Mobile: Future of the Internet

Mobile phones will become the primary Internet device for most people by 2020, largely due to their increasing computing power, predicts the "Future of the Internet," a new Pew Internet & American Life Project report. "Telephony [will be] offered under a set of universal standards and protocols accepted by most operators internationally, making for reasonably effortless movement from one part of the world to another," the report says. The report, based on a survey of 578 Internet activists, builders, and commentators, also predicts that despite the widespread access to other cultures and viewpoints on the Internet, Internet use will not make people more socially tolerant. The report says that some survey respondents even suggested that the divide between the tolerant and the intolerant could widen due to Internet-based information-sharing tactics. The report also found that 55 percent of experts believe that by 2020 people will routinely interact in artificial spaces through virtual worlds and other types of augmented reality. Voice activation and touch interfaces will be common by 2020, predict nearly two-thirds of experts, and "air-typing" will become common because small handheld devices will display a full size virtual keyboard on any flat surface. A majority of experts, 78 percent, believe that the current Internet architecture will not be completely replaced by a new system in 2020, but search, security, and reliability will have been improved by next-generation research.

Microsoft Research Projects

Microsoft is supporting a host of projects in its research and development division that are focused on tackling real-world technical challenges but could have a potentially dramatic impact on computing. One such project is Eagle 1, a tool for disaster recovery teams that captures information from multiple databases and generates real-time interactive maps through the use of geospatial mapping technology. Microsoft Surface, which has reached the product phase, promotes social interaction through a multitouch table with a ruggedized acrylic interface. Its capabilities include object recognition, optical tagging, and interaction with physical objects. LucidTouch V2 technology is a credit card-sized display screen that the user can reach behind to control a mobile device. Visual Studio 2010 upgrades Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform with new features that include unified modeling language, a debugging tool that can pinpoint non-reproducible bugs by automatically generating data sets, and an application that lets development teams visualize a model of the existing development architecture and find any existing code assets that are not well categorized. The Touch Wall is a new hardware/software interface with multitouch control that can mix and match media on the same large-screen display to enhance collaboration. The OSLO project offers a framework that allows all members of a team to access data models in a repository across the entire software development life cycle. Microsoft also is working on a robotic receptionist to be installed at the company headquarters that will help visitors find transportation, using voice and facial recognition technology. Finally, BlueTrack is mouse technology that employs a wider and brighter laser beam than conventional optics so that it can operate on uneven surfaces.

Hackers & Cellphones

Georgia Tech security researchers say that hackers will likely target cell phones for use in creating botnet armies. They say that as cell phones get more computing power and better Internet connections, hackers will be able to exploit vulnerabilities in mobile-phone operating systems and Web applications. Millions of PCs have already become part of botnets, and owners generally never know. The Georgia Tech researchers say that if cell phones become absorbed into botnets, new types of scams could be created. For example, infected phones could be programmed to call pay-per-minute 900 numbers, or to buy ringtones from companies established by criminals. The researchers say hackers are particularly drawn to cell phones because they are always on, they are always sending and receiving data, and they generally have poor security. "This is the perfect platform (for hackers)," says Georgia Tech professor Patrick Traynor. "There are some challenges for the adversaries, but we've seen them overcome the challenges in their way before." One challenge for hackers is learning how cellular networks work, which are tightly controlled by cell phone operators.

The Future of Internet Search

Danny Fine of BrainDamage in Haifa, Israel, says computers, not people, should be carrying out Internet searches. He says searching is a form of artificial intelligence that analyzes documents and creates a map of keywords and their relationships to each other. "The search engine doesn't really understand what you're asking, of course--it's just a dumb computer, after all," Fine says. "The way it figures out what you're looking for is by comparing your request to a long list of keywords that are indexed in a database with other terms that could really be what you're looking for." BrainDamage is developing Noesis, a new approach to Internet searching based on natural thinking technology. Natural thinking technology puts the burden of understanding search queries on the search engine, enabling it to return more accurate results. Fine says Noesis gathers information and develops it, guided by the user, to reach a conclusion using the same patterns of logic and ideas that humans use. Noesis essentially teaches machines to understand what humans have in mind when they make a request. "Our system advances artificial intelligence far beyond where it is today, enabling computers to truly understand what is being asked of them--and to respond appropriately," Fine says.

2008 Technology Innovation Awards

The Wall Street Journal's 2008 Technology Innovation Award winners included Salesforce.com's Force.com software tool suite, which enables companies to build their own specially tailored business applications that are developed and delivered over the Internet. The cloud computing service enables companies to access computing power on an as-needed basis. Globalstar's Spot unit earned an award in the consumer electronics category for the Spot Satellite Messenger, a handheld device that transmits preprogrammed messages such as "I'm OK," along with users' whereabouts. Software that tests for security holes in new applications by searching for flaws in binary code netted an award for Veracode, and company co-founder Chris Wysopal says the method offers the accuracy of source code analysis without the need for disclosing proprietary source code. The winner in the network/Internet technologies category was Xsigo Systems for hardware and software that allows the replacement of physical cables in a data center with virtual connectors, each of which is capable of mimicking the performance of up to 14 separate cables. Dispersed Storage software from Cleversafe won for a technology that allows sensitive computer files to be stored more securely and reliably by slicing them up and sending the slices, which by themselves are unreadable to unauthorized parties, over the Internet to multiple storage locations on a network. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology professor Jane Royston says the software "could be an important part of Internet data storage systems." The winner in the wireless category was Tata Consultancy Services' mKrishi service, which can supply crop advice to farmers in rural India via cell phones using a combination of remote sensors, a voice-enabled text-messaging service, and a camera phone.

