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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ACM’s SIGGRAPH 2009 conference in August featured an exhibit that enabled visitors to experience the various levels of vision and hearing of animals, such as the ultraviolet vision of birds or the ultrasonic hearing of whales. Computer scientists at Texas A&M University worked with the university’s fine arts expert Carol LaFayette on the virtual environment program, “I’m Not There.” Professor Fred Parke developed the system, which requires participants to don three-dimensional glasses and use a Wii controller to navigate through the immersive exhibit. He also is working on a liquid-crystal display version of the system. The virtual environment was enhanced by surround-sound recordings of animals in the wild and scenes set on Cocos Island, located southwest of Costa Rica. “The Viz lab is about the synthesis between art and science, so we inserted artistic elements into these scenes to make them more realistic and interesting,” LaFayette says. She believes science and natural history museums could use such technology to enhance the experience for visitors. “Think of all the exhibits that could come to life–and in a very green way,” she says.

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A consortium of network researchers has received a three-year grant from the U.S. Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) program to develop iGENI, an international version of GENI. The GENI research initiative was launched by the U.S. National Science Foundation to create a virtual laboratory for researching and exploring future Internets at scale. Led by Northwestern University’s International Center for Advanced Research (iCAIR), the consortium includes the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago; the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego; Cisco Systems; and BBN Technologies. “The iGENI initiative will enable our consortium to extend and build on these partnerships in order to develop and implement a large-scale distributed environment for GENI researchers, and to make that environment available to many more research communities,” says iCAIR’s Joe Mambretti. IGENI will integrate multiple network resources, segments of national research and education network infrastructures, a national wide-area private network run by Cisco called C-Wave, and components of the international optical-networking Global Lambda Integrated Facility. “One of the consortium’s major strengths has been its ability to develop teams, tools, and infrastructure on an accelerated schedule,” EVL’s Maxine Brown. “Each consortium member has over a decade of experience of active involvement in international networking infrastructure, projects, and community development.”

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Cornell University computer scientists have developed a method for generating the crashing and rumbling noises of objects made from thin harmonic shells such as cymbals and garbage can lids. The method, developed by professor Doug James and graduate students Jeffrey Chadwick and Steven An, will be presented at ACM’s SIGGRAPH Asia conference, which takes Dec. 16-19 in Yokohama, Japan. When a thin-shelled object falls or is struck, the metal or plastic slightly deforms and then snaps back into place, creating a vibration. Previous methods of synthesizing these noises did not account for the coupling effect that occurred when energy transfers from one vibration to another and back again, which resulted in a clean, clear sound that is more appropriate for a bell or chime. The new method accounts for this interaction and maps how the sound waves radiate to determine how the event will sound to a listener in any particular location. The researchers say that although their method is significantly faster than existing systems, the computations for a simple demonstration still take about an hour on a laptop. However, the researchers are hopeful that the simulation process can be accelerated by making some approximations. Their research is part of a larger project to synthesize various sounds, including dripping and splashing fluids, small clattering objects, and shattering glass.

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Cornell University computer scientists have developed a method for generating the crashing and rumbling noises of objects made from thin harmonic shells such as cymbals and garbage can lids. The method, developed by professor Doug James and graduate students Jeffrey Chadwick and Steven An, will be presented at ACM’s SIGGRAPH Asia conference, which takes Dec. 16-19 in Yokohama, Japan. When a thin-shelled object falls or is struck, the metal or plastic slightly deforms and then snaps back into place, creating a vibration. Previous methods of synthesizing these noises did not account for the coupling effect that occurred when energy transfers from one vibration to another and back again, which resulted in a clean, clear sound that is more appropriate for a bell or chime. The new method accounts for this interaction and maps how the sound waves radiate to determine how the event will sound to a listener in any particular location. The researchers say that although their method is significantly faster than existing systems, the computations for a simple demonstration still take about an hour on a laptop. However, the researchers are hopeful that the simulation process can be accelerated by making some approximations. Their research is part of a larger project to synthesize various sounds, including dripping and splashing fluids, small clattering objects, and shattering glass.

