Careers, People•
on January 21st, 2010•
From analyzing the contours of the ocean floor to protecting our financial systems from hackers, software is a vital part of the global economy. The men and women who understand the science of computers — computer scientists — will be critical to every industry for the foreseeable future. The career of computer scientist is crosscutting. Computer scientists can work across any of the in-demand fields, from biology to space science.
The general public sometimes confuses computer science with vocational areas that deal with computers (such as information technology), or think that it relates to their own experience of computers, which typically involves activities such as gaming, web-browsing, and word-processing. However, the focus of computer science is more on understanding the properties of the programs used to implement software such as games and web-browsers, and using that understanding to create new programs or improve existing ones.
Computer science deals with the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application. Computer science has many sub-fields; some, such as computer graphics, emphasize the computation of specific results, while others, such as computational complexity theory, study the properties of computational problems. Still others focus on the challenges in implementing computations. For example, programming language theory studies approaches to describing computations, while computer programming applies specific programming languages to solve specific computational problems, and human-computer interaction focuses on the challenges in making computers and computations useful, usable, and universally accessible to people.
While some computer scientists work for universities, pushing the theoretical boundaries of the science, others become Master Coders. Master Coders write software code with grace and beauty, mastering languages no less elegant than Chinese or Russian. They rule a world that is beyond the imagination of most. Their code and algorithms power all of the hardware that we touch: cars, smartphones and computers. It is their code that brings the greatest animated movies to life and makes our video games seem so real. Even floating digital clouds are brought to life by elegant algorithms.
When I was in high school, we had two choices if we wanted to study a “foreign” language: French and Spanish. Today, there is a new set of languages that should be studied by all students. “Students need to study programming languages to be literate in our increasingly technological society” commented Roderick Weldon Woodruff, Executive Director of the Urban Video Game Academy. Certainly not all students will become Master Coders, but some will be inspired at an early age and go on to push the boundaries of the science, protect us from hackers, and design the software that communicates with life across galaxies. It is a good idea to get your son or daughter involved in a digital arts, video game or computer-oriented summer camp at an early age.
If it isn’t obvious, I am humbled by what Master Coders can do. This article was inspired by a few Master Coders, who I am fortunate to count as friends: Alan Zander of TomoTherapy and Bill T. Becker of SiTEL. In the months to come, I will be interviewing each of them as they are role models for future generations of Master Coders.
If you want to get a glimpse into how they think, there is a great book that was published a few years ago by O’Reilly Media. Beautiful Code answers the question, “How do Master Coders solve difficult problems in software development?” In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts as they work through their project’s architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.
Written by Todd Borghesani
Education, Internet, People•
on December 21st, 2009•
Washington D.C. — With the coolness of a card shark at the final table of the World Series of Poker, Matt Bergin pulls the hood of his brown sweatshirt over his head and concentrates on the task at hand.
The task: hacking into as many target computers as he can and then defending those computers from attacks by other skilled hackers.
Other skilled hackers like Michael Coppola, 17, a high school senior who, at this very moment, is hunched over a keyboard in his Connecticut home. Or like Chris Benedict, 21, from the tiny town of Nauvoo, Illinois. Chris is sitting silently nearby, one of 15 “All Star” hackers who have taken over this spacious hotel conference room.
At days end, the moderator of this unusual computer challenge declares the best of the best: Benedict is the winner, king of the hacker hill, followed by Bergin and Coppola.
The trio — a job seeker, a grape distributor for a vineyard and a student — are precisely the type of people whom organizers of this event hoped to attract: young techies with perhaps little formal computer education who, nonetheless, could contribute to the defense of the nation’s networks. In many cases, organizers of the U.S. Cyber Challenge say, hackers’ skills go unrecognized or unappreciated by those around them and sometimes even by themselves.
“I thought that I would get demolished,” Benedict said. “I didn’t think I would get anything at all.”
Organizers say the competition is aimed at identifying young people with exceptional computer skills and inspiring them to join the country’s woefully understaffed ranks of cybersecurity specialists needed to protect systems used by the military, industry and everyday people.
Hackers may see the U.S. Cyber Challenge, which culminated last Thursday, as a game. But Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, an information security training institute, says it is really a national talent search.
And one that gives hackers an outlet not usually open to them.
