Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications researchers have experimented with using visible light from commercial light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to transmit data wirelessly at speeds of up to 230 Mbit per sec. One advantage to using light to carry data over Wi-Fi or another system is that the lights are already in the room, says Fraunhofer researcher Jelena Vucic. A signal from a LED is generated by slightly flickering all the lights in unison at a rate millions of times faster than the human eye can detect. Although the bandwidth for commercial LEDs is limited to a few megahertz, Vucic’s team increased the amount tenfold by filtering out all the light except for the blue part of the spectrum. The researchers say the data rate could be doubled with some modulation adjustments.
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U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) programs that assist specific racial and ethnic groups would be consolidated under a new proposal from the agency. According to the Obama administration’s budget recommendations for the 2011 fiscal year, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program, the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, and the Tribal Colleges and Universities Program would be replaced by the $103 million Comprehensive Broadening Participation of Undergraduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program, which would be allotted 14 percent more in funding than the three programs currently receive. NSF director Arden L. Bement Jr. says the number of minority students majoring in the sciences was not increasing fast enough under the old approach. “Linear growth is no longer acceptable, so we have to go into geometric growth,” Bement says.
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Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) researchers recently performed a multi-part analysis of Twitter and concluded that it is a surprisingly interconnected network and an effective way to filter information. On the MSN messenger network, the median degree of separation is six. However, on Twitter, the average path length is 4.12. Because 94 percent of Twitter users are fewer than five degrees of separation from one another, it is likely that the distance between any random user and a celebrity is even shorter on Twitter than in real life. “No matter how many followers a user has, the tweet is likely to reach [an audience of a certain size] once the user’s tweet starts spreading via retweets,” write the KAIST researchers. Earlier Twitter studies suggested that the best way to get noticed was to tweet at certain times of day. “Half of retweeting occurs within an hour, and 75 percent under a day,” according to the researchers. “What is interesting is from the second hop and on is that the retweets two hops or more away from the source are much more responsive and basically occur back to back up to five hops away.”
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An upcoming President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report will address the issue of improving pre-college math and science education in the United States. Its recommendations could include grants, a new federal agency, and increasing funding to programs that let students do science themselves, says University of Maryland’s James Gates. Gates is co-chair of a PCAST working group on science, math, engineering, and technology education. Gates says the National Science Foundation, the National Defense Education Act, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have helped foster technology innovation. However, he says there is “nothing like DARPA in the education system” and something like that needs to be directed at education. Another step the federal government could take is to find ways to jumpstart market-based solutions, according to Gates. He notes that there is a change taking place in the education system, as 46 governors have agreed to sign a common core of standards in what could be a unitary thesis that will control what happens in the schools.
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ACM and several computing community partners commend the U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of a resolution to improve the visibility of computer science as a transforming industry that propels technology innovation and improves economic productivity. The House resolution designates the week of December 7 as “National Computer Science Education Week” and calls on educators and policymakers to improve computer science learning at all education levels and to encourage increased participation in computer science. ACM is working with Microsoft, Google, Intel, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), and the Computing Research Association to improve awareness that computer science education is a national priority. “National Computer Science Education Week will help us draw attention to the need for an educational system that values computer science as a discipline and provides students with critical thinking skills and career opportunities,” says ACM Education Policy Committee chair Bobby Schnabel, dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University. CSTA executive director Chris Stephenson notes the vital role that computing plays in people’s daily lives, and stresses the urgency of building a strong computing workforce. “We need to expose K-12 students to computer science concepts to help them gain critical 21st century skills and knowledge, and we’re grateful for Congress’ recognition of this need as a national priority,” Stephenson says. NCWIT CEO and co-founder Lucy Sanders says the annual commemoration of National Computer Science Education Week can strengthen efforts to inform students, teachers, parents, and the public about how computer science enables innovation in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields and creates economic opportunities.

