computerized approach to scheduling airport operations that is designed to reduce delays, speed up baggage handling, and decrease pollution. The project aims to computerize and coordinate the scheduling of take-offs, landings, gate assignments, and baggage handling. The end result will be a search engine capable of analyzing the billions of possible scheduling combinations to provide the controllers with the most efficient courses of action. Currently, these four areas are organized manually by staff members who make decisions based on observations, reports, and experience. The scheduling improvements will make flying easier for passengers and reduce pollution by minimizing the time planes spend on the ground with their engines running. The project will develop computational models for each of the four areas of operations and determine how to run those models in conjunction with each other. One of the critical issues is how long an airplane needs for preparation on the ground before it can take off. Preparation includes enough time for the safety briefing and warming the engines. Sending a plane to the runway before either of these steps has taken place will cause delays on the runway that could affect other flights.

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Peruvian and Belgian researchers have developed an open source mobile learning application that enables health-care workers to connect to the free learning platform Moodle with their iPhone or iPod. The application was tested by health-care workers engaged in 20 clinics throughout Peru. The three-month pilot program used multimedia, three-dimensional animations, group discussions, policy documents, and peer-reviewed literature. The researchers are now finalizing the code before making it available under a Create Commons GNU license. Once the application is completed, the researchers say that institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and companies will be able to use the code to develop their own mobile learning environments.
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Frank Moss, head of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says there are real opportunities in developing technology for disabled or disadvantaged people, and believes they will translate into great commercial hits. For example, MIT’s Rosalind Picard is creating a system for people with autism that can tell from a person’s head movements and facial expressions if they are confused, interested, or disagreeing. The system then feeds the information to a display in the corner of a pair of glasses. “The idea is to supply autistic people with the cues they would otherwise miss,” says Moss. Meanwhile, MIT’s Hugh Herr has designed a supportive exoskeleton that enables a person to run with the same energy they would normally use to walk. And MIT research assistant John Moore has built an artificial intelligence system that collects information from a patient and creates a report for the doctor. The patient talks to an avatar, which uses natural language processing to interpret what the patient says.
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Cornell University (CU) professor Hakim Weatherspoon and IBM researchers are studying the causes of data distortions and are developing ways for cloud computing applications to deal with them. The research involves a testbed called the Cornell NLR Rings, which sends data on loops of up to 16,000 miles around the National LambdaRail high-speed fiber-optic research network. Weatherspoon and Cornell physics post-doctoral researcher Daniel Freedman developed an apparatus that uses a very precisely modulated laser to generate packets of optical signals and to analyze what comes back with sub-picosecond accuracy. Early testing found that transmission problems show up on the uncongested LambdaRail network, meaning they also may appear on private networks used by businesses and institutions. “I have discovered that contrary to the widely held supposition that such networks are largely stable, lossless, and jitter free, these networks can be rather unstable, prone to loss, and sources of significant jitter,” Weatherspoon says.
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The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released guidelines that would allow nearly 3 million overseas and military voters to cast votes over the Internet in November. The EAC plan worries cybersecurity experts, election officials, and voting integrity advocates. They note that email messages and voting Web sites are vulnerable to interception or hacking. Congress mandated in 2009 that the EAC develop guidelines for pilot programs to aid overseas voting, including online voting. Most states seek EAC certification of voting technology, and the commission’s Jeannie Layson says “the EAC hopes that the work we do in 2010 will assist states already running pilot programs to improve services for military and overseas voters.” The majority of the 33 states that have developed pilot programs for Internet voting will let voters send completed ballots as an email attachment, while faxes, which are another approved method for sending votes, are increasingly being sent on the Web due to the growing use of voice-over-Internet phone service. Critics say the EAC is circumventing the technical board that is supposed to review new regulations and also may be violating federal law by not allowing enough time for public comment on the guidelines.
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European researchers working on the INTAMAP project have developed a statistical tool that can turn a set of point measurements into a contour map that can be published on the Web in real time. The INTAMAP project, led by University of Munster’s Edzer Pebesma, uses a process called interpolation to find the value of an environmental variable at a point on a map where there is no monitoring device. The system creates a contour map that shows what is happening between the measurement points and describes how accurate those measurements are. The open source interpolation software accepts raw data published on the Web using standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). INTAMAP analyzes the data and conforms to OGC standards to create maps automatically, display them on the Web, and update them as needed. Pebesma says the INTAMAP tools could help researchers study weather patterns, groundwater pollution, agriculture, medical imaging, and other areas where a two-dimensional picture needs to be created from a series of point readings.
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