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June 30, 2009

Students and Faculty Members Are Among Competitors for $30-Million Space Prize

Robots could roam the Moon within the next three years, thanks to scientists and students across the world who are vying for the Google Lunar XPrize, a $30-million international competition to collect data and images with robots and send them back to the earth.

“The Moon is the hottest real estate in the solar system right now,” said William Pomerantz, senior director of space prizes at the XPrize Foundation, which is sponsoring the competition. “Every major space agency across the planet is looking to go back to the Moon, which means every university that has space research is focusing on the Moon.”

To win the prize, teams must safely land a robot on the Moon’s surface, travel at least 500 meters, and send a specified package of data, called a “Mooncast,” back to Earth. Mr. Pomerantz said the “Mooncast” would likely be one gigabyte, which translates to about 15 or 20 minutes of high-definition video and a collection of panoramic pictures.

The first team to complete that task by December 31, 2012, will win $20-million. The second team to land will win $5-million, and another $5-million will be awarded in bonus prizes. If no prize is claimed by the first deadline, teams will have until December 31, 2014, to claim a reduced prize of $15-million.

Mr. Pomerantz said the vehicles would be the first to land on the moon since 1976, and that the U.S. hadn’t seen any live or new surface data since 1972. “We’re hoping to show that these robots have capacities to show real scientific research,” Mr. Pomerantz said. “We want to inspire and educate people in same way Apollo did.”

Of the 19 teams, which must get at least 90 percent of their financing privately, several include groups of students or faculty members paired with researchers. About 30 universities are involved with the teams, Mr. Pomerantz said.

They include Omega Envoy, led by students at the University of Central Florida; Astrobotic, led by William L. Whittaker, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, with support from the University of Arizona; Stellar, whose team includes several faculty members from North Carolina State University and Duke University; Jurban, comprising researchers and a consortium of historically black colleges and universities; Italia, an effort by four Italian universities, and Independence–X Aerospace, which has a partnership with Malaysia’s MARA University of Technology.

“Tranquility Trek” is the name of the first mission for Astrobiotic, scheduled to begin in May 2011, and researchers plan to use the robot to inspect the historic Apollo 11 site. Team Jurban plans to launch September 12, 2011.

The competition is “a wonderful stepping stone as we try to move out further into the cosmos,” Mr. Pomerantz said. —Erica R. Hendry

Posted on Tuesday June 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]

An Unusual Attempt to Shape a High-Tech Future, Singularity U. Gets Under Way

Moffett Field, Calif. — An unusual new academic institution called Singularity University, run by a well-known entrepreneur and a futurist known for his claims that computers will soon outsmart human beings, welcomed its first class of students last night. But first the new students posed for a class picture and had a “spit party,” where they submitted saliva samples to have their DNA sequenced.

The premise of the university is that a range of technological fields — including nanotechnology, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence — are advancing more rapidly than many people realize. They’re accelerating exponentially, the university’s leaders argue, and so big changes may soon seem to sweep in all at once, even though initial developments happened less quickly.

The university’s goal is to train emerging leaders in business, government, and academe to prepare for what’s ahead — and possibly dream up a few new technological applications. The institution’s first program — a nine-week summer session — offers students a survey of the latest developments and trends in several high-tech disciplines, taught by experts from universities, government agencies, and technology companies. Classes are taking place at NASA’s Ames Research Center here, set in the heart of Silicon Valley. Google is a corporate sponsor, and the company gave every student a cellphone running the company’s Android operating system.

Peter Diamandis, the university’s founder, said at an opening ceremony on Monday that the institution is meant to supplement more-traditional options. “Today’s institutions of greater learning — where you go and get your doctorate degree — teach you to focus so narrowly,” he said. “Where do you learn to pull way back and think about the biggest issues on the planet? That’s what we hope to bring you here today. Not to compete with the great institutions out there but to give you a different way of thinking.”

Forty students were selected for the inaugural class, though leaders hope to expand that to 130 next summer. Tuition is $25,000 for the summer.

Mr. Diamandis modeled the institution on another one he created, the International Space University, a graduate-level training center to which NASA and other space agencies have sent students for 22 years.

For Singularity University, Mr. Diamandis teamed up with Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist who argues that by 2030, a moment — the “singularity” — will be reached when computers will outthink human brains.

Mr. Kurzweil goes further than many academic researchers in his predictions of what the future will look like — and how fast it will arrive. In his latest book, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, which he wrote with the physician Terry Grossman, he predicts that computers and human bodies will soon intermix, greatly extending lifespans. “Instead of repairing our genetic code, we will eventually be able to completely replace our DNA with microscopic computers whose code could be wirelessly reprogrammed to quickly address threats, such as a viral infection or cancer,” he wrote.

In an interview with The Chronicle on Monday, Mr. Kurzweil said that he believes such new technologies are sure to come, but that how they will be used is far from certain. “I think it’s important that people be aware of these exponentially growing information technologies and their power, for both promise and peril, so we can harness the former and control and harness the latter,” he said.

He seems as concerned about the dangers as he is excited by the promises. “We’re democratizing the tools of destruction, and there are things we can do about that, but we need to do them,” he said. “We are reprogramming biology away from heart disease and aging. But the same tools could be use by a bioterrorist to reprogram a virus to make it more deadly.”