“This is to capture kids that can be very good at this, whose only real option is to do illegal things with it because there’s no place to do it in school; there’s no place to do it legally,” Paller said. “This creates an environment where they can show their skills and advance their skills and do it in the nation’s interest rather than for other purposes.”
A high-stakes game. Former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell says the United States “will suffer a major catastrophic event” in the cyber arena if it doesn’t boost its ability to protect its computer infrastructure.
A terrorist or extremist group could attack the financial system in New York, destroying data to cause the loss of confidence in banking transactions, McConnell said. They could follow up with an attack on the power grid during a snowstorm. They could cause trains to collide and could release contaminants in the New York subway.
Imagine being a top hacker and working for the National Security Agency. The new command will at least initially be part of the Pentagon’s Strategic Command, which is responsible for computer-network security and other missions. The command is meant to begin working by October and to be fully operating by October 2010.
Are you THE ONE. The goal of the U.S. Cyber Challenge is to find and develop 10,000 cybersecurity specialists to help the U.S. regain the lead in cyberspace. But McConnell feels that even more is needed. He suggests legislation to create a National Security Act for cybereducation.
As our world increasingly becomes more dependent on the cyber world, we need a growing array of private companies, public infrastructure and top secret government experts to protect us. Could this be your future world?
Engineering, People, Science•
on December 20th, 2009•
Guess what’s on the U.S. Air Force’s wish list this holiday season. Sony’s popular PlayStation 3 gaming console. Thousands of them. The Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., recently issued a request for proposal indicating its intention to purchase 2,200 PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles.
But the military researchers don’t plan to play “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ or any of the season’s other blockbuster games. They plan to string the consoles together into a massive supercomputer and study how well they can enhance the military’s high-performance computing systems.
Once the researchers configured the hardware, they installed the Linux operating system on them, turning the gaming consoles into a military-grade supercomputer. Linderman said their first PS3 cluster was used in applications such as high-definition video processing and “neuromorphic” computing, which mimics the way the human brain perceives and processes images and information. When the new cluster of 2,200 PS3 consoles arrive in the next month or so, he said they will likely be used for similar projects.
Researchers Across the Country Harness Power of PlayStation 3. David Bader, a professor and executive director of high performance computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been involved in a number of projects involving PlayStation clusters.
When the PlayStation launched in 2006, he said, its processor far surpassed those of its generation. “Sony wanted a processor that they could use inside a game box that would be able to render the games but also incorporate real-world physics, emotion and really new aspects to game playing,” Bader said.
The same chip that enabled high-octane game play also powered Toshiba’s high-end HD TVs and technology created by IBM for oil and gas exploration.
At Georgia Tech, Bader has researched the possibility of using PS3 clusters in aircraft monitoring and financial risk assessment.
One project proposed using PlayStation 3 consoles on board commercial airplanes, he said. Consoles would not only provide in-flight entertainment for each passenger, but also serve as sensors around the aircraft that would alert the pilot to potential problems and failures.
Astrophysicists at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth are using a cluster of PS3 consoles to research gravitational waves and black holes. And even the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Cyber Crimes Center has used linked PS3s to solve Internet crimes.
Soon, you may be able to find information about almost any physical object with the click of a smartphone. Imagine working on augmented reality applications that change that way we use our intelligence; that augment our intelligence. Careers in this area include human computer interaction, computer science, computer vision and biomemetics.
This vision, once the stuff of science fiction, took a significant step forward this month when Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles. It allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google’s search engine.
How tall is that mountain on the horizon? Snap and get the answer. Who is the artist behind this painting? Snap and find out. What about that stadium in front of you? Snap and see a schedule of future games there.
Goggles, in essence, offers the promise to bridge the gap between the physical world and the Web.
Goggles is not the first application to try to create a link between the physical and virtual worlds via cellphones. A variety of so-called augmented-reality applications like World Surfer and Wikitude allow you to point your cellphone or its camera and find information about landmarks, restaurants and shops in front of you. Yet those applications typically rely on location data, matching information from maps with a cellphone’s GPS and compass data. Another class of applications reads bar codes to link objects or businesses with online information about them.
Goggles also uses location information to help identify objects, but its ability to recognize millions of images opens up new possibilities. “This is a big step forward in terms of making it work in all these different kinds of situations,” said Jason Hong, a professor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
When you snap a picture with Goggles, Google spends a few seconds analyzing the image, then sends it up to its vast “cloud” of computers and tries to match it against an index of more than a billion images. Google’s data centers distribute the image-matching problem among hundreds or even thousands of computers to return an answer quickly.
