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.