Web 3.0

Europe is in an excellent position to become the leader in Web 3.0 technology because of its focus on open and pro-competitive telecom networks and commitment to online privacy and security, says Viviane Reding, the European Commission's (EC's) commissioner for information society and media. "Web 3.0 means seamless 'anytime, anywhere' business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks," Reding says. "It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines." She says there could be a 10-fold increase in the scale of the digital universe by 2015. The EC's consultation on the next generation of the Internet launched on Sept. 29 was accompanied by a roadmap. The report described social networking, online business services, nomadic services based on GPS and mobile TV, and smart tags using RFID as trends that would lead to Web 3.0. In a blog post, Vint Cerf welcomed Reding's stance on free and open networks and on open standards. "For Europe to keep up in the global online race, it needs to sprint ahead powered by an openness recipe encompassing a neutral network, users' rights, and open standards," Cerf wrote. "I'm delighted to see that Europe's policymakers stress the successful ingredients to promoting a robust, healthy Internet."

The Web's Future

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is helping to create the World Wide Web Foundation, a new organization that will certify Web sites it finds to be trustworthy and a reliable source of information. Berners-Lee says there needs to be a new system that will give Web sites a label for trustworthiness once they have proven to be a reliable source. "On the Web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable," he says. "A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging." Berners-Lee and colleagues at the World Wide Web consortium examined simple ways of branding Web sites, but concluded that a whole variety of different mechanisms are needed. In addition to creating a trustworthiness rating, the World Wide Web Foundation also will strive to make it easier for people to get online. Currently, only 20 percent of the world's population has access to the Web. The foundation also will explore ways of making the Web more mobile-phone friendly, which will increase its use in Africa and other developing parts of the world where there are few computers but plenty of handheld devices. The foundation also will examine how the Web can be used to benefit those who cannot read or write. "We're talking about the evolution of the Web," Berners-Lee says. "When something is such a creative medium as the Web, the limits to it are our imagination."

Microsoft Asia Research

Microsoft's Bill Gates says the dramatic growth of the Internet will eventually help eliminate "the last constraints we have" and lead to a software-writing revolution. Speaking at a forum marking the 10th anniversary of Microsoft's Asian research division, Gates said that technology currently in development will transform how people use computers as well as expand their ability to interact with machines. Greater Internet connectivity will give users better services, providing remote access to a variety of software and information, Gates says. "That will eventually lead to machines that have lots of server capacity, lots of low-cost computing, low-cost storage," Gates says. "And that will let us write software in an even more ambitious way, eliminating the last constraints we have." Gates believes that uses for computers will expand to encompass all interactive techniques, such as touch, sight, and speech. Gates also praised the work of Microsoft's Asian research division, and praised science and technology as a force for positive change. Gates says major developments in Internet services and computer interfaces are at a good stage of development in the labs, and should be widespread within 10 years, while more advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence or robotics, could be available within 20 years.

Artificial Tongue

Anton, a mechanical tongue and jaw that has successfully mimicked the muscular activity involved in producing certain vowel sounds will be presented at this year's International Society of Artificial Life conference. Robin Hofe of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom says Anton has the potential to help improve speech recognition software. Existing systems are working with larger databases of recorded speech, but their performance has not significantly improved because the way people talk is not steady and uniform. Speech can be affected by where people are and what they are doing. The researchers believe Anton will be a key to learning more about how the mouth produces sounds, since obtaining data from inside the human mouth might not be the best approach. The researchers also want to embed artificial muscles in Anton to make it more realistic, and eventually have it produce sound. The previous test involved MRI scans to compare the movements of Anton with those of real mouths.

Plastic Based Electronics

Plastics-based electronics can be cheaper and less energy intensive to manufacture than their silicon counterparts while also being bendable and potentially more energy efficient. Organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) can be used for displays that require no backlight and are flexible, and major technical issues such as uneven wear and durability have been addressed. Experts say price is currently the biggest obstacle to the launch of a mass market OLED display. High-definition televisions that can be rolled up after use is one OLED application that is envisioned to happen after the technology breaks into the mainstream. Electronics for plastic displays can be "printed" roll to roll like a newspaper rather than be constructed piece by piece, and NanoMarkets analyst Lawrence Gasman says this feature will probably lower the cost of fabricating OLEDs to a significant degree. Universal Display has a two-year, approximately $2 million contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop thin OLED lighting panels that can either be printed or mounted onto numerous surfaces. Another breakthrough in plastics electronics is electronic paper. Co-op America estimates that electronic magazine delivery through e-paper could spare 35 million trees from getting converted into paper yearly. The emergence of affordable solar panels could also be accelerated by plastic electronics through the efforts of companies that are working on organic solar panels.

Cuil Search Engine

Cuil is a new search engine started by former engineers from Google and several other tech giants. Cuil's founders say the new search engine covers as many as three times the number of Web pages as Google. Cuil aims to deliver better results than other major search engines by searching through more Web pages and studying pages more accurately. Cuil's results page also is different; it looks more like a magazine than a list of results. "You can't be an alternative search engine and smaller," says Cuil cofounder Anna Patterson, one of the engineers who helped build Google's search index. "You have to be an alternative and bigger." Cuil claims to be able to search across 120 billion Web pages, compared with Google's 40 billion. Patterson says Cuil has developed a faster and better way to index Web pages that relies of fewer machines. Analyst Greg Sterling says the strong skills of Cuil's founders, which includes Patterson's husband Tom Costello, who built search engine technology for IBM and was on the research faculty at Stanford University, and the fact that the company has already built such a large search engine from scratch strengthens Cuil's chances of competing over the long term. However, the company must still find a way to generate enough advertising revenue to fund the hefty infrastructure and technology costs of scaling a search engine.