It’s not hard to imagine a slew of commercial applications for this technology. You could compare prices of a product online, learn how to operate that old water heater whose manual you have lost or find out about the environmental record of a certain brand of tuna. But Goggles and similar products could also tell the history of a building, help travelers get around in a foreign country or even help blind people navigate their surroundings.
It is also easy to think of scarier possibilities down the line. Google’s goal to recognize every image, of course, includes identifying people. Computer scientists say that it is much harder to identify faces than objects, but with the technology and computing power improving rapidly, improved facial recognition may not be far off.
Mr. Gundotra says that Google already has some facial-recognition capabilities, but that it has decided to turn them off in Goggles until privacy issues can be resolved. “We want to move with great discretion and thoughtfulness,” he said.
Find the original article posted on the NY Times
It takes a very unique team to bring a visionary’s imagination to life. Cameron, who has served as an adviser to NASA to investigate a camera for a Mars mission, is known for taking the science in his flicks very seriously. So how did he do?
Here we check on some of the movie’s scientific bona fides with top researchers in their respective fields to see where artistic license and scientific plausibility meld. As fantasy and reality are melded in CG worlds, the entertainment sector offers opportunities for computer scientists, artists, engineers, designers and scientists across all disciplines.
Technologies of Avatar: Amplified Mobility Platform
For work, combat and stomping through Pandora’s rainforest, humans gear up in Amplified Mobility Platform (AMP) suits. These armored exoskeletal vehicles are very similar to the Armored Personnel Units featured in The Matrix Revolutions and the power loader in Cameron’s own Aliens, but with an enclosed cockpit.
From this perch in the machine, the movements of a human operator’s arms and legs are translated to the suit’s exterior limbs and “amplified.” The operator swings his arm several inches, and the AMP’s corresponding giant metal arm scythes a 10-foot arc.
“The super hydraulics are all very strong so [the AMP suit] can crush buildings and do all the things that, like, a tank could do,” says Avatar vehicle designer Ty Ruben Ellingson in a promotional video. The Herculean strength granted to the AMP suit’s operator lets space marines tote giant 30-mm autocannons into battle as easily as one might carry a rifle. In further characterizing the AMP suit, John Rosengrant, design supervisor for Stan Winston Studios, says it’s “an Apache helicopter with legs.”
The Science: For decades, the U.S. military has been looking into powered exoskeleton suits that could let soldiers lug around heavy equipment—as well as bigger guns—while aiding in rescue work, construction and injury rehabilitation.
The Army’s research and development branch, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) issued various grants since 2000 under its Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation program, including funding for the Raytheon Sarcos team. Their machine, called XOS, weighs 150 pounds and fits around the wearer’s arms, legs and back.
This aluminum robot’s hydraulics allow the wearer to lift 200 pounds hundreds of times without tiring, yet the XOS suit remains nimble enough to allow the man-cum-machine to climb stairs or kick a soccer ball. The key hurdle for the Raytheon Sarcos device is independently powering it. For now, the XOS remains tethered to an external power source.
The World of Avatar: Alpha Centauri
The white-yellow glow of Alpha Centauri A, a star very similar to our Sun, illuminates the giant gaseous planet Polyphemus and its tropical moon Pandora. On this lush world, great beasts roam the jungles and pterodactyl-like creatures soar through the sky. A sentient, blue-skinned humanoid species known as the Na’vi has evolved here and learned to live in harmony with nature.
The Science: Alpha Centauri A is one of the three stars that make up Alpha Centauri, which is located 4.37 light years away, making it our solar system’s closest stellar neighbor. This proximity has inspired an intense hunt to reveal the exoplanets that could be right next door.
Last January, a team led by Yale astronomer Barbara Fischer began a five-year survey of Alpha Centauri using a 1.5-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. Her group is looking for rhythmic, telltale patterns in the wavelengths of a star’s light caused by the gravitational tugging of orbiting worlds.
This “wobble technique” has already ruled out the presence of Jupiter- or Saturn-scale exoplanets (like Polyphemus) around the Alpha Centauri stars. But “there’s a very good chance,” Fischer says, that planets with masses near that of Earth’s could grace this star system. “There’s still so much we don’t understand about planet formation around single stars,” Fischer says—let alone triple-star systems like Alpha Centauri. So in terms of what may be out there, “it’s almost an open slate.”
