U.S.-owned businesses and U.S. affiliates of foreign companies had worldwide R&D expenses of $330 billion in calendar year 2008 and worldwide sales of $11 trillion, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Working with the Census Bureau, NSF launched a pilot-scale study in 2008 to more accurately track R&D activity in an attempt to obtain a better gauge of the global competitiveness of the United States. The initial findings show the manufacturing sector accounted for about 71 percent of R&D activity. Moreover, 68 percent of the worldwide sales of companies with R&D activity came from their domestic business, and 85 percent of the sales at scientific R&D service companies came from their domestic operations. Small businesses with less than 500 employees invested more of their expenditures on R&D than larger companies, spending $64 billion on R&D and accounting for $1 trillion of the total $11 trillion in sales. About $234 billion of the total R&D expense was conducted in facilities in the United States. The report also shows that foreign companies with R&D operations in the United States are making up the difference in R&D activity that has been taken overseas by U.S.-based companies.
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ACM’s International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), sponsored by IBM, challenges students to solve real-world problems using open technology and advanced computing methods in a very short time period. Last year’s competition attracted tens of thousands of students on 7,100 teams from universities in about 90 countries. “The world faces many daunting problems such as pandemic diseases, climate change, water pollution, food safety, finite energy resources, as well as issues with urban management and mass transportation,” says IBM’s Doug Heintzman, ICPC’s sponsorship executive. “At IBM, we believe we have a responsibility to help develop the next generation of technology leaders, help them to understand and tackle these complex business issues.” ICPC executive director Bill Poucher, a professor at Baylor University, says the contest gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their talents and present themselves to top recruiters. “The contest is also a forum for advancing technology in an effort to better accommodate the growing needs of the future,” Poucher says. “At the same time, the competition is a chance for students of similar interests to exchange ideas and peer educate.” Following the regional contests currently underway, finalists will attend the World Finals, which will take place in February 2010 in Harbin, China, hosted by Harbin Engineering University.

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A new graphics processing units (GPUs) computer cluster will process CSIRO research data thousands of times faster and more efficiently than a desktop PC as a complementary system to the supercomputing resources available to CSIRO researchers. The new GPU cluster is the first of its kind in Australia, and is about the size of six large refrigerators, containing 61,440 compute cores. CSIRO’s John Taylor says the new cluster combines central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs to make the system more efficient. “GPUs speed up data processing by allowing a computer to massively multitask through parallel processing,” Taylor says. GPUs are generally less expensive, per unit of processing power, and more energy efficient than a CPU-based supercomputer, and GPUs can be 30 to 70 times faster than CPUs. “This cluster will be part of our family of high-end computers in CSIRO and important to our e-Research Strategy,” says CSIRO’s Alex Zelinsky. “It will enable CSIRO to, in a cost-effective way, be globally competitive in addressing computational challenges for ‘big science.’ ” Taylor notes that running experiments on the GPU cluster requires a new approach to coding, specifically dividing up each task to make the best use of the extra processors.

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Users of touch-screen gadgets must contend with snoopers, and researchers at Britain’s Newcastle University and elsewhere are working on alternative input mechanisms to thwart shoulder surfing, based on touch screens that can detect multiple simultaneous touches. ColorRings, developed by Newcastle’s Paul Dunphy and Patrick Olivier in collaboration with colleagues at Northumbria University, is one such system. ColorRings is based on a user recalling a sequence of pictorial icons rather than numbers, and when entering this code, users are presented with a screen littered with icons, including their four secret ones. The users use their fingers to drag four different colored circles so that each surrounds the correct icon–and with each circle big enough to ring as many as six icons, it is impossible for snoopers to know which icon is part of the code. Meanwhile, an authentication system also developed by Olivier’s team requires the user to choose a different known face in each of a sequence of grids containing numerous faces. The method is designed to deter shoulder surfers by having the user place three fingers on each grid, highlighting three rows or columns of faces. Northumbria University’s David Kim says that users apply extra pressure to the row in which the known face is to make their actual choice, “so the user is not directly selecting each face.”

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The United States remains the world’s leader in science and technology, based on factors such as gross dollars spent, relative spending on research, research articles published, and patents granted, according to the National Science Board’s biennial report on science and engineering. The report says the U.S. accounted for nearly one third of the $1.1 trillion spent on research and development (R&D) worldwide in 2007. From 1998 to 2007, R&D spending grew between five and six percent annually in the United States, Japan, and the European Union. However, R&D spending in India, South Korea, and Taiwan grew an average of nine to 10 percent per year during that period, and Chinese spending grew by more than 20 percent per year. Out of approximately 760,000 research articles published in 2008, 25 percent were written by U.S. researchers. Chinese scientists published about eight percent of the research articles, up from one percent in 1988. U.S.-based inventors accounted for 49 percent of the patents granted in 2008, down from 55 percent in 1995.

