Tom Mitchell, head of Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department, says that advances in machine learning could bring about a transformation in psychology and neuroscience. Mitchell says that his group has trained an algorithm to study functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of a person’s brain activity and determine what object they are thinking about. “We can look inside your brain when you see the color red, and we can look inside my brain when I see the color red, and we can ask, ‘Is it or is it not the same pattern of neural activity?’ ” he notes. Mitchell speculates that people could conceivably be networked to exchange information so that one person can tell what the other is thinking. He observes that a number of researchers are developing brain-computer interfaces that can enable the decoding of a person’s thoughts. This could be particularly useful for “locked in” patients who are speech- and mobility-disabled.
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ACM has named Cornell University professor Jon Kleinberg the winner of the 2008 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences. ACM and the Infosys Foundation created the award in 2007 to recognize personal contributions by young scientists and system developers to a contemporary innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent achievements in the computing field. Kleinberg’s models show how information is organized on the Web, how it spreads through large social networks, and how the structure of these networks leads to the six degrees of separation phenomenon. “With his innovative models and algorithms, he has broadened the scope of computer science to extend its influence to the burgeoning world of the Web and the social connections it enables,” says ACM President Dame Wendy Hall. “We are fortunate to have the benefit of his profound insights into the link between computer network structure and information that has transformed the way information is retrieved and shared online.” ACM will present Kleinberg with the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 27 in San Diego, Calif. Financial support for the $150,000 award is provided by an endowment from the Infosys Foundation.
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Florida State University (FSU) researchers have discovered four crystals that possess properties which could lead to the development of a new generation of computer chips and other information storage devices. “We identified these four crystals as ‘multiferroic,’ meaning that they are simultaneously ferromagnetic and ferroelectric in nature when cooled to a specific temperature,” says FSU professor Naresh Dalal. Multiferroic crystals could be used to create high-powered computer memories that could hold far more information than is currently possible, says FSU professor Sir Harold Kroto. “Theoretically, it might be possible to design devices that are much smaller and faster than the ones we use today to store and transmit data,” Kroto says. The researchers say that electronic devices using multiferroic crystals would have far less environmental impact than devices used today. “The four new multiferroic crystals that we have identified all substitute other, less toxic metals for lead, which is a potent neurotoxin,” Dalal says.
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The United States is engaged in an international race to develop both cyberweapons and cyberdefenses. Thousands of daily attacks on federal and private computer systems in the United States, some malicious and some testing for weak points in the U.S.’s firewalls, have prompted the Obama administration to review the nation’s strategy. Efforts include developing a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future to simulate what would be needed for the country’s enemies to shut down power stations, telecommunications, and aviation systems. Obama is expected to propose a significantly larger cyberdefensive effort, including the expansion of a $17 billion, five-year program approved by Congress last year, as well as an end to the bureaucratic battle over who is responsible for defending the country’s cyberinfrastructure. However, Obama is not expected to discuss the U.S.’s cyberoffensive capabilities, which has been a major investment area for the nation’s intelligence agencies, as many of these cyberweapons remain classified. The White House declined to comment on whether Obama supports or opposes the use of U.S. cyberweapons. Some exotic cyberweapons under consideration would enable a military programmer to enter a computer server in Russia or China and destroy a botnet, or activate malicious code that is secretly embedded on computer chips when manufactured, enabling the U.S. to take control of an enemy’s computer system.
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In a recent speech before the members of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. President Barack Obama said the United States should invest 3 percent or more of its annual gross domestic product (GDP) in basic and applied scientific research funding. A 3 percent investment would represent the largest investment in U.S. history, an even larger share of the GDP than the U.S. invested during the space race of the 1950s and 1960s. Obama said the pursuit of discovery a half century ago fueled the U.S.’s prosperity and success, and that this new commitment will fuel the nation’s success for another 50 years. Obama presented a wish list for the future, including educational software as effective as personal tutors, advanced prosthetics that could enable users to play the piano, and an expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge. Obama plans to finish the 10-year doubling of the budgets for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, which would add $42.6 billion to the budgets for these agencies between 2009 and 2016. Obama also wants to launch the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a new DOE organization, and a joint initiative by the DOE and NSF that would inspire tens of thousands of U.S. students to pursue careers in science, engineering, and entrepreneurship in clean-energy programs. Obama also used the speech to name the members of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, which will include Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft’s chief research and strategy office Craig Mundie.