Comparing Web 1.0 & Web 2.0

Among Web 2.0's key attributes are the growth of social networks, bi-directional communication, diverse content types, and various "glue" technologies, and the authors note that while most of Web 2.0 shares the same substrate as Web 1.0, there are some significant differences. Features typical of Web 2.0 Web sites include users as first class entities in the system, with prominent profile pages; the ability to connect with users through links to other users who are "friends," membership in various types of "groups," and subscriptions or RSS feeds of "updates" from other users; the ability to post content in various media, including blogs, photos, videos, ratings, and tags; and more technical features, such as embedding of various rich content types, communication with other users through internal email or instant messaging systems, and a public API to permit third-party augmentations and mash-ups. Web 1.0 metrics of similar interest in Web 2.0 include the general portion of Internet traffic, numbers of users and servers, and portion of various protocols. About 500 million users reside in a few tens of social networks with the top few responsible for the bulk of the users and traffic, and traffic within a Web 2.0 site is more difficult to measure without help from the site itself. The challenges for streamlining popular sites for mobile users differ slightly between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, in that instant notification to users through mobile devices can be facilitated because of the short or episodic nature of most Web 2.0 communications. Most communication in Web 2.0 is between users, so Web 2.0 sites have no easy way to select during overload; however, the sites apply varying restrictions to guarantee that overall load and latency is reasonably maintained. Some of the Web 2.0 sites are eager to maximize and retain members within an "electronic fence," which can facilitate balkanization, although total balkanization is likely to be prevented by a countercurrent stemming from the prevalent link-based nature of Web users continuously connecting to sites outside the fence. The authors point out that there are substantial challenges in permitting users to comprehend privacy implications and to simply represent usage policies for their personal data.

Intel's Ct Programming Language

Intel showed off a new programming language for multi-core computing, called Ct, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., on June 11. An extension of C/C++, the programming language automatically partitions code to run on specific cores. "With Ct, it's almost like you're writing to a single-core machine," said Intel researcher Mohan Rajagopalan during the open house for Intel labs. "You leave it to the compiler and runtime to parallelize." Intel developed the Ct compiler, which chops up the code to run on separate cores based on the type of data and the operation performed on the data, in addition to the runtime and an API for the compiler. Less than 5 percent of Ct is new, so C/C++ programmers will find it easy to use. Rajagopalan also noted that programs compiled in Ct can scale to the available number of cores. Intel is relatively close to bringing to market a product developers will be able to use to make financial analytics applications and software for processing images or decoding video

CCTV That Can Hear

University of Portsmouth researchers are working on a three-year project to incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities into visual recognition software that would enable CCTV cameras to turn in the direction of a certain sound and capture it in about 300 milliseconds. "So, if in a car park someone smashes a window, the camera would turn to look at them and the camera operator would be alerted," says David Brown, director of the Institute of Industrial Research. Portsmouth will not have the algorithms capture full conversations, but they will be capable of listening for specific words associated with violence. The idea is to develop shapes of sounds that can be recognized by the software of the CCTV cameras. "The software will use an artificial intelligence template for the waveform of sound shapes and if the shape isn't an exact fit, use fuzzy logic to determine what the sound is," Brown says.

Computers & Diamonds

University of Melbourne physicist Steven Prawer says the current generation of computers are power hungry and inefficient, but that quantum computers made using diamonds are a practical way to achieve a significant improvement in computer power without generating more heat. Prawer says quantum computers provide a new paradigm for computing that utilizes exponential processing power through a highly efficient process that does not create heat. Quantum computers will use "qubits" that can be on, off, or both states at the same time depending on the electrons' spin, providing extremely high processing power because messages based on different states can be processed in parallel. Prawer says many quantum computer designs rely on very low temperatures and complex infrastructures to detect the electron spin and protect from being influenced by the outside environment, but diamonds can provide a unique platform for building quantum computers that can operate at room temperature. "All of the things that you would want from a quantum computer have been demonstrated in diamond," says Prawer. Tiny manufactured diamonds with a nitrogen atom at their center can act as a qubit, and the spin of the electrons in the diamond can be manipulated using microwaves or laser pulses. Although true quantum computing is still years away, Prawer says diamonds can already be used for a variety of new engineering and research devices, and that the first quantum device to be commercialized was a diamond-based single photon source used for quantum cryptography.

Educational Benefit of MySpace

University of Minnesota researchers have determined the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and also found that low-income students are in many ways just as technologically proficient as their more advantaged counterparts. The researchers found that 94 percent of students in the study used the Internet, 82 percent used the Internet at home, and 77 percent have a profile on a social networking site. Students said social networking sites taught them technology skills, creativity, being open to new or diverse views, and communication skills. Data was collected over six months from students in 13 urban high schools in the Midwest. In addition to the initial surveyed students, a follow-up, randomly selected subset were asked questions on their Internet activity while they used MySpace. University of Minnesota learning technologies researcher Christine Greenhow says students that use social networking sites learn and practice the kinds of 21st century skills that educators say are needed to be successful. "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content, and thinking about online design and layout," Greenhow says. The results show that social networking sites provide more than just social fulfillment or professional networking and have implications for educators, who have an opportunity to support what students are learning on the Web, Greenhow says. The study contradicts a 2005 study from Pew that suggests a digital divide is forming in which low-income students are technologically impoverished.

Laptop in your Pocket

Modern laptops may soon be replaced by smaller, more useful devices such as the smart phone. Current trends for low-power chips, such as those used in devices such as cell phones and iPods, indicate that we will likely see eight times the CPU power in handheld devices by 2010, says former Sun Microsystems distinguished engineer Adrian Cockcroft. Cockcroft envisions an always-on device that wirelessly and seamlessly connects to a car when driving, a desktop monitor and keyboard when working, and to projection systems and portable displays when giving a presentation. Such powerful and capable handheld devices could lead to what Cockcroft calls computer-assisted telepathy, or a permanent connection to alternate worlds such as Second Life, as well as "lifesharing," which would create a network of permanently connected friends and family. Cockcroft says lifesharing is the next logical step from the behaviors of today's youth. Older users less interested in frictionless communication would be able to used the constantly connected device to remind themselves of forgotten names at social gatherings and other tasks. Cockcroft says the underlying technology driving such advancements is the increasing robustness of low-power chips and devices, which is allowing handhelds to advance faster than laptops. For example, laptop memory doubles every two years, while pocket devices double in memory annually. Cockcroft predicts that by the end of the year smart phones will have double the CPU power and RAM of current state-of-the-art handheld devices such as the iPhone.

