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In the Comments
No offense, but you all are showing your age. No one under 30 takes Facebook all that seriously, and they certainly don’t expect privacy & security. The entire site is a high tech freshman mixer — nothing more. --Mike
Facebook Goes Back to 'Schools'
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August 27, 2008
High-Stakes DICE Roll From San Diego to Chapel Hill
Updated August 27, 2008 at 6 p.m.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is crowing about a faculty and research coup: It has captured the Data Intensive Cyber Environments group, known as DICE, from the University of California at San Diego’s Supercomputer Center. The new East Coasters consist of 10 people, including a star computer scientist, Reagan Moore.
An additional four DICE members are remaining in San Diego, at the university’s Institute for Neural Computation, said Jose-Marie Grifffiths, dean of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, the group’s new home base. All 14 members, however, voted to make the switch, Ms. Griffiths said.
The DICE group has garnered a world-class reputation for open-source software that allows data sharing among researchers, publication in digital libraries, and preservation of data in archives. The group’s members are working on research projects currently financed at more than $10-million.
The team has developed data-management systems that spread big computer projects among many machines, including systems for the Southern California Earthquake Center, the TeraGrid, the Worldwide University Network, and the California Digital Library-Digital Preservation Repository.
Mr. Moore and two other principal investigators will have tenured faculty positions at North Carolina. They and the other DICE members will continue to focus on ways to organize the deluge of data now being created in a number of disciplines by scientists and scholars — scientists and scholars who have discovered that while computers are great at producing information, organizing it is another matter altogether. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Wednesday August 27, 2008 | Permalink | CommentAugust 12, 2008
Java Jive
Java is the most popular computer-programming language in the world, according to analysts who tracks such matters. So it should be a staple of every college computer-science program, right?
Not so fast, says Robert Dewar, an emeritus professor of computer science at New York University. In an interview with InternetNews, Mr. Dewar lays out the case against Java: Students can rely heavily on the language’s libraries of pre-written code, he argues, so they’re not necessarily developing advanced programming skills.
In fact, Mr. Dewar paints a fairly grim view of computer-science programs. Department heads are worried by dropping enrollments, he says, so they have simplified their courses in an attempt to win students back. The problem, Mr. Dewar goes on to say, is that a computer-science degree facilitated with Java shortcuts isn’t as valuable as one achieved through more intensive training.
Does your institution put Java at the core of its computer-science training? Is Mr. Dewar right to worry about the language’s instructional value? —Brock Read
August 4, 2008
Sonoma State U. Students Learn to Create Computer Viruses
Students at Sonoma State University learn how to create computer viruses, worms, and other malicious code in a controversial class taught by George Ledin, a professor of computer science. An article last week in Newsweek says anti-virus software manufacturers are irked by the professor’s class and some have vowed not to hire his students when they graduate.
According to the article, Mr. Ledin has been likened to A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold nuclear technology to North Korea. But Mr. Ledin says he’s performing a service, helping his students develop antidotes to computer viruses by teaching them to think like hackers. His students work on closed networks from which viruses can’t escape.
Mr. Ledin argues that anti-virus software produced by McAfee, Symantec, and other companies is ineffective. In this two-minute video he says that telling a computer user to rely on these products is akin to a physician advising a patient to take a couple of aspirin and call in the morning.
Mr. Ledin’s class recalls a similar class taught at the University of Calgary by John Aycock, an associate professor of computer science. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday August 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]July 30, 2008
An Interdisciplinary Vision of Computer Science
Richard A. DeMillo is stepping down as dean of Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing. During his six-year tenure at the college, Mr. DeMillo expanded the college’s research funds by 60 percent and increased the number of faculty members by 40 percent. A former chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard, Mr. DeMillo plans to write technology books after he leaves the dean’s office November 1. Then he will return to the university to teach computing and management.
Q. You told Cox News Service that your decision to resign was prompted by disagreements with the university’s provost. Can you elaborate?
A. Any questions about what the provost’s perceptions might be need to be addressed to him. I’m in the dark about that.
Q. What was your next big priority for the college of computing?
A. We’ve been working on establishing schools in biomedical informatics and information science. Those are still in the development stage.
Q. What are the technology books you’re writing?
A. One is a book with a business focus. I’ve helped foster three or four business revolutions. The most recent was the merger of HP with Compaq. In each of those transformations there’s a technologist’s story to be told. The second book will probably be a textbook about Web science.
Q. What areas will you focus on as a professor?
A. On the management side I’m going to be focused on technology innovation, from defining and incubating small companies to innovation in large organizations. My computing interest is in areas like Web science. One of the things that attracts me to spanning both areas is the chance to put programs in place that really bridge computing and business in interesting ways.
Q. What kind of person would be best qualified to take your place?
A. My preference would be to have someone with strong leadership skills that would continue along the direction that we’ve started, very externally focused, an interdisciplinary person who has a real passion for helping the country define the boundaries of computing.
