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.

Ten Emerging Technologies to Watch in 2010

The editors at EE Times have compiled a list of 10 emerging technologies to watch in 2010. First, biofeedback or thought-control of electronics could give people with disabilities, the military, and consumers new ways to control user interfaces. Second, the possibility of rapidly printing multiple conductive, insulating, and semiconductive layers to create electronics could significantly lower the cost of manufacturing electronics. Third, the development of plastic memory could lead to rewritable, non-volatile memory capable of retaining data for more than 10 years and one million cycles. Fourth, maskless lithography could be a spoiler in the effort to replace immersion lithography with extreme ultraviolet lithography. Fifth, parallel processing will become better understood and more widely used as initiatives such as OpenCL and Cuda expand the understanding of how multiple processors will be programmed and used for increased computational and power efficiency. Sixth, energy harvesting will increasingly be used in devices, such as vibration-powered wireless sensors on machinery or vehicles, or motion-powered mobile phones. Seventh, biology and technology will continue to merge, building off of devices such as under-the-skin tags for pets and heart pacemakers for humans. Eighth, resistive RAM, or the memristor, will continue to evolve. Ninth, the depth of the interconnect stack on top of the leading-edge silicon surface could lead to a splitting of front-end fab production into surface and local interconnect. Finally, various batter technologies will emerge to power an increasingly diverse number of devices.

Facebook Offers Poor Personal Data Protection

A study of Norwegian Internet users and social media found that people are willing to post their personal information on social media sites even when they are not aware how it will be used. Conducted by SINTEF for the Norwegian Consumers' Council, the researchers found that 60 percent of Norweigan Internet users are on Facebook. SINTEF's Petter Bae Brandtzaeg and Marika Luders conclude that Facebook offers relatively poor personal data protection due to the service itself, its design, the level of competence of its users, and their lack of awareness of how to protect themselves. "Facebook has become an important arena for social participation in our personal environment," Brandtzaeg says. "However, it is becoming ever more easy to gather and aggregate personal information, outside the control of users." Still, people are willing to post their personal information because so many other people use Facebook, and they rarely hear of unfortunate incidents. Respondents were usually not aware that Facebook uses personal information for commercial purposes, and their personal information also can be used against them, such as when they apply for a job. The researchers say that people and objects will be woven together ever more closely by the next wave of Internet media such as Google Wave and mobile smartphones. "This can make us even more vulnerable to failures of personal data protection," Luders says.

Google's Go Programming Language

Google has unveiled Go, a new programming language the company says offers the speed of working in a dynamic language such as Python and the performance and safety of a compiled language such as C or C++. "Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection," according to the Google Go team in a blog post. However, Google is not using the experimental language internally for production systems. Instead, Google is conducting experiments with Go as a candidate server environment. "The Go project was conceived to make it easier to write the kind of servers and other software Google uses internally, but the implementation isn't quite mature enough yet for large-scale production use," according to the FAQ on the Go language's Web site. With Go, developers should find builds to be spontaneous. Large binaries will compile in just a few seconds, and the code will run close to the speed of C. Go is the second programming environment Google has released this fall. In September, Google released Noop, a Java-like programming language.