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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The European Union (EU) has announced the finalization of the EURACE project, which used supercomputing technology to develop advanced financial models designed to help predict and prevent future financial disasters. The three-year EURACE project is based on agent technology known as Flexible Large-scale Agent Modeling Environment (FLAME). The EU says the software stimulates the interactions between different economic actors, such as households and companies, banks and borrowers, and employers and job seekers. “The results of this research project will complement traditional economic statistics and assumptions about how economic actors react by enabling better testing of a policy’s effects on people, while still on the drawing board,” says EU commissioner Viviane Reding. The EU believes that an agent-based approach to financial modeling could create realistic simulations that would be more useful for preventing future recessions. “Agent based modeling is one of the emergent branches of [artificial intelligence] which best demonstrates complex, social behavior of different communities living together in real-world scenarios,” according to the EU. “The ideology allows agents, representing individuals or groups, to be put into a simulated environment where their individual interactions can then be studied more closely.” The project’s FLAME agent technology was developed by the University of Sheffield and has been used in a variety of projects, including the Epitheliome Project for developing various models of skin.

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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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The number of foreign scientists that earned Ph.D.s in science and engineering in the United States continues to grow, despite a weak job market and increased opportunities at home, according to a study by the U.S. Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. The study found that 62 percent of foreigners who earned Ph.D.s in science and engineering at U.S. universities in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007, and 60 percent of those receiving Ph.D.s in 1997 were still in the U.S. a decade later. Foreign scientists account for about 40 percent of all science and engineering Ph.D. holders in the U.S. The Energy Department’s Michael Finn says that Ph.D. graduates in computer science and the physical sciences are the most likely to stay in the United States after graduation. However, other analysts say that foreign scientists are more likely to return home, especially due to the current job market. “I have no doubt that the 2009 data will show a dramatic shift,” says Duke University professor Vivek Wadwha. According to a recent National Science Foundation survey, there were 158,430 foreign science and engineering students enrolled in U.S. graduate programs in April 2009, up eight percent from the previous year.

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Researchers at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have incorporated cloud computing technology into Dimmunix, a new tool designed to make programs immune to future recurrences of bugs. When a bug manifests in software for the first time, Dimmunix saves its signature, then observes the response of the computer and records a trace, which enables the tool to recognize the bug the next time. When the bug appears again, Dimmunix automatically changes the execution of the program so it continues to run smoothly. The use of cloud computing technology means the tool can protect an entire network of computers from bugs, even in an environment such as the Internet. EPFL professor George Candea compares Dimmunix to the way the human immune system develops antibodies after an infection. “Subsequently, when the immune system encounters the same pathogen once again, the body recognizes it and knows how to effectively fight the illness,” he says. Dimmunix is available online for free.

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The neutron transport code UNIC being developed by a team of computer scientists and nuclear engineers at Argonne National Laboratory enables researchers to acquire a fine-grained model of a nuclear reactor core for the first time. “The UNIC code is intended to reduce the uncertainties and biases in reactor design calculations by progressively replacing existing multilevel averaging techniques with more direct solution methods based on explicit reactor geometries,” says Argonne scientist Andrew Siegel. The Argonne researchers have executed detailed simulations of the Zero Power Reactor experiments on as many as 163,840 processor cores of the Blue Gene/P and 222,912 processor cores of the Cray XT5 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as on 294,912 processor cores of a Blue Gene/P at Germany’s Julich Supercomputing Center. UNIC has enabled researchers to successfully represent the details of the full reactor geometry as well as compare the results directly with the experimental data. The scientists say the code could play an essential role in the development of safe, affordable, and green nuclear reactors. UNIC gives researchers a better understanding of the behavior of existing reactor systems and also allows them to anticipate the behavior of many newly proposed systems with untested design characteristics.

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The Perception-on-Purpose (POP) project is an effort by European researchers to develop technology enabling a robot to integrate visual and audio data to facilitate purposeful perception. “It is not that easy to decide what is foreground and what is background using sound alone, but by combining the two modalities–sound and vision–it becomes much easier,” says project coordinator Radu Horaud. “If you are able to locate 10 sound sources in 10 different directions, but if in one of these directions you see a face, then you can much more easily concentrate on that sound and throw out the other ones.” The researchers followed this strategy in their development of algorithms that allowed their robot, Popeye, to reliably identify speakers. “Most often, sound research is conducted in specialized labs, with arrays of microphones and a very controlled acoustic environment,” Horaud says. “But we integrated our two microphones and two cameras onto the head of our Popeye. The idea is to have an agent-centered cognitive system.” Horaud believes there is a link between multi-sensory perception and cognition, and that some modern artificial intelligence applications are constrained by their inability to learn from their environment.

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Researchers at Queen’s University are calling their new technology the future of board games. The technology, which looks like a set of white, cardboard hexagrams from the game board of Settlers of Catan, enables people to play electronic games in a traditional setting around a table, while enhancing game controls. Queen’s Human Media Lab (HML) professor Roel Vertegaal worked with graduate student Mike Rooke to develop the technology, which makes use of an overhead camera and a projector that allows designers to turn each piece of cardboard into a minicomputer capable of displaying video images. Vertegaal says such board games will become practical with the emergence of thin-film organic light-emitting diode screens. Meanwhile, Vertegaal also is working with HML student Eric Akaoka on research into DisplayObjects, which would allow any object to become a computer. “In the near future, a computer will have any shape or form, and iPhone-like computer displays will start appearing on any product,” he says. “These organic user interfaces will be embedded in real-world interactions.”

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