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.