Singapore-MIT Research

MIT students have developed AudiOdyssey, a computer game for visually impaired users. AudiOdyssey simulates a DJ trying to create a catchy tune and get people to dance. The player uses the Nintendo Wii's remote-control device to create a rhythm and lay down a series of musical tracks, gradually building a song. Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab graduate student Eitan Gilnert says that although the Wii gaming system has attracted a lot of people who never previously played video games, people with disabilities are being left behind. Gilnert started to research available video games that were designed for the visually impaired, and found that the games were so specifically adapted for sound and tactile play that they gave visually-impaired players too much of an advantage. Gilnert set out to create a game that could be played equally well by both visually impaired and sighted players. The game also is designed to be played on a regular keyboard for those without Wiis. Gilnert says the game is an early prototype and limited in its capabilities. MIT Comparative Media Studies program graduate Alicia Verlager, who is blind, helped develop the game. "The element I probably most envy about gamers is just the way they hang out together and share doing something fun," Verlager says. "Hanging out with other gamers playing AudiOdyssey was really fun."

Visual Analytics

Visual analytics is the current focus of Jim Thomas, director of the U.S. Homeland Security Department-sponsored National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC), who describes the field as "the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces." A 2006 paper posits that visual analytics integrates visualization with human factors, geospatial, scientific analytics, and information so that people can extract individual fragments of a whole from a vast volume of unstructured data, and then piece the whole together. NVAC's mission is fivefold: To understand the vulnerabilities of and risk to critical U.S. infrastructure, reduce the terrorism threat, devise a visual communication infrastructure for response teams, cultivate an enduring talent base, and produce effective communications metaphors that can encompass the conclusions of risk evaluations as well as the evidence and chain of logic. Among the users of NVAC's products are intelligence analysts who must sift through the Web information streams and first responders managing a crisis as it occurs. Thomas says the presentation of information in a context that is apropos to individual users is vital, while discovery, comprehension, and confirmation requires interaction. He says the visual analytics field has expanded to more than 1,000 researchers up from 40 researchers just a few years ago. Thomas says about 50 percent of NVAC's funding is committed to basic research via a quintet of university-led research centers, each of which has a regional partner to help focus its research.

IT Skills Demographics

New data from IT job board Sapphire Technology reveals significant patterns in the availability of technology jobs in different regions in the United States. For example, more than 58 percent of all available tech jobs in Austin, Texas, were in software development, primarily due to the large number of startup companies in Austin. In Chicago, project management positions accounted for more than 52 percent of job listings, which Sapphire's Mike Giglio attributes to the large number of mergers that have occurred in recent years. Software development skills were also in high demand in Tampa and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the D.C. metropolitan area, and Sacramento, Calif. Meanwhile, one-third of available IT job listings for the Los Angeles area were for desktop support. In fact, there were more listings for help desk jobs than for any other type of technology work in Los Angeles. Giglio says that companies in the Los Angeles area are so fast-paced that if anything happens to the systems they are working on they need it fixed right away and they staff their companies accordingly.

Stealing Data Research

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Saarland University in Saarbrucken, Germany, have found unconventional ways of stealing data. In Saarbrucken, the researchers have been able to read computer screens using reflections on objects such as glasses and teapots. Meanwhile, UCSB researchers have created Clear Shot, software that analyzes a video of hands typing on a keyboard to determine what was being written. Clear Shot was inspired by the movie "Sneakers," in which Robert Redford's character obtains a video of his potential victim typing in his password and says he is going to get a "clear shot." Clear Shot can analyze video of hand movements on a computer keyboard and transcribe them into text. UCSB graduate student Marco Cova says Clear Shot is accurate about 40 percent of the time. The software also suggests alternative words that may have been typed. Saarland University professor Michael Backes says his research began as a fun project to see if he could tell what other people were working on by watching windows near computer monitors. The researchers soon found that using a $500 telescope focused on a reflective object in front of a monitor could create readable images of Word documents. The researchers are now working on new image analysis algorithms and using astronomical cameras in the hopes of getting better images from more difficult surfaces such as the human eye.

Brain Monitoring System

Researchers at Taiwan's National Chiao-Tung University and National Cheng-Kung University and the University of California, San Diego have designed a new bio-signal monitoring system that fits inside a baseball cap and detects and analyzes electroencephalogram (EEG) signals from the wearer's brain. The cap is capable of determining if someone is getting too tired to drive based on brain-wave patterns and could be configured to control TVs, computers, and other electronic devices. The wireless system can process and provide feedback in real time. The researchers say that measuring EEG signals enables the brain-computer interface system to monitor an individual's physiological and cognitive states. The system capitalizes on recent advancements in sensor and information technology to reduce power consumption and production costs. It can run on a lithium-ion battery for about two days before needing charging, and the researchers hope to increase the device's efficiency. The cap includes five embedded dry electrodes for the wearer's forehead and one electrode for behind the ear to read EEG signals. The system includes Bluetooth transmissions for distances up to 10 meters and RF transmissions for distances up to 600 meters.