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Microsoft Live Labs researchers have developed Pivot, a tool designed to visually organize large data sets. Pivot presents data in the form of several images accompanied by textual data. Users can zoom into the images to study individual pieces of data, or zoom out to see items grouped according to certain criteria. Data collections can contain a few images with static data attached, or they can be large and connected to a feed of changing data. Pivot is based on Microsoft’s Seadragon, software designed for manipulating large amounts of visual information. Users can make their own collections of data by converting images to the Deep Zoom format used by Seadragon, and annotate them using a format based on extensible markup language. Pivot also could provide a better way to sort through Internet search results, because users could sort through thousands of results visually, instead of just looking a list of the top 10 search results.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Susan Hockfield notes that the majority of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners for physics, chemistry, and medicine are immigrants who came to the United States as scientists or as graduate or post-doctoral students. She writes that they were drawn by the openness and prestige of the U.S. system of higher education and advanced research, but “that openness stands in sharp contrast to arcane U.S. immigration policies that discourage young scholars from settling in the U.S.” Student immigrants play a vital role in job creation, and Hockfield notes that foreign MIT graduates have started 2,340 active U.S. businesses in which more than 100,000 people are employed. She points out that U.S. immigration statutes require that students go back to their homelands after graduation and then apply for a visa if they wish to return and seek employment in the United States. “It would be hard to invent a policy more counterproductive to our national interest,” Hockfield says. She advocates the creation of a wider-ranging immigration policy that would allow foreign students who earn advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math to easily obtain legal permanent residence. Also critical is the aggressive cultivation of more domestic talent, especially Ph.D.s in the sciences, as other countries’ graduation rates are outpacing those of the United States. “To be part of [the] global creative network we must inspire more young Americans to pursue scientific careers, and we must rapidly reform U.S. immigration policies that drive away talented young scholars who would otherwise decide to live, work, and innovate here,” Hockfield concludes.

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A project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and led by University of Nottingham researchers is developing a new computerized approach to scheduling airport operations that is designed to reduce delays, speed up baggage handling, and decrease pollution. The project aims to computerize and coordinate the scheduling of take-offs, landings, gate assignments, and baggage handling. The end result will be a search engine capable of analyzing the billions of possible scheduling combinations to provide the controllers with the most efficient courses of action. Currently, these four areas are organized manually by staff members who make decisions based on observations, reports, and experience. The scheduling improvements will make flying easier for passengers and reduce pollution by minimizing the time planes spend on the ground with their engines running. The project will develop computational models for each of the four areas of operations and determine how to run those models in conjunction with each other. One of the critical issues is how long an airplane needs for preparation on the ground before it can take off. Preparation includes enough time for the safety briefing and warming the engines. Sending a plane to the runway before either of these steps has taken place will cause delays on the runway that could affect other flights.

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University of Edinburgh researchers used low-energy lasers to make salt crystals in gel, which could make it possible to store a terabyte of data in a space the size of a sugar cube within the next 10 years. The researchers focused two overlapping low-energy laser beams on a salt solution, which provided the exact right amount of energy to form a temporary crystal. Edinburgh professor Andy Alexander says the process could be used to improve on traditional methods of optical data storage such as CDs. In comparison to the two-dimensional surface of a CD, three-dimensional (3D) optical data storage contains far more layers, and tiny crystals could act as storage points. Information would be stored by making marks in a pattern and read using light. Alexander says that 3D, crystal-based devices could be available within 10 years and would enable users to easily store, access, and move massive amounts of data. “This research builds on a discovery that was made by accident many years ago, when it was found that light can be used to trigger crystal formation,” he says. “We have refined this technique and now we can create crystals on demand. There is much work to be done before these crystals can be used in practical applications such as optical storage, but we believe they have significant potential.”

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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) unanimously voted to start drafting rules to support Internet neutrality. “It’s hard to imagine anything more important to the future of the success of our economy than a healthy and vibrant Internet, and there is no question that the openness of the Internet is the secret sauce to its success,” said FCC chairman Julius Genachowski following the vote. He also noted that the FCC has a core agenda to drive investment, innovation, and opportunity in 21st century communications. In addition to providing their customers with consistent Web traffic, Internet service providers (ISPs) would need to detail their network traffic management operations to ensure no wrongdoing. The U.S. government’s previous stance on the Web regulation issue was one of non-involvement, but it changed its position as worries mounted that ISPs could begin to exhibit favoritism toward their products and services. Crafting the rules will be a long, contentious process as wireless carriers, telecommunications firms, and other industry players and participants sound off on the benefits and drawbacks. The FCC’s Democratic commissioners are vocal advocates of net neutrality rules, while the agency’s Republican commissioners argue that such regulations are unnecessary. Critics are concerned that Web regulation will have an adverse effect on innovation in the Internet sector. However, Genachowski disagrees that the rules would hamper investment in broadband networks. “I reject the notion that we must choose between open Internet rules and investment by service providers in their networks,” he said during the meeting.

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