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.