MIT Research

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ambient Intelligence Group scientists have developed Quickies, intelligent Post-it notes that combine artificial intelligence, RFID, and ink-recognition technologies. Quickies can communicate with PCs to relay any information written on them to a computer for display on a variety of electronic devices. The Quickie writer uses digital-pen hardware that translates the movement of the pen on the surface of the paper note into digital information. The information can be viewed at any time using Quickie software, which stores the notes as images and converts the handwritten notes into computer text using handwriting recognition algorithms. The Quickie software allows users to browse through their notes and search for specific information or keywords. Using a commonsense knowledge engine and computational AI techniques, the software analyzes the notes and categorizes them to provide users with reminders, alerts, messages, and relevant information. Each Quickie note has a unique RFID tag so it can be placed around a house or office, preventing users from losing a book or other object marked with a Quickie. Users can tell the software to remind them of important notes at specific times, and the software can synchronize Quickie to-do lists with task lists on mobile phones and laptops.

Xerox Palo Alto Research

Researchers at the Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL) recently demonstrated the Seamless Documents project, mobile phone technology that can store a scanned document in a database and analyze its structure and content. The analysis is used to identify sections and paragraphs to automatically extract key phrases that summarize sections, enabling users to jump to a section labeled with a key word, or skip to the last paragraph on a page, when reading the document on a mobile phone. The software also automatically resizes images, section headers, and plain text when a user is scrolling through the document. The first part of the Seamless Documents project focuses on converting analog documents into digital information that can be stored in a database and accessed using the Internet and cell-phone networks. FXPAL software analyzes the document's structure to find paragraph breaks, pictures, and section titles. The software then automatically summarizes text and chooses key words and concepts from each section to highlight for the user. The second part of the project involves software that runs on mobile phones. The software opens the document and displays extracted information. The user can see a view of the document with key phrases in a large font, overlaid on top of paragraphs and segments.

Teaching Mobile Computing

Mobile computing will be the focus of research and teaching at the Mobility Research Center, a new facility that Carnegie Mellon University plans to open this fall at its Silicon Valley site. James Morris, dean of Carnegie Mellon West, says mobile computing makes sense as an academic discipline because billions of people around the world are being introduced to computation and the Internet because of handheld devices such as cell phones, rather than desktop or laptop computers. "The United States needs to have that perspective as we look at a global market for computing devices on the Internet," Morris says. Context-aware applications and services, serendipitous collaboration, and rich semantic information to enable novel data and media management, visualization, and access will be specific interests of the multidisciplinary program. "We have probably 30 faculty members who work in various areas--anything from antenna design [to] anthropology and psychology--and we're getting a lot of these people together into teams to perform research to look at the way people are going to use mobile devices in the future," Morris says.

IT Skills' Trend

Advances in technology continue to create demand for new IT skills, while making other skills obsolete. HTML programming is a high-tech skill that will no longer boost the pay of IT professionals. Companies want Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX, and expertise in AJAX and XML has increased salaries by 12.5 percent in the last six months of 2007, according to Foote Partners. Legacy programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran, PowerBuilder, and Jini noncertified skills were among the lowest-paying skills over the second half of last year. Demand for Novell's network operating system NetWare has been surpassed by interest in Windows Server and Linux skills. Non-IP network expertise and know-how in technologies such as IBM's System Network Architecture (SNA) is another low-paying skill. "For networking, IP skills have replaced SNA skills," says Foote Partners CEO David Foote. The demand for PC tech support skills is also in decline.

Future of the Web

Google Australia engineering and site director Alan Noble says there are a couple of "pretty amazing" trends developing, including a move toward gadgets, mini-applications, and widgets. He says applications are being improved by gadgets by democratizing them and making it possible for developers to disaggregate applications in a completely new way. He says another major trend is a shift toward cloud computing, which he believes will have profound implications. He says Google has "taken a whole range of applications that users traditionally thought of as client-side applications and moved them online ... It basically means you have access to your applications anytime, anywhere." Noble says there are still a lot more applications that need to be moved to the cloud, but the trend towards cloud computing is clear. As for the future of Web content and rich content Web searchers, Noble admits that video and image searching techniques are rudimentary, but the technology is improving. Noble cites research at the University of Queensland in Australia that has been able to classify videos and detect similarities with other videos. He says the Internet is becoming richer and being able to search through rich content will be crucial.

Amsterdam Robot Conf

A team of students from the University of Amsterdam won the top prize at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Amsterdam on March 15. The public voted "Phobot," which mimicked human phobia, as its favorite robot at the competition of seven teams from technical universities from around the world. During the demonstration, a menacing larger robot inspired fear in Phobot, which retreated and then spun in circles to display a sense of panic. To overcome this fear, the team exposed Phobot to small robots and then to larger ones. "This robot is there as a sort of buddy to help a child having any kind of actual fear, doing it step by step," says team member Ork de Rooij. A team from Carnegie Mellon University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology took second place and the jury's prize for developing "Pot Bot," which was designed to monitor potted plants and determine when they need more water or sunlight. The contestants used Lego robotics and software from National Instruments to build their robots.

US Military Networks

Gen. Kevin Chilton, the top U.S. commander in charge of cyberspace, said the nation's military networks are being targeted by an increasing number of attacks. Chilton said there is evidence that links China to many of the incidents, though he did not formally accuse the Chinese government of involvement. A recent Pentagon report said that China was expanding its military power into cyberspace, which angered the Chinese. Although the People's Liberation Army repeatedly denies being behind the hacker attacks, the U.S. government has linked China to several cyber attacks, including the hacking of a Pentagon email system used by the Secretary of Defense's office. A 2007 Government Accountability Office report warned that the nation's infrastructure, including water-treatment and power plans, are at risk of being targeted by a cyber threat. Chilton said the military is concerned that the increasing number of "mining" attempts could just be the beginning of a growing cyber threat. He said hackers could eventually attempt to knock out classified networks or slow down the nation's government, media, and financial Web sites. "You don't shut the system down completely, but you slow it down," Clinton says. "I would consider that an attack."

