Digital Doomsday

In the event of a disaster that destroys the vast majority of the world, humanity's legacy will largely reside on data stored on hard drives. However, hard drives were never meant for long-term storage and no one can be sure how long they will last. The Canadian Conservation Institute's (CCI's) Joe Iraci says that although the most important data is backed up on magnetic tapes or optical discs, these formats cannot be trusted to last even five years. Iraci has conducted accelerated aging tests by exposing different forms of media to high heat and humidity. The tests found that the most reliable data storage devices are recordable CDs with a reflective layer of gold and a phthalocyanine dye layer. Many experts believe that after a major catastrophe only information that is written on paper will survive. "Even the worst kind of paper can last more than 100 years," says the CCI's Season Tse. Proposals to make a paper format that can store digital data for centuries using a system similar to bar codes have been slowed due to a lack of commercial interest. Another option is the Rosetta Disk, which holds descriptions and texts of 1,000 languages. The Rosetta Disk is made out of nickel, etched with text that is only readable at 1,000 times magnification. Each disk holds about 30,000 pages of text or images.

Latest Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Research

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed Sikuli, a system that enables computer users to write programs using screen shots of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The researchers say that Sikuli could allow novice computer users to create their own programs without having to master a programming language. Sikuli was designed by MIT professor Rob Miller and graduate student Tsung-Hsiang Chang, and the University of Maryland's Tom Yeh. The researchers won the best-student-paper award at ACM's recent User Interface Software and Technology conference. The paper described how Sikuli can build short programs that aid other, larger programs. Sikuli uses computer vision algorithms to analyze the computer screen and can work with any program that has a graphical interface. Another Sikuli application lets programmers who are working on large software development projects create scripts that automatically test an application's GUI components.

Thought Controlled Technology

Researchers are developing technology that would enable people to control electronic devices using only their thoughts. The technology uses software that can analyze and interpret patterns in the brain's electrical activity when people think about specific words or actions. "If we could access the global information network simply by using the power of our thoughts, it would open up incredible new opportunities for computing technology," says Intel's Dean Pomerleau, who has been working with Carnegie Mellon University researchers to study brain patterns. The U.S. Army is working with University of California, Irvine researchers to study how to harness brain waves to send nonverbal messages in battle. Meanwhile, Mayo Clinic researchers think thoughts can be read faster by placing sensors inside the skull. The Mayo Clinic's Jerry Shih says that one day people's brains could be implanted with microchips similar to those used for personal computers. Already, University of Southern California researchers have implanted chips into the brains of rats to try to study ways to boost memory, with applications for Alzheimer's patients in mind.

International Internet Classroom

University of Arizona (UA) researchers are developing the International Internet Classroom as a way to help teachers access information and teaching resources. The project will use artificial intelligence and user-generated data to create pertinent educational resources. The UA team plans to release a Unit Package Editor in February 2010 to a small test group of teachers. The tool will enable teachers to build and share collections of educational resources such as lectures, exercises, homework assignments, and videos. "Just about every single educational idea is out there, and we want to make it easy to develop and to share that information," says UA computer science department head Paul Cohen. A similar project, called eTwinning, already exists in Europe and has about 74,000 members and 3,980 active projects for teachers to use. The service connects educators from European Union countries. International collaboration among students is very important, as educators in other countries have realized, while U.S. teachers seem to fight global educating efforts, says Alan November, an international education consultant. As part of the UA project, a survey of U.S. educators was developed to determine how they use Internet-based resources. According to the survey, teachers use tools such as Wikipedia, Discovery Education, and YouTube, as well as search engines such as Google and Yahoo, to locate educational resources.

Do Computers Understand Art?

Researchers from the University of Girona and the Max Planck Institute have demonstrated that certain mathematical algorithms can offer clues about a painting's artistic style, although this is still a far cry from human-like artistic interpretation. The research team has shown that some artificial vision algorithms mean a computer can be programmed to "understand" an image and distinguish artistic styles based on low-level pictorial data, which covers such aspects as brush thickness, the type of material, and the composition of the color palette. Medium-level information encompasses differentiation between certain objects and scenes appearing in an image, as well as the type of painting. High-level information accounts for the historical context as well as knowledge of the artists and artistic trends. "It will never be possible to precisely determine mathematically an artistic period nor to measure the human response to a work of art, but we can look for trends," says study co-author Miquel Feixas. The researchers' analysis of various artificial vision algorithms used for art classification discovered that certain aesthetic measurements--calculating the order of the image by examining pixels and color distribution--along with the composition and diversity of the color palette, can be helpful. The researchers plan to apply their work to the development of image viewing and analysis tools, the classification of and search for museum collections, the creation of public informative and entertainment gear, and a better understanding of the interplay between people, computers, and works of art.

Learning Programming From Scratch

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Mitchel Resnick and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab have enjoyed great success with Scratch, a computer programming language geared toward children ages eight to 16. Scratch users write code by connecting graphical blocks together. Concurrent with the launch of Scratch two years ago was the rollout of the Scratch Web site, where programmers can publish their Scratch projects online and share them with others. Nearly 800,000 projects have been uploaded to the site since its launch, and the site has nurtured an online community that enables sharing and collaboration on Scratch projects. Resnick's motivation behind Scratch's creation was to make programming fun for kids as part of an effort to get young people more interested in computer science as well as achieve fluency in digital technologies. Resnick and his team believe Scratch is an important tool through which computer science concepts can be introduced to students. The team is creating support materials and cooperating with educators on the best way to use Scratch in the classroom. Resnick believes that digital fluency is becoming increasingly essential for many careers, including those that are outside of technology, such as the creative arts. He notes, for example, that Scratch is being used in English courses as a tool to help produce book reports.

Microsoft's Vision of Computing

Over the next 10 years, how people interact with computers will evolve drastically, with hand gesture controls becoming as common as keyboards, and file selection being determined by eye scans instead of mouse movements, predicts Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie. "Today, most people's interaction is through a screen--whether they touch it, type it, point or click, it's still just graphical user interface," Mundie says. "While that's very powerful and has a lot of applicability, I think it will be supplemented in dramatic ways by what we call a natural user interface." He says computers will soon be able to emulate the human senses of sight, hearing, speech, touch, and gesture, and combine them in multiple ways for people to interact with machines. The interactivity revolution will be fueled by new multiprocessor computers, which are expected to be widely available by 2012. Mundie says these new processors should provide a major performance gain, with some performances increasing by a factor of 100. One of the first major commercial applications of the new interface technology is expected to be released next year when Microsoft launches its new line of Xbox gaming consoles, which will completely eliminate the need for handheld controllers. Mundie says the new gaming interface enables players to move and use gesture controls, with the system calculating in real time the angular position of the 22 major joints in the body. Mundie envisions a day when users will simply be able to talk to their computers about solving problems. "You should be able to describe the problem or the policy you want and the computer should be able to somehow implement that," he says.