Germany’s Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has partnered with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to establish the first interactive digital media research institute in Asia. Fraunhofer Singapore, which will be located at NTU, will focus on promoting applied research and commercial opportunities for areas such as computer graphics, computer vision, virtual reality, and augmented reality. Researchers will work directly with Fraunhofer’s Institute for Computer Graphics Research on new technologies, as well as with industry partners. NTU, Fraunhofer, and Singapore funding agencies will provide Fraunhofer Singapore with about $10 million over five years. NTU and Fraunhofer hope to have the institute up and running in the first half of 2010 with 20 scientists and researchers, and have a staff of about 50 international researchers within the next two to three years. “That they have chosen NTU as their research partner in the area of computer graphics, interactive digital media, virtual reality, and augmented reality, speaks volumes for NTU’s research and innovation culture and the strength of our engineers and scientists at NTU,” says NTU president Su Guaning. “We are delighted to partner with one of the most highly regarded computer graphics powerhouses of Europe.”

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The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that few students are enrolling in computer science courses, particularly women and minorities. The BLS ranks computer application software engineering as the fourth most in-demand occupation in its Occupational Handbook for 2006-2016, largely because of the growing number of applications for emerging technologies and the increasing complexity of businesses. However, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Jan Cuny says there has been a major drop-off in the number of computer scientists entering the workforce since 2000. Since 2000, 70 percent fewer students have majored in computer science, with 80 percent fewer women entering the field, according to Computing Research Association data. Cuny says the Higher Education Research Institute reports that only 1 percent of students are majoring in computer science, and just 0.3 percent are women. University of North Carolina (UNC) at Greensboro professor Anthony Chow says that over the past eight years there has been a slight increase in women’s enrollment in computer science at the undergraduate level, but on the graduate level minority enrollment plunges to extremely small percentages. Retaining minority employees is another major problem, with nearly half of all minorities leaving technology jobs to enter other occupations, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Isolation is a major factor in the drop-out rates for women and minorities, says Teresa Dahlberg, director of the Diversity in Information Technology Institute at UNC Charlotte. She also says that women are often judged more harshly than men. Cuny says NSF is focusing on information education programs intended to spark student interest in computing by demonstrating how computers can solve programs through creativity, and also is working to infuse computer science into middle school and high school curricula.

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Recent advancements in supercomputer design coupled with falling prices are breaking down the barriers that have traditionally surrounded computing-intensive research, which could give ordinary users with a novel idea the opportunity to explore its potential using powerful computers. Ninety percent of the world’s 500 fastest computers use standard microprocessors, which enable supercomputers to be built much more inexpensively. “I think this says that supercomputing technology is affordable,” says Advanced Micro Devices director Margaret Lewis. “We are kind of getting away from this ivory tower.” This possibility has inspired some of the world’s top computing experts to make valuable sources of information available, with the goal of filling supercomputers with scientific data and allowing anyone in the world with a PC to access these systems. “It’s a good call to arms,” says Silicon Graphics’ Mark Barrenechea. “The technology is there. The need is there. This could exponentially increase the amount of science done across the globe.” Sharing data and supercomputing resources could allow labs to accomplish far more than was previously possible. Argonne Leadership Computing Facility director Pete Beckman says shifting science research into the cloud democratizes science. Argonne, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, is working on Magellan, a project to explore the creation of a cloud-computing infrastructure that scientists around the world could use. Beckman says such a system would reduce the need for smaller universities and labs to spend money on their own computing infrastructure.

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University of Arkansas researchers have developed a new method for preventing the cloning of passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. The method prevents the production of counterfeit tags by focusing on one or more unique physical attributes of individual tags, instead of the information stored on the tags. “It is easy to clone an RFID tag by copying the contents of its memory and applying them to a new, counterfeit tag, which can then be attached to a counterfeit product–or person, in the case of these new e-passports,” says Arkansas professor Dale R. Thompson. “What we’ve developed is an electronic fingerprinting system to prevent this from happening.” The researchers determined that all RFID tags have a unique fingerprint due to variances in radio frequency and manufacturing. By using an algorithm that repeatedly sent reader-to-tag signals, the researchers found that radio frequencies in RFID tags ranged from 903 MHz to 927 MHz, and increased in increments of 2.4 megahertz. The measurements showed that each tag had a unique minimum power response at multiple radio frequencies, and that power responses were significantly different even in same-model tags. Thompson says the different minimal responses are just one of several unique physical characteristics that enabled them to create an electronic fingerprint to identify tags with a high probability of detecting counterfeit tags.

