YSU's ACM

ACM/IEEE Seek CC2001 Curriculum Recommendations
ACM Allan Apt (04/27/07)

The distressing drop in student enrollment in computer science throughout the U.S. has, in part, prompted the need to reevaluate the current CS curriculum. ACM and the IEEE are asking for industry feedback on the 2001 Computing Curriculum, hoping this insight will help better define the opportunities the field offers and draw more student interest. The recent plunge in student interest in computing has been accompanied by criticism of the relevance of the current curriculum to critical job skills. The ACM Education Board and the IEEE Computer Society are providing the opportunity for input with the launch of the Interim Review of the 2001 Computing Curriculum for Computer Science (CC2001). A Web site has been established to provide comments, criticisms, and, most importantly, contributions. The review period extends to June 30, 2007. In 2001 the Computer Science volume was published as the first in a series of five curriculum guidelines that became known as the Computing Curricula Series. To provide timely guidance in the fast-changing computing field, ACM and IEEE-CS directed that an interim review of each volume be conducted after approximately five years. A meeting open to members will also be held on May 11 at the Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, near Boulder, Colorado. Anyone wishing to attend (at their own expense) should send their request to Alan Apt, ACM Education Manager. ...more

Leadership Alliance Targets Minorities in Computing
HPC Wire (04/27/07)

The National Science Foundation awarded a three-year, $2 million grant to create the Empowering Leadership (EL) Alliance, a national alliance led by Rice University that will establish a nationwide network to engage underrepresented minority student in computing disciplines. The network, which will be composed of dozens of leading universities, professional societies, laboratories, research centers, and corporations, will strive to keep minority students interested in computing careers by providing them with research opportunities, professional development, and mentoring programs. “At universities across the country, we are seeing what I call the 'loss of the precious few.' Research shows that isolated, unsupported students of all kinds will leave and environment that does not meet their needs,” said Rice University professor Richard A. Tapia, director of the EL Alliance. “Students migrate to more welcoming degree programs and departments where they recognize that they have support, a vested interest, and a high probability of success. Those that do complete bachelor's degrees in the computing disciplines may have had such a painful journey that they are unlikely to consider graduate school, and another opportunity for diversifying our national leadership in computing and advanced technology has been lost.” To prevent the “loss of the precious few,” the EL Alliance will provide students with summer research opportunities with experienced and successful computer researches, mentoring, meetings with national leaders, professional development programs, career support, and online speaker series and meetings to discuss challenges and engage minority role models. ...more

Does Moore's Law Help or Hinder the PC Industry?
Extreme Tech Bryan Gardiner (04/24/07)

A discussion of Moore's Law by Gartner analysts Brian Gammage and Carl Claunch led to agreement that Moore's law is a key driver in the computer industry, but is also often misunderstood. Gammage attested that most people assume Moore's Law means that the speed and power of processors doubles every 18 to 24 months, when in actuality the law “is all about the density ... the density of those transistors, and not what we choose to do with it.” He said this increased transistor density has also accelerated replacement cycles for computers and servers, which many people feel is a negative trend for the PC industry because it saddles users with the cost burden. Claunch and Gammage agreed that computer suppliers are facing tighter prices and margins as a result of Moore's Law, with Claunch observing that the cost of doubling the number of transistors is not doubling concurrently every 18 to 24 months. One of the benefits Gammage saw as a result of Moore's Law was the creation of many jobs in the computer industry, while other advantages he cited include periodic innovation and agility in the industry, increased power efficiency, and the law's tendency to create a level playing field. On the other hand, Claunch cited electronic waste, a lack of replacement parts, excessive premium price tiers, and embedded CO2 from all the discarded computers as problems that possibly stem from Moore's Law. Claunch concluded the debate with the recommendation that Moore's Law not be perceived “as simply good or evil, but rather a mix of both.” ...more

Carnegie Mellon Unveils Internet-Controlled Robots That Anyone Can Build by Following the Right Recipe

PITTSBURGH--Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new series of robots that are simple enough for almost anyone to build with off-the-shelf parts, but are sophisticated machines that wirelessly connect to the Internet. The robots can take many forms, from a three-wheeled model with a mounted camera to a flower loaded with infrared sensors. They can be easily customized and their ability to wirelessly link to the Internet allows users to control and monitor their robots' actions from any Internet-connected computer in the world.