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Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) researchers have developed SIMulator for Business Administration (SIMBA), business simulation software that can mimic how a market behaves as companies make different business decisions. “It can be utilized from a competitive point of view since different companies can compete against each other to improve their own results,” says UC3M’s Fernando Fernandez. SIMBA uses different variables, including products, markets, client segments, technology, languages, currency, and socio-economic environments, to create a realistic simulated business environment. SIMBA also can be used as a tool for students who are studying the business world. The companies involved in a simulation can be controlled by humans or by computer programs using artificial intelligence. “This increases the complexity of the simulated market and creates the possibility of carrying out multi-player simulations, where some players are human, but where others are controlled by computer programs built by artificial intelligence techniques,” Fernandez says.

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Engineers have developed new transistors that can locate hardware bugs in a fraction of the time it takes to perform normal debugging. Instruction footprint recording and analysis (IFRA) enables engineers to find evidence of bugs while they happen, eliminating much of the time needed to perform electrical simulation during the post-silicon debugging phase of testing. The approach relies on building recording devices, or buffers, into about 1 percent of the transistors on a chip, to collect the right amount of information about chip activity at the right time. The circular buffers are designed to briefly hold information on instructions that stream through a chip, but when a failure or impending failure is detected, recording stops, buggy instructions are saved, and the data is transferred to a computer. The team has developed software to decode the labels and detail the instructions and location on the chip that led to the failure. Working with Intel, a test of IFRA on its Core i7 chips found the technique can locate 96 percent of bugs and pinpoint 80 percent with their exact time and location.
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A key topic at this week’s SC09 supercomputing conference, which takes place Nov. 14-20 in Portland, Ore., is how to reach the exascale plateau in supercomputing performance. “There are serious exascale-class problems that just cannot be solved in any reasonable amount of time with the computers that we have today,” says Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility project director Buddy Bland. Today’s supercomputers are still well short of exascale performance. The world’s fastest system, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jaguar, reaches a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. Bland says the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is holding workshops on building a system 1,000 times more powerful. The DOE, which is responsible for funding many of the world’s fastest systems, wants two machines to reach approximately 10 petaflops by 2011 to 2013, says Bland. However, the next major milestone currently receiving the most attention is the exaflop, or a million trillion calculations per second. Exaflop computing is expected to be achieved around 2018, according to predictions largely based on Moore’s Law. However, problems involved in reaching exaflop computing are far more complicated than advancements in chips. For example, Jaguar uses 7 megawatts of power, but an exascale system that uses CPU processing cores alone could take 2 gigawatts, says IBM’s Dave Turek. “That’s roughly the size of medium-sized nuclear power plant,” he says. “That’s an untenable proposition for the future.” Finding a way to reduce power consumption is key to developing an exascale computer. Turek says future systems also will have to use less memory per core and will require greater memory bandwidth.

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The current state of women in academia was addressed during the annual meeting of the grant recipients of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advance program. Advance grants have helped fund initiatives for increasing the number of female scientists and engineers, as well as creating family-friendly university policies, networking groups, and mentor programs to help schools retain them. University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC) president Freeman A. Hrabowski III says it is time to focus more on the attitudes of department chairs, professors, and top administrators rather than the numbers. At UMBC, which received a $3.2 million Advance grant in 2003, 54 percent of assistant professors in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are women. “You can’t change attitudes unless you know what people really think,” says Hrabowski. He says colleges must continue to work toward institutionalizing the effects of the Advance grants in the current economic climate. “Even when we’re cutting the budget, we have to say we really believe in this, and we’re going to keep doing it,” he says.

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Software developed by the Heath-e-Child project is capable of comparing a variety of structured and unstructured data to help identify rare or life-threatening diseases in children and then model the potential progression of those diseases. The software can search and compare patient data from hospitals throughout Europe, allowing doctors to study how patients with similar data at other hospitals were treated and whether treatment was successful. The Health-e-Child system links anonymized databases of patient information from hospitals in Paris, Genoa, Rome, and London, and there are plans to extend the network to 25 hospitals. For unstructured data such as images, the project has developed tools that translate visual information into a machine-readable language. The project’s three-dimensional (3D) registration tool for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and its MRI erosion-scoring system for juvenile idiomatic arthritis have been recognized as major advances. The project’s CaseReasoner tool enables doctors to search thousands of disease diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes to find similar cases. And the CardioWiz tool can be combined with MRI scan measurements to rapidly generate animated 3D models of a patient’s heart that can be used to simulate the effects of heart surgery or drug treatments.

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