Intl Animation Competition

Animation teams can upload animation reels to the ACM SIGGRAPH Web site for FJORG!, its International Animation Contest, until May 7, 2008. Sixteen teams of 3D and 2D animators will be chosen to compete over 32 hours before a live audience to create a 15-second, character-driven animation that adheres to specific themes, and they will be judged by an expert panel of representatives from leading graphics, feature film, animation, and gaming companies. FJORG! was a success a year ago, but the organizers of the contest have decided to make some changes. Solo animators will be able to qualify and will be organized into additional teams for a "Pot Luck" submissions category. And a "Vikings vs. Pirates" division has been created to give students an opportunity to compete with professionals. "Our goal is to build on the resounding success of the competition's first year that resulted in new friendships and prizes for many of our participants," says Patricia Beckmann-Wells, SIGGRAPH 2008 FJORG! Chair from Walt Disney Animation Studios. FJORG!, which will take place during the SIGGRAGH conference in Los Angeles on Aug. 11-15, could be a tremendous benefit for participants, says DreamWorks animator W. Jacob Gardner, who was a member of last year's winning team. "Professionally, I know that I wouldn't be where I am today without the experience and connections my team and I gained through the FJORG! competition," he says.

Collaborative eLearning

Collaboration between geographically dispersed student teams is the focus of a European project that has devised an online platform that combines e-learning, social networking, and project management components to help virtual teams fully leverage their practical experience. "Collaborative learning through teamwork projects need an entire project management system, but with e-learning functionality built in," says Germany L3S Research Center researcher Xuan Zhou, who is a member of the COOPER project. The project's platform delivers a virtual environment that far-flung teams can use to converse, get in touch with tutors, establish project workflows, and submit documents. The COOPER platform's flexibility is facilitated by a method known as Dynamic Process, which is mated with the WebML modeling language to allow project teams to construct their own, specially tailored project management system and workflows. The platform also integrates voice over IP and videoconferencing systems, enabling team members to speak with one another, conduct virtual meetings, or leave messages for tutors or other team members. To address the impact assessment problem inherent in project-based learning, the COOPER project's research partners are devising tools that follow a system from the Central Institute for Test Development and the Open University of the Netherlands, which includes long-term evaluation schemes. COOPER invests project results with additional value by analyzing and archiving all project output to compile a "project memory bank" that can be utilized to augment study programs and for institutions to supply public information about their curricula and innovative initiatives. Most of the COOPER platform will be freely downloadable over the Web once the project concludes in March.

Microsoft Research '08

At Microsoft's seventh annual TechFest, the company demonstrated some of its research projects that go beyond the next Windows operating system or Internet Explorer browser. One of the research projects on display was the 10TB World Wide Telescope project, which aims to combine images and information from major telescopes, scientists, and astronomical organizations from around the world, including NASA. Also on display was a new programming language to study cell biology, work on new AIDS vaccines, software to monitor and predict global epidemics, and sensors that monitor the melting of glaciers in the Alps. Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie says that Bill Gates has encouraged the company to invest some of its assets in projects that will make a difference even if they do not relate directly to a company product or brand. "That's partly been the motivation to go beyond using computer science to just benefit us as a company," Mundie says. "It's important that we not just make money, but that we contribute to working on these other problems."

Google Mobile in Japan

Japan's widespread use of wireless broadband has made the country a sort of unofficial testing lab for Google as it tries to refine mobile search technology. Japan's 100 million cell phone users represent the most diverse group of mobile subscribers. Google tests in a variety of locations, but the Japanese are often the most critical because they are just as likely to use a phone to access the Internet as a PC, and at speeds that rival fixed-line broadband. Japanese carriers have also offered such services for years, and many Web sites in Japan are formatted for cell phones. Google is working with the two top Japanese wireless operators, which have a combined subscriber base of 82 million. "Our fundamental strategy is to take ideas from Japan and apply them to other markets," says Google's Emmanuel Sauquet. Japan's influence is why Gmail users will soon be able to include "emoji," or small animated cartoons and emoticons, in their messages. Google relies on user-experience groups to determine what mobile Web surfers like. Participants are given phones with Internet access and asked to complete simple tasks, either in Google's lab or on the streets of Tokyo. Google also conducts what it calls 1 percent tests, which is when a small portion of users see different layouts, fonts, and other features. The goal is to determine what changes make the service easier to use. For example, Google found that letting users choose a default neighborhood can make searching faster.

Foreign Language Translation

METIS II is a European-based machine-translation project that has demonstrated an inexpensive technique for translating documents from Dutch, German, Greek, or Spanish to English. Machine translation currently works best for formal texts in specialized areas with unambiguous vocabulary and limited sentence patterns. The European Union has been supporting research in this field since the large Eurotra project in the 1980s, which used a rules-based approach that taught a computer the rules of syntax and applied them to translate texts from one language to another. However, starting in the early 1990s, a new concept of statistical translation has gained in popularity. Statistical translation replaces rules with statistical methods that are based on a text corpus--a large body of written material, up to tens of millions of words--that is intended to be representative of a language. Parallel corpora contain the same material in two or more languages that the computer uses to compare corpora and learn how words and expressions in one language translate to another. Parallel corpora are expensive and rare and exist only in a very few languages. METIS II researchers are employing statistical machine translation without a parallel corpora resource by using monolingual corpora for the target language. Using a single corpus requires using a dictionary for the vocabulary and a way of understanding syntax. METIS II matches patterns at the "chunk" level by matching phrases or fragments of a sentence instead of the entire sentence, which makes the pattern matching more efficient.

