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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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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The computer industry had an opportunity to learn about the technical details of Google’s infrastructure during LADIS 2009, ACM’s recent SIGOPS International Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware. Jeff Dean, a Google engineer who was one of the keynote speakers, also talked about Spanner, a new storage and computation system for automating the management of services across multiple data centers. Spanner, which will have a scale of 1 million to 10 million servers in the future, would be capable of automatically allocating resources across “entire fleets of machines,” Dean says. The goal will be “automatic, dynamic, worldwide placement of data and computation to minimize latency or cost.” Spanner also would offer a cost management strategy for addressing regional differences in bandwidth and power costs. Google would have energy management opportunities because Spanner can seamlessly shift workloads between data centers. Automated capacity management also would enable Google to route around failures or data center downtime as well as plan more energy-efficient facilities.

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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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Studies done at Microsoft Research are using electroencephalograph (EEG) measurements to read users’ minds in order to help tag online images. The researchers say the mind-reading technique is the first step toward a hybrid human-computer data analysis system. The manual process for tagging images is often tedious and repetitive, but with the new method of EEG tagging, workers may be able to perform other tasks during the tagging process. Computers can recognize shapes and movements very well, but they have a harder time with categorizing objects in human terms, says Microsoft Research’s Desney Tan. During testing, researchers could determine if the subject was looking at a face, an animal, or an inanimate object with good results. The researchers found that no improvement was seen if the viewer was given more than half a second to look at each image. This leads researchers to think images could be displayed at that speed with no loss of accuracy.

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Microsoft and researchers from the University of Konstanz in Germany are collaborating to create Videomap, navigation software that incorporates videos of driving routes. The program gives drivers visual cues by highlighting landmarks and emphasizing one side of the road before a turn. Videomap uses algorithms for “turn anticipation”–essentially, the video slows before a turn and points out key images where the turn must be made. The program points out landmarks in the same way. “As we pass a landmark, the field of view will expand to encompass that landmark and create a landmark thumbnail,” says Microsoft’s Billy Chen. The image is held for a few seconds so that the driver can commit it to memory. Video speed varies depending on whether the driver wants to note landmarks or get an idea of the length of the trip. To test the system, 20 volunteers read normal driving instructions for five minutes. Then they were shown a simulation of the route and were asked several times to state where the car would turn next. The second time participants used Videomap instructions. With normal directions, the drivers were correct 60 percent of the time; with Videomap, the number rose to 80 percent. Chen calls the study “pretty conclusive,” and points out that drivers relied less on text instructions after using Videomap and most of them preferred the software. Chen plans to test participants a second time using a new video simulation to see how the program holds up in different environments. He also wants to develop the program so that users will look only at the video when it covers a landmark, rather than looking equally at both the moving map and video. University of Zurich researcher Arzu Coltekin says that Videomap could potentially be useful for bikers and pedestrians as well.

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University of California, Santa Barbara professor Jeff Dozier has received Microsoft Research’s second annual Jim Gray eScience Award. The award was created to honor the memory of the late Microsoft visionary in data-intensive computing, and Dozier was recognized because of the impact that his research in remote sensing, water resources, and climate change has had on environmental science and computer science. “Jeff Dozier’s work epitomizes what the Jim Gray eScience Award is all about … using data-intensive computing to accelerate scientific discovery and, ultimately, to help solve some of society’s greatest challenges,” said Microsoft’s Tony Hey, who presented the award during the recent 2009 eScience Workshop at Carnegie Mellon University. Dozier said he first met Gray while serving on a National Academy committee in the early 1990s. He noted that he was interested in taking advantage of large data streams back when he served as senior project scientist in the early days of NASA’s Earth Observing System. “Over the years, we had many fruitful exchanges about current technology and the likely computing future,” Dozier said.

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DC predicts that by 2013, jobs in information technology (IT) will expand by 5.8 million worldwide, and that 75,000 new businesses will be created during that time. IDC says that growth in software and cloud computing will be major factors in new business and job creation, and expects new cloud-based businesses to generate $800 billion in revenues by 2013. IDC also predicts that IT spending will increase to $1.7 trillion annually by 2013, up from $1.41 trillion in 2009, in the 52 countries covered in the report. The rate of increase in IT spending will be more than three times the expected rate of gross domestic product growth in the 52 countries. “The advantages of a growing IT sector are more extensive than the raw numbers alone suggest,” the IDC report says. “IT jobs tend to be higher skilled than most others, particularly in emerging economies, and countries with higher computerization can be more competitive in world markets.” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation founder Robert D. Atkinson says the past 20 years have shown how investments in IT innovations foster economic growth. Atkinson says that continued IT innovation and investment will help to jump-start the economy out of the current recession and will significantly contribute to job and new business creation.

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Organizers of the 20th annual ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, which takes place June 15-18, 2010, in San Jose, have announced a call for proposals to help shape the program for next year’s gathering. The theme of the conference is Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in the Networked Society and seeks to address how constant connection in social, communication, information, and physical environments impacts freedom and privacy, and how computers can be used to improve freedom and privacy. Organizers are seeking suggestions for speakers, topics, workshops, tutorials, and panel sessions. The proposals should take advantage of the location of the conference, include a diverse set of panelists and new voices, offer a number of perspectives on challenging issues, and explore cutting-edge technology, legal, and policy issues. Possible topics include social networks, cloud computing, surveillance networks, anonymity in a networked world, ethics and computing, accessibility, open source, and media concentration, advertising, and political campaigning on the Internet. The final program will be assembled partly from the proposals. The early bird deadline for proposals is Dec. 1, 2009, and the final deadline is Jan. 31, 2010.

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Internet security experts have discovered that many phishers are using a trick called a flux, which allows a fake Web site to rapidly change its URL, making it difficult for defenders to block phishing sites or warn unsuspecting users. New research has found that about 10 percent of phishing sites are now using flux. Indiana University professor Minaxi Gupta says that because phishers often have access to thousands of hijacked machines they can quickly move a site around the Internet, protecting it from security professionals while keeping the fake site operational. To use a flux, phishers must control a domain name, giving them the right to control its name server. The phisher can then set the name server so it directs each new visitor to a different set of machines, rapidly cycling through the thousands of addresses available within its botnet. If the name server also is moved to different locations on the Internet, it is particularly difficult for defenders to pinpoint a central location where the fake site can be shut down. Gupta has identified several methods for detecting a flux and suggests that flux detection should be incorporated into the domain name system itself, because only a fraudulent site is likely to use a flux. There are some legitimate reasons for using a flux, but a legitimate flux looks different from a flux on a botnet. Shortening the detection time of phishing sites by even a few hours can make a major difference and make the scams less profitable for criminals, Gupta says.

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