The new tools that make this possible are a single piece of hardware and a set of “recipes” that people follow to build their bots. Both are part of the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK) developed by Associate Professor of Robotics Illah Nourbakhsh and members of his Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab. Their goal is to make highly capable robots accessible and affordable for college and pre-college students, as well as anyone interested in robots. Unlike other educational robot kits on the market, TeRK is not sold as a complete set of parts. The CREATE Lab's recipes allow for a variety of robots to be built with parts commonly available through hardware and hobbyist outlets. At the heart of each TeRK robot is a unique controller called Qwerk that combines a computer with the software and electronics necessary to control the robot's motors, cameras and other devices. Qwerk, developed by the CREATE Lab and Charmed Labs of Austin, Texas, also connects the robot automatically and wirelessly to the Internet so it can be controlled by any Internet-connected computer. ...more

Where are the programmers?
EE Times Rick Merritt (03/12/2007 9:00 AM EDT)

The number of students pursuing computer science is on the decline just as researchers are being pressed to solve thorny problems in parallel programming for tomorrow's multicore processors. So said top researchers at Microsoft Corp. who gathered for an annual meeting here last week. Microsoft Research showed off a slew of its latest projects, from keyboards that recognize simple gestures to software that links sensor networks to PCs (see story, page 12). Just two of the programs discussed at TechFest 2007 addressed parallel programming for multicore processors, but researchers said much work on the topic is going on behind the scenes. Given the intractability of the problem, Microsoft executives acknowledged that progress is likely to be slow. And the cultural challenge of attracting more good people to computer science may be an equally high hurdle. more

What Programming Languages Should You Know?
By David Chisnall (Article is provided courtesy of Prentice Hall PTR. Mar 9, 2007)

The ability to use different languages when they suit the task at hand is a sign of a good coder. The more languages you learn, the easier it is to pick up a new one. Eventually, you start thinking of every new language as just a set of modifications to a language you know already. So what languages should you learn that will help you to quickly build up the set of basic concepts and let you pick up other languages easily? The rest of this article contains my answer to this question. Note that I'm not necessarily advocating using any of these languages for a real project, but I believe that learning them will make you a better programmer in whatever language you do use. more

Programming the Cell Processor: It may be tricky, but the performance gains are worth the effort
Dr. Dobbs Journal (03/09/07) Daniele Paolo Scarpazza, Oreste Villa, and Fabrizio Petrini

Thanks to nine processors on a single silicon die, the Cell Broadband Engine-a processor jointly designed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba and used in the PlayStation 3-promises lots of power. The good news is that the Cell is really fast: It provides enough computational power to replace a small high-performance cluster. The bad news is that it's difficult to program: Software that exploits the Cell's potential requires a development effort significantly greater than traditional platforms. If you expect to port your application efficiently to the Cell via recompilation or threads, think again.
In this article, we present strategies we've used to make a Breadth-First Search on graphs as fast as possible on the Cell, reaching a performance that's 22 times higher than Intel's Woodcrest, comparable to a 256-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer-and all this with just with a single Cell processor! Some techniques (loop unrolling, function inlining, SIMDization) are familiar; others (bulk synchronous parallelization, DMA traffic scheduling, overlapping of computation and transfers) are less so.
more

The Second Humanoid Robot in France
Robotics Trends (2/23/07)

The HOAP3 humanoid robot has just arrived at the Laboratory for Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics of Montpellier (LIRMM - CNRS - University of Montpellier 2). This platform supplements the one that was installed at the LAAS in Toulouse last June. They were both made in Japan and represent a strong robotics research potential for France. Research activities in the field of human robotics are expanding rapidly. The establishment of the JRL (Joint Japanese-French Robotics Laboratory) based in both Japan (Tsukuba) and France (Toulouse-LAAS and Montpellier-LIRMM) contributed strongly to the realization, reinforcement and dynamization of the robotics research community in this field. The two humanoid robots are at the core of JRL's research. The acquisition of HOAP3 by LIRMM, 50% co-financed by the CNRS, is part of this process. Within the framework of JRL-France, the LIRMM will thus offer the national community an open experimental platform for the validation of models or control methods contributing to ambulation and the handling of objects while maintaining balance. This 8.8 kg, 60 cm tall robot has 28 motorized articulations. It has a large number of sensors including accelerometers, rate gyros, an infra-red range finder, pressure sensors and two cameras. This unit is based around a completely open software platform (RTLinux) allowing all of the researchers interested to freely evaluate and test their new theoretical developments concerning the modeling, control, vision or learning of these. more

