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.