AtGentive's eLearning

European researchers working for the AtGentive project have developed two new software platforms that incorporate artificial intelligence and social networking into their approach toward e-learning. AtGentive coordinator Thierry Nabeth says the first generation of e-learning platforms focused on replicating the classroom experience, but student's often had difficulty staying motivated and the learning program failed to keep their attention. To overcome this problem, one of the AtGentive platforms uses techniques similar to those found on Web sites such as Facebook that make them so popular as a means of staying in touch with others. The platforms also use artificial intelligence to keep students interested. "Artificial agents are autonomous entities that observe users' activities and assess their state of attention in order to intervene so as to make the user experience more effective," Nabeth says. "The interventions can take many forms, from providing new information to the student, guiding them in their work, or alerting them when other users connect to the platform." The artificial intelligence agents provide a smart form of proactive coaching for students by assessing, guiding, and stimulating them. The agents can alert students when others have read their articles, or when they receive feedback on their contributions to a collaborative project. The agents are also able to detect when students are not interacting with the system and try to get them to rejoin the lesson.

Microsoft's DreamSpark

Microsoft has announced DreamSpark, a program that will provide students with free access to some of the company's most popular software development tools. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says past efforts to create education discounts limited the number of students that could use the programs, but DreamSpark could reach as many as 1 billion students. DreamSpark will allow students to download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program; SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition; and Windows Server Standard Edition. "It's a brilliant strategic move on the part of Microsoft," says analyst Chris Swenson. "This is one of the core audiences you have to hit if you really want to make a difference in the rich Internet application market going forward." Analysts say that distributing free copies of its tools increases the chances that a Microsoft product will be used to develop the next big Web 2.0 craze, and could also help convince a generation of programmers to move away from open source software. DreamSpark will be made available to high school students around the world starting in the fall, and to college students in other countries starting next year.

Computer Science Curricula

Computing Research Association chair Dan Reed writes that new approaches to computing education are needed to reverse declining enrolment in computer science. He says that little has changed in computer science curricula in the past 30 years. Its core elements remain centered on formal languages and theory, data structures, programming languages and compilers, operating systems, and computer architecture. Successive layers have been added to the computing curriculum onion, including graphics and human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, mobile and embedded devices, computational geometry, networks and distributed systems, numerical and scientific algorithms, parallel computing, databases and data mining, among others. Reed says that as the computing curriculum onion grows larger and more complex, the number of students will continue to approach zero as the knowledge and degree expectations nears infinity. He says that most graduates solve problems using computers rather than working in core computing technologies and computing as a problem-solving process needs to be accepted and introduced into education through technically challenging and socially relevant problem domains. "This does not mean we should eviscerate the intellectual core of computing," Reed writes, but that education must emphasize relevance and introduce computing as a means to solve problems.

Java & Open Source

Sun Microsystems fellow James Gosling, creator of the Java programming language, says in an interview that he expected Java to go open source, recalling that the development of the language followed a model that was very similar to open source. Gosling notes that all of the source code is published and community interaction is very collaborative, and he is confident that the new open source status of Java will permit other open source communities to bundle Sun's Java implementation. Gosling describes JavaFX as "a really strong, coordinated set of client-side technologies" that will feature JavaFX Mobile, a deployment of the cell phone stack along with the cell phone hardware. He says cell phones are evolving into desktop computers, pointing out that a pretty small number of activities--email, Web browsing, etc.--comprise the majority of desktop applications used. "Those apps all work really well on cell phones, and there have been cell phones that do this for years," Gosling says. He says Java is a platform for building rich and sophisticated Internet applications, and easing the difficulty of building such applications is what most of his efforts have been focused on. Gosling laments the low student enrollment in computer science, which he chiefly blames on both the media's exaggeration of the IT outsourcing trend and the dot-com crash, which he says simply represented the collapse of companies whose ideas were bad.

Invisible Keyboard

Daniel Rashid and Noah Smith believe an invisible keyboard could be used to enter text into mobile devices. The Carnegie Mellon University Language Technology Institute researchers are behind the "relative keyboard," a concept that would allow users to type on any touch-sensitive surface. However, users will need to have good touch-typing skills. The relative keyboard relies on software to measure the relative distance between keystrokes as it determines what is being typed, and a dictionary to filter possible strings as it figures out what was meant. In a test involving 10 people typing 160 words on a blank touch screen, some of the participants were not as accurate using the invisible keyboard and some said it was difficult to type without seeing any keys. The researchers believe the concept can work on any surface as long as a device knows where a user's fingers fall.

Improving eLearning

The shortcomings of e-learning courses include tedium, less emphasis on education, and higher dropout rates, but some professors and schools are revamping their courses to exploit the Internet's visual and interactive potential, adopting wikis, avatars, and other Web tools to enhance the e-learning experience. Researchers say students greatly lessen their chances of dropping out of courses that offer several of the e-learning field's best practices. Among the e-learning course traits they say students should research are accreditation by approved organizations, transferability, a solid reputation, scheduling, guidance for technology, detailed syllabi, and logical grading criteria. "The evidence shows the more access, more interaction, and more opportunities for feedback learners have from instructors, the better they do," notes executive director of Michigan State's Global Online Connection Christine Geith. Easy accessibility is a key characteristic of the best online teachers. Another indicator of excellent online teachers is their ability to present information in multiple formats, and to take advantage of the Web's opportunities for interactivity and flashy graphics. Good e-learning courses cultivate student communities, which some colleges support by requiring students to post personal information on a class blog, Facebook, or Web page.

Software To Check Essay

University at Buffalo computer scientists and researchers are developing a computational tool that could significantly reduce the time it takes to grade handwritten essays, as well as improve students' reading comprehension skills. The software under development is being designed to work with the standardized English Language Arts exams administered every year by the public school systems in every state, and could eventually relieve teachers of the task of grading the children's essays. Preliminary results with the software will be published in the February/March issue of Artificial Intelligence. Using handwritten essays from eighth graders in Buffalo's public schools, the software was able to grade the essays within one point of the score teachers gave the essays on a six point scale 70 percent of the time. Sargur N. Srihari, director of UB's Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition, says the software involves two significant artificial intelligence problems, handwriting recognition and an artificial neural network for automated grading. "In this method, the system 'learns' from a set of answers that were scored already by humans, associating different values or scores with different features in the essays," Srihari says. Although some teachers may doubt a computer's ability to accurately grade essays, James L. Collins, UB education professor and co-investigator, says, "Computational linguistics has made great leaps over the past decade and it turns out that for judging the overall quality of a paper, computers are indeed as reliable as human graders."