I, Robot; You, Human: IU Android Expert Guides Discussion in Science Journal
Indiana University (12/20/06)

Connection Science devotes its December issue to the possibilities of android science. The special issue of the journal addresses ideas such as whether more advanced human-like robots will one day have moral and legal rights that humans will have to respect. Karl F. MacDorman, associate professor at the School of Informatics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Lab at Osaka University, co-edit the issue. At the 2005 World Exposition in Aizu, Japan, they unveiled their android Repliee Q1Expo. "An android offers a good balance between experimental control and ecological validity because it looks more human than other devices and can support more humanlike interaction while still being precisely controllable, " MacDorman writes in the introductory editorial. The question of whether androids will be able to connect with people and form relationships is raised in an article written by MacDorman and the University of Hertfordshire's Stephen J. Cowley, while MIT's Sherry Turkle addresses the ethics of having people establish unauthentic relationships with robots. "The challenge today is to develop 'mindful' machines that use [physical] movements that can be experienced as expressions of purpose and intention" that androids can mimic, MacDorman and Cowley write. more

PS3 Considered a Supercomputer

The PS3 has a Cell processor. The Cell configuration has one Power processing element (PPE) on the core, with eight physical SPEs in silicon. In the PlayStation 3 one SPE is locked-out during the test process-a practice which helps to improve manufacturing yields-leaving seven SPEs operational in PS3 software. The relationship between cores and threads is a common source of confusion. The PPE core is dual threaded and manifests in software as two independent threads of execution while each active SPE manifests as a single thread. In the PlayStation 3 configuration as described by Sony, the Cell processor provides nine independent threads of execution. The target clock-frequency at introduction is 3.2�GHz. more

The PS3 can run Linux. Watch a video of PS3 running Fedora Linux. ...more

Torvalds: ‘Hot Air’ in Debates on GPL, Content Control
CNet (01/16/07) Kotadia, Munir

Linux creator Linus Torvalds does not think that the battle between General Public License (GPL) and Digital rights managements (DRM) will cause any harm to innovation, despite the arguments and hurt feelings. “People have strong opinions,” says Torvalds, who discounts any expectations of a messy conflict between DRM and GPLv3 advocates. However, he does have his preferences. He says, “One reason I really dislike DRM is that it is technologically an inferior solution to not doing DRM. It actually makes it harder for people to do what they want to do. It makes it harder to do things that you really should be able to do.” Despite his opinion, he claims that “I am a big believer in letting people do what they want,” but his own beliefs do “put [him] at odds with other people in the technical area who have an agenda that they want to drive.” He calls the release of GPLv3 a “watershed” event, since GPLv2 has been used in the open-source, free-software environment since 1991. Torvalds says he is not concerned with which technology or development methodology is superior, since he is confident that “good technology” will prevail. He claims to use open source because “it is fun. That is the most basic thing. I also happen to believe that it is the best way to, eventually, get the best end result. Part of that is the ‘eventually. ’. At any particular point in time, it may not always be the best thing right then.” more

EU Study Says Open Source Could Increase Competitiveness
Computer Business Review (01/15/07)

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) could be utilized to achieve the European Union's goal of making it the world's leading knowledge economy by 2010, concludes a new study. "Given Europe's historically lower ability to create new software businesses compared to the U.S., due to restricted venture capital and risk tolerance, the high share of European FLOSS developers provides a unique opportunity to create new software businesses," says the report, which was commissioned by the European Commission's Information Society Technologies program. FLOSS could also make up for low information and technology investment: A 20 percent to 40 percent increase in the FLOSS share of software investment could bring about a 0.1 percent rise in annual EU GDP growth, which is about a 10 million euro contribution. A survey by United Nations University and Maastricht University joint research and training center UNU-MERIT found that 63 percent of all FLOSS developers live in the EU, while only 20 percent live in the U.S. and Canada, and 42 percent of Sourceforge users are in Europe, while 39 percent are in the U.S., and 7 percent are in Asia. Europe's biggest challenge will be keeping these FLOSS developers in Europe; of those that do not live in their native country, 5 percent had left the U.S., while 26 percent had gone to the U.S. The ability to cultivate Floss-related companies may be the deciding factor in the competitiveness of the EU's information economy. more