The orbital mechanics of the two stars at Alpha Centauri’s heart, often called Cen A and Cen B, indicate where planets are likely to reside. The stellar duo gravitationally tangos as close as 11 astronomical units (AUs, the average distance from the Sun to Earth) to each other before swinging as far apart as 36 AU. (The third star, a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri, circles this couple at a considerable distance and is too faint for Fischer’s team to study, but it could boast small planets, too.)
Given this setup, the orbits of exoplanets that formed 2 AU away and more from Cen A and Cen B would get destabilized by the other star and eventually get shot right out of the system, Fischer says.
Fortunately, if life has taken root in the Alpha Centauri system, it is not likely to suffer this fate. The habitable Goldilocks zone—the not-too-hot, not-too-cold orbital band where water can be liquid on a planet or a moon’s surface—is situated closer to both Cen A and Cen B. The former, a bit bigger than the Sun, has a Goldilocks zone of around 1.2 AUs out.
From Cen B, at about 90 percent of the Sun’s mass, this zone is found at about 0.75 AU. Since both stars are chemically similar to the Sun, the same general mixture of elements that allowed life to develop on Earth should have been available in the primordial soups of both Cen A and Cen B’s planetary brood.
For now, the jury is still out on whether the Alpha Centauri system has smaller, Earth-like worlds in life-friendly regions, but Fischer expects answers shortly. “By the end of year four [2012], we’ll really know,” she says. Meanwhile, other efforts led by famed planet-hunter Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva and a new initiative by the University of Canterbury in the United Kingdom may render the verdict even sooner.
For more on the science facts and science fiction in Avatar, read the full story on Popular Mechanics.
Science•
on December 8th, 2009•
Batteries made from plain copier paper could make for future energy storage that is truly paper thin. The approach relies on the use of carbon nanotubes – tiny cylinders of carbon – to collect electric charge. While small-scale nanotube batteries have been demonstrated before, the plain paper approach lends itself to making larger devices more cheaply.
The work, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to “paintable” energy storage.
Because of its structure of millions of tiny, interconnected fibres, paper is a good candidate to hold on to carbon nanotubes, providing a scaffold on which to build devices.
However, paper is also mechanically tough, and can be bent, curled or folded, more than the metal or plastic surfaces that are currently used or under development.
Read more of this story »
People•
on December 2nd, 2009•
The prize is $40,000, and it goes to the first person or group to determine the locations of 10 red balloons that can be anywhere in the continental United States.
The apparent frivolity of the challenge is only on the surface. This is not a game invented by some eccentric Web Midas. The contest, which takes place on Dec. 5, is being sponsored by Darpa, the Pentagon’s research agency.
The goal is to learn more about social behavior in computer networks and how large computer-connected teams use their resources and connections to compete.
There is also an invention being celebrated. Peter Lee, a computer scientist and one of the Darpa directors organizing the contest, said Dec. 5 would be the 40th anniversary of the day when the first four nodes of the Arpanet — the experimental military-sponsored computer network that was the forerunner of today’s Internet — were connected.
Darpa has previously sponsored three “grand challenges” in an effort to advance the technology for autonomous vehicles. In the second one, in 2005, a Stanford University team won $2 million when its roboticized Volkswagen Touareg was the quickest to navigate a 131-mile course through California desert.
The mission of the agency, created in 1958 after the Sputnik satellite’s launching, is to guard the country against technological surprise. But Darpa prompted concerns about privacy after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks when it created a program to use data-mining technologies to identify potential terrorists.
Dr. Lee said he was not certain what to expect in the tactics that teams might use to track down the balloons, which will be visible from public roadways for a single day. Some groups are developing software applications. Dr. Lee said he also expected large teams of spotters and even the possibility that some groups might use subterfuge like disseminating false information.
Other groups may try to pay for information, he said, noting that even during a brief experiment the agency ran with a balloon near its headquarters, information on the location was offered for sale on Craigslist.
Dr. Lee said the agency would continue to pursue a number of large and small challenge-style contests to foster what he described as new ways to tap into pools of talented individuals and creative groups. Contestants from anywhere in the world may participate in this contest, he said, and registration will stay open until the contest begins.
By JOHN MARKOFF