Google's Wikipedia Version

Google recently announced Knol, an experimental Web site that allows individual authors to create subject pages on topics of interest or expertise. Knol is seen as a response to Wikipedia, but will differ from Wikipedia in that pages will not be open for anyone to contribute to. Knol articles will have individual authors that will list their credentials, including work history, institutional affiliation, along with references to build credibility. Individual topics may have multiple pages by different authors, allowing Web users to read multiple but possible conflicting viewpoints on a subject. Currently, participation in Knol is by invitation only, but Google may eventually make Knol open to the public. "A Knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic will want to read," says Google's Udi Manber. Wikipedia's Mark Pellegrini sees several problems with Knol. "I think what will happen is that you'll end up with five or 10 articles," Pellegrini says, "none of which is as comprehensive as if the people who wrote them had worked together on a single article." Pellegrini says Knol authors will tend to link to other articles they have written, but ignore other people's work on the subject, and that Knol articles could end up being less complete than if they were written by a community of authors. However, Google has a major advantage in that it may pay Knol authors if the pages attract a large number of visitors and advertisers are willing to publish ads on Knol pages.

Consumer Electronics Show

Mobile devices might soon "augment reality" by providing information from the Internet in real time, predicted Intel CEO Paul Otellini at the Consumer Electronics Show. He said that devices will become location-aware and will provide access to the Internet over WiMax wireless connections. "Instead of going to the Internet, the Internet comes to us," Otellini said. "We need a ubiquitous, wireless broadband infrastructure. Eventually we will blanket the globe in wireless broadband connectivity." Otellini said his future will require exponentially more powerful processors that use less and less power, which will require breakthroughs in chip development. At CES, Intel unveiled a range of new processors, including chips for "mobile Internet devices," which Otellini said will be able to deliver the Internet "with no compromises," and will be only slightly larger than mobile phones, but are expected to shrink in size by a factor of four within two years.

Wikia Search

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' latest brainchild is Wikia Search, a for-profit search engine that Wales says he launched partly to make a political statement that supports open source. He views it as unhealthy that a small group of players control the flow of all search engine traffic, a model that is inconsistent with the traditional open Internet. As with Wikipedia, Wikia Search's content will be provided by thousands of volunteer contributors, and Wales says the software and data will be released under a free license. "We have open-source software and cheap commodity computers in an open, neutral setting so that people can innovate very cheaply," he says, adding that this allows people to experiment and perhaps make search a ubiquitous infrastructure component. Wales anticipates that many organizations will build their own search engine services thanks to the software's availability on an open platform, and he says the trick to persuading people to use Wikia Search is delivering quality and a search experience that is at least as good if not better than their preferred search engine. "Because we are putting all the software out there in an open-source fashion, we expect in some ways to generate our own competition," Wales says. Wikia Search has received $14 million in financing, and Wales says it will be funded via an advertising business model. He says Wikia Search volunteers sign in with their user account, and they can build a profile, connect to friends, send messages, and perform other social networking activities.

Software Development

Specialist software developers are less in demand than versatile generalists as applications become more sophisticated and complex. "In the old days, applications were often standalone," notes Corticon Technology executive David Straus. "Today we are trying to develop applications into component services which are orchestrated by some [software] layer. We want these components to be reusable and well orchestrated." Trends are unfolding in the three biggest integrated development environments--NetBeans, Eclipse, and Visual Studio--that are easing the accommodation of different data types, the establishment of connections with an assortment of SQL databases, and the masking of the complexity of esoteric SQL syntax so that working visually with tables and rows, or even with higher-level entities, is possible. "While broader database and middle-tier skills are a big plus for a developer, in addition to expertise in the presentation layer, the [database administrator] as a specialty is still a necessary ingredient for architecturally complex projects," says RTTS division manager Jeff Bocarsly. "It might be good to have players who can cover either shortstop or left field on the team, but your closer is still going to be your closer."

Driverless Cars

General Motors predicts that consumers will be able to buy vehicles that drive and park themselves within a decade. The necessary technology, such as radar-based cruise control, motion sensors, lane-change warning devices, electronic stability control, and satellite-based digital mapping already exists. Stanford University computer science professor Sebastian Thrun agrees that the driverless car is a technically attainable goal, but he is unsure if the automaker will have any vehicles in its showrooms in a decade. "There's some very fundamental, basic regulations in the way of that vision in many countries," Thrun says. He notes that the technology has a long way to go, considering one vehicle in the recent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Urban Challenge nearly charged a building and another pulled into a house carport and parked itself. The contest initially drew 35 teams, but only six completed the 60-mile course, and Thrun's team took second place.

Natural User Interface

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates predicts that they way people interact with computers will change dramatically over the next five years, with mice and keyboards giving way to touch, vision, and speech interfaces. "This whole idea of what I call natural user interface is really redefining the experience," Gates says. "We're adding the ability to touch and directly manipulate, we're adding vision so the computer can see what you're doing, we're adding the pen, we're adding speech." As examples of the future of user interfaces, Gates pointed to the Microsoft Surface computer, a large table-like machine with a multi-touch interface on the surface, as well as the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii game console. "I'll be brave, in five years we'll have many tens of million of people sitting browsing their photos, browsing their music, organizing their lives using this type of touch interface," Gates says. He says that although his company has made some mistakes over the years, he says Microsoft will surprise people with what it plans to do in the search area. Gates also supports Vista, noting Microsoft has sold 100 million licenses for the operating system.