Participation in Animation10 should top the more than 800 schools across the United Kingdom that registered for last year’s competition, according to the University of Manchester. The organizers believe the animation competition will help attract more young people to computing. Students between the ages of seven and 19 will compete to create short, animated films, using the Alice, Scratch Adobe Flash, Greenfoot, or Serif software packages. Winners will receive prizes such as laptops, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Students have until April 1, 2010, to enter the contest, and Manchester will announce the winners on May 3. “We need to encourage the brightest and the best of the young generation to engage in the challenges facing computing–not just to use computers, but to invent the next generation of hardware and software,” says Manchester’s Toby Howard. “And we hope this competition will go some way to raising the profile of computer science amongst children in a fun and exciting way.”

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New human-device interface technology will soon be available that enables users to change TV channels or move documents on a computer screen with simple hand gestures. Companies have been developing this technology for years, but only recently has a breakthrough enabled them to manufacture products to a mainstream audience. The breakthrough came from a company called GestureTek, which creates interactive displays for TV weathermen, museums, and hotels. GestureTek built three-dimensional cameras that can distinguish the hand movements of users. From a soft punch up into the air to turn on the TV, to a twist of the hand to change channels, or raising the volume with an upward pat, these simple gestures can be detected by the cameras and interpreted by specially-designed computer chips. The use of gesture technology to control electronics will get a big boost later this year when Microsoft releases a new video game system based on the technology, which currently is known as Project Natal. Unlike Nintendo’s Wii system, which uses handheld controllers to convert body movements into commands, Project Natal is based on body movements captured by digital cameras. Gesture-controlled TVs and computers also are expected later this year that will feature built-in cameras and could ultimately make many touch-screen controls obsolete.

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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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Researchers from Motorola, BT, and Intel are developing ways to combine social networking technology with TV viewing. The goal is to get as close as possible to physically sharing the viewing experience. “The one huge key is trying to make it not like instant messaging or a PC on your TV, but like it’s sharing an experience,” says Motorola Social Media Research Lab’s Crysta Metcalf. “What we’re working on right now is a version in which people can see what their friends are watching–not Facebook friends, but people you’re close to and would really want to watch TV with.” The popularity of social networks has made this idea much more realistic. “It’s very clear that social networking will become part of the TV viewing experience,” says Edelman Digital’s Steve Rubel. Several startup companies also are designing new technologies aimed at bridging the gap between social networks and TV. For example, Boxee makes software that enables the user to easily access Internet video content, such as YouTube videos, on TVs. Meanwhile, Motorola researchers are experimenting with software that would make smartphones the interface between users and their TVs. Both BT and Motorola are in the advanced stages of testing and claim that the first fully integrated social TV system will be available to consumers sometime this year.

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European researchers are working to create more effective hybrid control systems known as networked embedded systems. Starting in 2004, a European Union-funded project called the Hycon Network of Excellence began “concentrating on the use of advanced automatic control methods to make networked embedded systems fulfill their promise.” The goal was to create hybrid systems in which physical and computational processes mesh to reshape the way health care, transportation, personal spaces, and environmental problems are handled, says project coordinator Francoise Lamnabhi-Lagarrigue. The Hycon team first developed solutions in the area of automatic control and deployed them in real situations for testing. One test involved an automatic refrigeration system for supermarkets, which needed to maintain a steady temperature in the freezers while the external temperature fluctuated throughout the day and night as customers opened and closed the doors and removed products. Other tests were conducted in a solar air-conditioning plant, a sugar-processing plant, a mining and smelting company, and a power station. The Hycon project, which ended in 2009, laid the foundation for the European Embedded Control Institute, which will become a worldwide center for hybrid systems research.

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In Malaysia, women make up between 50 and 60 percent of the computer industry’s employees and many of them hold management positions. Computing and programming are considered “women-friendly” professions because men do not see indoor work as masculine and much of Malaysian society stigmatizes women who work outdoors as lower class. “In the U.S., technology and masculinity are very connected, which is not the case in Malaysia,” says Lulea University of Technology professor Ulf Mellstrom. Women initially left their villages to seek jobs in the electronics industry. Those jobs were replaced with technological jobs, which enabled newly educated women to assume positions of authority. Mellstrom says the transition was facilitated for women in computer science by role models from the electronics industry. He says the critical mass of women in the computer sciences has created “a symbolic space” that continues to provide new role models for other women.

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European researchers have devised a new software development paradigm using an assembly line-style development process. “Think of this as a sandwich shop, where you have different products coming from a product line that shares ingredients, which customers can pick and choose,” says AMPLE project coordinator and Lancaster University professor Awais Rashid. The asset base features modular software elements that establish a Software Product Line (SPL), within which is managed the entire software lifecycle from design and development through deployment and maintenance. The AMPLE team created analyses tools that guide users on system development. Rashid says the results of the AMPLE tool analyses match those of human software experts, but the AMPLE software is capable of much faster assessment and can be used by non-experts. Other tools in the chain let companies generate their own modular software components, to put them together for a specific job, and to test and validate the resulting application. Another key element is the maintenance, repair, and modification of both the SPL and the software it creates.

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More than a decade after it was first recommended, a trust that would function as a venture capital fund to research learning technology has finally achieved congressional appropriation through the U.S. Department of Education. The National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies will be introduced on Jan. 25 and could be awarding grants by the fall. The center’s co-chairmen will include former U.S. Federal Communication Commission chairman Newton N. Minow, former NBC News and PBS president Lawrence K. Grossman, and former American Arts Alliance director Anne G. Murphy. “It’s time that education had the equivalent of what the National Science Foundation does for science, Darpa [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] does for the national defense, and what N.I.H. [the National Institutes of Health] does for health,” Grossman says. The group constructed three prototypes to gain support for the project–an educational video game for biology students, a museum game, and a computer simulation to train firefighters in high-rise conflagrations.

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