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ACM has named University of California, Berkeley computer science professor Eric Brewer the recipient of the 2009 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award for his contribution to the development of highly scalable Internet services. Brewer broke down jobs, which once required large and expensive servers systems, so they could be handled by many inexpensive, small machines. Brewer also developed a way to replicate computing chores so that if one server went down, another would provide the answer without users noticing an interruption. He also developed Brewer’s wireless hypothesis, which suggests providing communications and computing capabilities to developing nations is more helpful than waiting for more conventional components of their economies to take shape. Instead of using Wi-Fi technology to cover a small area, Brewer developed technology called WiLDNet that can send signals in a single direction over long distances at a very low cost. Applications of WiLDNet include helping to remotely diagnose eye ailments by using wireless videoconferencing. “He demonstrated not only could you help people but you could advance the state of the art,” says Berkeley computer science professor David Patterson. The award, which is sponsored by the Infosys Foundation, includes a $150,000 prize.
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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposes to offer a 10-year plan to implement broadband Internet as the reigning communications network in the United States. FCC officials say the commission’s recommendations will include a subsidy for Internet providers to wire rural U.S. regions currently without access, a voluntary auction of some broadcast spectrum to open up space for wireless devices, and the development of a new universal set-top box that links to the Internet and cable service. The FCC says the proceeds from the spectrum auctions alone should pay for the plan. About one-third of U.S. residents either lack broadband Internet access, cannot afford it, or opt not to have it. In a February address, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said that broadband wiring would be of immeasurable help to the U.S.’s construction of cutting-edge computers and applications, otherwise “it would be like having the technology for great electric cars, but terrible roads.” Another part of the plan calls for outfitting 100 million households with high-speed Internet with a maximum speed of 100 Mbps by the end of this decade.
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SRI International and Georgia Tech researchers have developed Block All Drive-By Download Exploits (BLADE), free software that can stop Internet attacks brought on by visiting a Web site. BLADE acts by halting downloads that are initiated without the user’s consent. In 2009′s fourth quarter, about 5.5 million Web pages contained software designed to install unwanted malware on visitors, according to Dasient. The researchers tested BLADE and found that it blocked all of the more than 5,150 malicious programs unleashed by the 1,205 drive-by URLs they tested. Adobe’s PDF Reader accounted for more than half of the applications targeted by the drive-by exploits and Sun Microsystems’ Java platform attracted about 25 percent of all drive-by attacks, with most of the remaining exploits being aimed at Adobe Flash and Internet Explorer. Experts say that BLADE still needs to be tested in real-world settings, and SRI’s Phil Porras notes that it cannot stop all Web-based malware, such as social-engineering attacks.

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Stanford University researchers are developing the Frankencamera, an open source digital camera that they hope will lead to a computational photography revolution. “Computational photography will change how we do photography,” says Stanford professor Marc Levoy. “It would allow you to fix things that you can’t currently–whether by combining pictures in a different way, or by fiddling with optics so that more is recorded than on a normal camera.” The goal is to turn the camera into a powerful computer, with the ability to change the focus of a shot after it has been taken, take three-dimensional photographs, and convert photographs into drawings, diagrams, or watercolors. Meanwhile, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ramesh Raskar notes that researchers are already exploring the next step beyond computational photography. For example, Raskar notes that Microsoft is developing software to generate “sense photographs,” which capture the sense of the real experience, not just what the camera and computer are able to record.

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Rutgers University (RU) computer scientists have demonstrated how rootkits could surreptitiously instruct a smartphone to eavesdrop on a meeting, track its owner’s location, or rapidly drain the battery. Smartphones “run the same class of operating systems as desktop and laptop computers, so they are just as vulnerable to attack by malicious software, or malware,” says RU professor Vinod Ganapathy. Rootkit attacks on smartphones could be especially effective because smartphone users tend to carry their phones with them all the time, which creates opportunities for attackers to eavesdrop, extract personal information, or pinpoint the users location using the phone’s global positioning system.

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Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and Cornell University are developing PhotoCity, a system that uses graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional (3D) renderings of buildings, neighborhoods, and cities from unstructured collections of two-dimensional digital photos. To improve the quality of the renderings, the researchers plan to combine their system with a social game that permits teams to add images where they are needed to improve the visual models. The researchers also plan to accept public submissions, in an effort to collect 3D renderings of cities such as New York and San Francisco. The emergence of such collaborative systems has great promise for capturing the creative abilities of people and networked computers, says the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Peter Lee.

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