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European researchers working on the HEALTH OPTIMUM project are using telemedicine technology to enhance healthcare across Europe while lowering its cost. “We set out to prove the sustainability of telemedical services from an organizational and economic point of view,” says HEALTH OPTIMUM project coordinator Claudio Dario. “In our two years of market validation, we found that telemedicine not only gave advantages from an economic point of view, but was very useful for the needs of patients.” For example, Dario says that before the project most head-trauma patients and possible brain-injury patients were transported by ambulance or helicopter to a neurosurgical center, but once diagnosed many patients did not need the center’s specialized care. The HEALTH OPTIMUM project restructured the entire process. An IT infrastructure was established to support remote, full-service neurosurgical consultation using a hub-and-spoke model. Medical recordkeeping practices also were reorganized to enable computed axial tomography images and lab results to move smoothly and securely between specialized centers and peripheral clinics. The new infrastructure means patients no longer need to be transported from an accident site or emergency call location to a specialized center, but instead can be brought to a regular emergency room, where the patient can be stabilized and tests and other medical data can be digitally sent to the specialists, who can decide if the patient needs specialized care. “Our analysis showed that up to 80 percent of transportations have been avoided by this system, achieving a high level of savings,” Dario says. “In addition, by speeding up expert assessment, telemedicine saves lives.”
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Scientists at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence are working on Nepomuk, a project to give computers a human-like capacity to remember. Nepomuk has developed a process that uses semantic technology to support personal information management. Data contained in the traditional computer folder structure are automatically transferred to a personal information model. For example, emails are linked with contact data and images on the hard disk. The resulting connections created between information and concepts are used for storage and search features. For storage, content analysis algorithms create proposals on how new documents should be added to the existing system. The system is similar to a human’s ability to remember the subject of a speech, as well as the face of the person who gave the speech, but not necessarily the person’s name. The brain connects individual elements that it perceives at the same time, and makes associations, such as between conference proceedings and speakers or dates, for example. The new system could help a user find documents related to a subject if they only have a picture of a contact person related to that subject. The semantic network could find the correct documents using the connections from the picture.
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Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin announced that the government would spend more than a tenth of its budget on science and innovation this year. “We have assigned about 1.1 trillion rubles ($36.8 billion), or more than 10 percent of the federal budget, for fundamental and applied sciences, higher education, high-tech medicine, and specialized federal programs,” Putin said. The government increased its science and innovation spending by more than 300 billion rubles in 2009 compared to 2008. The new effort to promote science and innovation includes requiring competition for scientific projects and giving preference to innovative options when the state buys products and services. Separately, Putin announced that Russia has allocated 1.1 billion rubles ($37 million) to develop supercomputer technologies in Russia. Last year Russia launched its fastest supercomputer, Lomonosov, at the Moscow State University’s Research Computing Center. Lomonosov has a peak speed of 420 teraflops and is ranked as the 12th fastest computer in the world.

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Microsoft’s joint venture with a supercomputing center in Barcelona aims to develop a processor that will scale from a data center server to a smartphone, which would save energy and require less space. The researchers hope to apply vector processing technology to commercial applications such as making data centers and mobile handsets run more efficiently. The goal of the energy-efficient, composable vector processor project is to build a device that uses grid computing techniques to analyze multiple streams of data in parallel, and for the device to reconfigure itself on the fly in response to the workload it receives, say Microsoft researchers Timothy Hayes and Oscar Palomar. The technique uses some of the concepts of reduced instruction set computing, as well as new programming so that a single instruction can initiate an array of complex processes. The researchers also are working on scheduling algorithms to allocate work efficiently and to accurately recombine results from processes.
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Yale University researchers have described why computers tend to malfunction more than living organisms by analyzing the control networks in both an E-coli bacterium and the Linux operating system. Both systems are arranged in hierarchies, but with some key differences in how they achieve operational efficiencies. The molecular networks in the bacteria are arranged in a pyramid, with a limited number of master regulator genes at the top that control a wide base of specialized functions. The Linux operating system is set up more like an inverted pyramid, with many different top-level routines controlling a few generic functions at the bottom. This organization arises because software engineers tend to save money and time by building on existing routines rather than starting systems from scratch, says Yale professor Mark Gerstein. “But it also means the operating system is more vulnerable to breakdowns because even simple updates to a generic routine can be very disruptive,” Gerstein says.
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