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A coalition of seven academic institutions will use a $12.2 million National Institutes of Health grant to develop VIVOweb, a Facebook-style professional networking system for biomedical researchers across the United States. Participating institutions say VIVOweb will make it easier for scientists to find one another, ultimately enabling them to improve their ongoing studies and create long-term collaborative projects that could result in new discoveries. University of Florida professor Michael Conlon, the principal investigator on the project, says scientists often have difficulty finding each other, and currently the best way to connect with others performing similar research is through lists of publications. Dean Krafft, who is leading the project at Cornell University, says VIVOweb will use the Semantic Web to make information more available to scientists. The public also will be able to access the site, but some information will be available only to scientists. The open source software developed by Cornell for VIVOweb collects the facts a person is looking for and assembles a unique Web page just for that search. Participants expect to have VIVOweb connected across the country within two years, and eventually plan to connect scientists from around the world.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s “Adaptive Use Musical Instruments for the Physically Challenged” program enables students with severe physical disabilities to make music by just moving their heads. The system uses a digital video camera to track a student’s head movements on a computer screen and then translates the movements into piano scales or drum beats. Zane Van Dusen, a RPI undergraduate student in computer science and electronic media arts and communication, developed the idea of using a digital video camera to track the user’s head. A cursor is digitally placed on a portion of the student’s head, usually the tip of the nose, to follow the user’s movements. As the cursor moves, sounds are created based on the user’s movements. Moving the head completely in one direction will create a scale climb on the piano or a quick series of drum beats or a drum roll. The project’s ultimate goal is to eventually enable students to compose their own pieces to help students learn the creative process and build communication skills. “The client or patient doesn’t have to be a musician to participate,” says the American Musical Therapy Association’s Al Bumanis. “The goal is not usually a performance, it’s increasing communication skills, understanding, relearning lost skills.”
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The number of doctorates awarded in science and engineering (S&E) fields has risen for the fourth consecutive year, according to the National Science Foundation. Last year the United States produced 29,854 doctorate degrees in S&E fields, an increase of nearly 7 percent from the previous year. Computer science doctorates led the way with a 28 percent increase to 1,452 degrees, following a double-digit increase in CS doctorates from the previous year. CS doctorates are up 79 percent since 2002 and now represent a considerable share of not only S&E doctorates but all doctorate degrees. Non-U.S. citizens have been key to the growth in CS doctorate degree production. In the mid-to-late 1990s permanent or temporary visa holders received about half of CS doctorates, but last year they accounted for 61 percent. CS doctorates to U.S. citizens rose 42 percent from 2002 to 2006, but jumped 115 percent for non-U.S. citizens over the same period.
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The Obama administration has declassified part of its plan to improve the security of cyberspace in an attempt to cultivate greater collaboration between government and civilian groups. More cooperation between the private sector and the U.S. National Security Agency is the centerpiece of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). The declassified abstract of the plan reveals that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will operate a new security system, called Einstein 3, that analyzes email and other data traffic into and out of federal networks. CNCI also urges merged oversight of federal spending on research and development in cybersecurity, with a particular focus on “leap-ahead” technology. Although the initiative acknowledges that traditional security approaches “have not achieved the level of security needed,” it says the federal government is now outlining “grand challenges” for the research community to help solve the most difficult problems.
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Hewlett-Packard (HP) Labs announced the opening of a new research and development (R&D) center in Singapore. The Singapore lab will work with HP labs in Bristol, England, and Palo Alto, Calif., on research in cloud computing and software development. The Singapore lab is located in a government-owned research facility called Fusionopolis. HP says the lab in part will work to meet the needs of telecom companies. According to a recent National Science Foundation report, Singapore, China, and South Korea are the fastest growing countries for overseas R&D by U.S. companies. The Singapore lab is part of HP’s renewed effort to generate cutting-edge technology developments from its scientific centers in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. HP Labs director Prith Banerjee has urged labs in China, England, India, Israel, and Russia to work with each other to produce more inventions that can be turned into revenue-producing technology for the company.
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