Bell Labs is launching Green Touch, a consortium that includes industry, academia, and government entities from around the world with the goal of making the Internet 1,000 times more energy efficient. The Green Touch initiative will offer a five-year plan to achieve this goal, including a reference network architecture and demonstrations of key components. “A thousand-fold reduction is roughly equivalent to being able to power the world’s communications networks, including the Internet, for three years using the same amount of energy that it currently takes to run them for a single day,” Bell Labs says. The 1,000-fold efficiency target is based on research that looked at the fundamental properties of communications networks and technologies such as optical wireless, electronics, possessing, routing, and architecture. Bell Labs research indicates that today’s information and communication technology (ICT) has the potential to be 10,000 times more efficient. The first consortium meeting is scheduled for February and will establish the five-year plan, first-year deliverables, and member roles and responsibilities. The exponential expansion of Internet services “leads to an exponential growth in information and communication technology energy consumption which we, as an industry, have to jointly address,” says Bell Labs’ Gee Rittenhouse.

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Cornell University researchers are developing search engine software that can learn by noticing which links are clicked on in a list of search results, and how searches are reworded when the first results are unsatisfactory. The research will lead to methods that improve search quality, especially on specialized Web sites such as scientific or legal collections. “I think there is a potential for commercial impact, improving quality and productivity,” says Cornell professor Thorsten Joachims. Joachims and fellow Cornell professor Robert Kleinberg have created an open source search engine called Osmot, which uses extensive machine learning technology. With the help of Cornell professor Geri Gay, eye-tracking studies have shown that search engines can improve by shuffling the order in which results are returned, since a result that shows up toward the bottom of a list may not be clicked on because the user does not scroll down far enough. Joachims says search engine results represent a tradeoff between displaying the best ranking based on existing data, and experimenting to be able to provide better results in subsequent searches. “The key is to balance the tradeoff between presentation and experimentation in an optimal way,” he says.

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ACM Queue readers have an opportunity to compete in an online programming competition based on the 2009 ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) Challenge problem. Working under the same rules used for the ACM ICPC Challenge, participants get to code a “player” in C++, C#, or Java, for a game called Capture, and enter it into a tournament against other teams’ players. Capture is a game in which two players, each controlling three playing pieces, compete to convert game pucks to their own color. Queue readers can use the Challenge problem distribution binary to try the game and code their own player. All interaction will occur via text protocol implemented with stdin and stdout. The deadline for the Queue ICPC Challenge is Feb. 7, 2010. Participants can try their players in preliminary matches during the one-month coding phase, ahead of the final, double-elimination competition.

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