Q. Why is computer science attracting more interest among students?
A. Georgia Tech had a role in that. We started redefining what computer science meant when the dot-com bust was hitting academic computer-science departments. One of our real accomplishments was to get the Computing Research Association to form a subcommittee on computing education.—-Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wednesday July 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]GENI Project Gets Slice of Internet2's Network for Experiments
The leaders of Internet2 are lending a hand to what could be called “Internet 3.” The Internet2 advanced research project, a consortium of colleges and others, announced this week that it will loan a small part of its network backbone to GENI, a research project hoping to design an updated replacement for the current Internet.
This doesn’t mean your course Web pages will load faster anytime soon. GENI’s leaders are still deciding what kind of approach they should take to building a replacement Internet. And then they’ll most likely build an even bigger experimental network to test their ideas, which, if they work, could be incorporated into a new network. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday July 30, 2008 | Permalink | CommentJuly 17, 2008
Computer-Science Courses Attract More Students
For years academics have been reading about declining enrollment in computer science courses. But Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, reports on the Computing Community Consortium blog that interest in the field is now growing, even though the number of bachelor’s degrees granted in computer science this year was less than last year.
“It’s not surprising that things are turning around,” he writes. “Google is hot. Tech in general is hot. There are startups everywhere. It’s clear to anyone that there are plenty of jobs.”
At Washington, the number of students who enrolled in the university’s introductory computer-science course increased by 27 percent between the 2003-4 and 2007-8 academic years, he writes. Enrollment by women was up by 45 percent during the same period.—Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Thursday July 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]July 7, 2008
New Ways to Connect Data, Computers, and People
Edward Seidel, an astrophysicist, will lead the National Science Foundation’s efforts to advance computer science by exploring new ways to connect data, computers, and people starting this September. He says Cyberinfrastructure, or CI — which forges these connections — is necessary for success in industry and academe.
The CI office awards competitive grants to researchers who are doing pathbreaking computer-science work. The office also oversees advances in supercomputing, high-speed networking, data storage, and software development on a national level. Mr. Seidel comes to the foundation from Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, where he directs the Center for Computation & Technology.
Q. What are your priorities for advancing the foundation’s CI vision?
A. Developing a CI-savvy work force is perhaps the most important long-term investment that needs to be made. We face a critical shortage of computationally skilled researchers and staff to support them. Increasing the number of researchers who understand the importance of CI and how it can transform their fields is just as important as increasing budgets and deploying equipment that becomes obsolete in a few short years.
Q. Are some scientific disciplines better suited to promoting CI than others?
A. Atmospheric research, astrophysics, and fluid dynamics have been early drivers of CI development. At present, absolutely all areas of research, education, and industry are being transformed by advances in CI.
Q. How does the U.S. CI program stack up against programs in other countries?
A. The U.S. has been the leader in development and application of computing to advance science. On the other hand, CI is much broader than supercomputing systems, encompassing software, application development, networks, data, analysis, visualization, algorithms, and so on. In some of these areas, the U.S. can learn much from efforts around the world, especially in Europe and Asia.
Q. What are the greatest opportunities for international collaboration in CI?
A. We need to assemble teams with different kinds of expertise needed to attack complex problems, for example in climate, geosciences, astrophysics. You name it.
Q. What can individual universities do to support CI development?
A. Universities need to hire more faculty who use CI to advance their disciplines. Consider developing local training courses in computational science and the use of CI, and participate in national training events. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday July 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]May 1, 2008
Purdue U. Installs New Supercomputer -- in One Day
In a feat of electronic “barn-raising,” 200 people will install a new supercomputer at Purdue University in a single day.
The machine will be the size of a semi trailer when it is installed, on May 5, and it will be able to perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second. It would rank in the top 40 of the current Top 500 list of most powerful supercomputers in the world.
To stoke campus involvement in the installation of the new machine (named “Steele” after a former faculty member), organizers created a movie trailer called “Installation Day,” a parody of “Independence Day.” Here it is:
—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Thursday May 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]February 14, 2008
Ohio Unveils 9th-Fastest Academic Supercomputer
The Ohio Supercomputer Center held a dedication ceremony this week for its newest supercomputer, an IBM Opteron Cluster 1350. The machine, which performs 17 trillion calculations per second, is expected to assist in the development of scientific and industrial applications in fields like energy, biosciences, defense, and aerospace. The machine is the ninth fastest among U.S. academic supercomputers.
Photo courtesy of the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
The machine is named Glenn after John Glenn, the astronaut and former senator. The above photo shows Stan Ahalt, executive director of the supercomputer center (center), with Annie and John Glenn. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Thursday February 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]January 29, 2008
Academic Group Convenes to Tackle Archiving of Digital Data
Preserving digital data is a costly and time-consuming task, especially when the amount of data keeps growing exponentially. A new group is tackling the problem with a two-year grant totaling $525,000 from the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Called the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation, the group is holding meetings in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss what it means to have an economically sustainable model for digital preservation, and various ways to achieve this.
The group is expected to issue two reports, one at the end of this year and one in 2009. Brian Lavoie, an economist who is a research scientist at the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, and Francine Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego, are heading up the task force.
They said Monday that they hoped to have an outline for the first report by the end of this week. Ms. Berman said she was particularly concerned about the lack of attention paid to preserving data from research financed by the federal government.
The task force is working with the Library of Congress, Britain’s Joint Information Systems Committee, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the National Archives and Records Administration.—-Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tuesday January 29, 2008 | Permalink |