“It’s potentially more dangerous than an atomic bomb, and the tools to do it are much more widespread,” he said. “It’s not so easy to create an atomic bomb — Iran still doesn’t have one. But the tools to create a bioengineered biological virus are in a typical college bioengineering laboratory.”

Several students and instructors said they were not here to enact Mr. Kurzweil’s visions. “We’re much more for the practical and pragmatic technologies that are five to 10 years out,” said Sterling Wright, a teaching fellow for the university.

Jessica Scorpio, a student from Canada who founded a nonprofit organization, said she sees “huge potentials” in emerging technologies and is hoping to find new ways to use them to help people. For her, the idea of a “singularity” is not her reason for attending, despite the university’s title. “If you call it ‘Emerging Technology University,’ that’s not a catchy title,” she said.

As for the “spit party” where students had their DNA analyzed, Ms. Scorpio said it was a good bonding experience, and a way to think about medical technologies on the horizon. “It was actually hard for me because I got a lot of bubbles in the tube, but you had to have nonbubbly saliva,” she said. —Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Tuesday June 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [8]

June 29, 2009

Microsoft Unveils New Research Tools at Its Annual TechFair

A number of new technologies in computer graphics, online searching, and workplace collaboration — many of which may soon become available to colleges and universities — were on display Wednesday at the Microsoft Research TechFair 2009, in Washington D.C.

Many of the 13 projects on exhibit — all of which are under development in Microsoft’s six worldwide labs — involved workplace communication and research. Project designers say the tools could help make academic collaboration, either between students and professors or among universities, much easier.

“Our goal really is, how can we further research, how can we further education, how can we really change the way people think about the work that they do?,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

Highlights from the fair included:

The Social Desktop
It’s easy to share a link to a Web site because of its URL, but there’s no way to link directly to items stored on a computer’s desktop, said Cezary Marcjan, principal software design engineer for Microsoft Research.

Mr. Marcjan’s project, Social Desktop, adds URLs to files and folders on a computer desktop, allowing other users to access them — and add comments or make changes — using any type of browser.

“Especially if people are using different operating systems, it becomes very, very hard,” Mr. Marcjans said. “This way, we can just publish this content and ask people for annotations, and we can collect those items on the desktop.”

Viveri: A Platform for Search Incubation
Scott Imig, a senior software-design engineer, calls Vivieri, Microsoft’s ongoing search-engine project, a “platform for new search ideas.” Vivierie collects content from multiple sites and can present that data in typical search-engine style or in a topic-specific form. Results from a general search may be listed or categorized by Web site, Mr. Imig said, but topic-specific searches can be represented as word clouds or other interactive features.

Mr. Imig also says researchers are experimenting with ways to use tools like OpenSearch and RSS to sort search results intelligently.

For highlights of the research behind other projects including Social Views of E-Mail and the Research Desktop, watch our video coverage of the fair:

—Erica R. Hendry

Posted on Monday June 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [4]

June 16, 2009

Springer Announces New Image-Searching Program

Springer Science and Business Media says it has created a new way for researchers and professors to search, download, and use its collection of 1.5 million images.

At the American Library Association’s conference next month, the company plans to introduce SpringerImages, a subscription service that will combine graphs, charts, drawings, and photos from books and journals published by the company and available on SpringerLink and Images.Md.

The new product will be able to search any text in the image, as well as its caption. Users will be able to edit the key words or tags corresponding to the image, and those with subscriptions to Springer’s online material will also find a link to the article. The new technology will make all images available for download in high resolution, and they can be sent to either a PowerPoint presentation or PDF document. They can be used freely, as long as there is no profit being made. Springer is looking for other image databases to incorporate, but only if the images will be available free.

While the company said the subscription cost for the image-searching software would be less than its print subscription, prices will vary depending on the customer’s institution size and whether the access to scientific images is full or limited. —Marc Beja

Posted on Tuesday June 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comment

June 15, 2009

Podcast: How Google Book Search Affects Academe

Depending on whom you ask, Google’s Book Search book-scanning project lays the foundation for a universal, digitized library or creates a dangerous monopoly on information. The Chronicle sat down with Adam Smith, director of product management at Google, to talk about Book Search, the proposed settlement in the authors-and-publishers lawsuit against it, what it means for academic authors and researchers and so-called orphan works, and fears of a Google monopoly. Listen to a podcast of the conversation. —Jennifer Howard

Posted on Monday June 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [2]

May 26, 2009

Paper Highlights Pros and Cons of Twittering at Academic Conferences

Professors are beginning to use Twitter at academic conferences to share proceedings with absent colleagues and to create an online “backchannel” for attendees, but the tool can also be distracting and detract from face-to-face communication at events.

Those were the basic findings of a survey of academics at five recent conferences, in research presented this month at the annual EduMedia Conference in Salzburg, Austria. The paper is titled “How People Are Using Twitter During Conferences.”

Though the findings may not surprise anyone who’s seen Twitter in action at recent scholarly events, the paper does provide a good overview and looks at the implications of microblogging for scholarly communication. Though the study’s sample size was small — just 41 people — one of them raised a word of caution not seen in many excited blog posts about the promise of Twitter. “Twitter can be distracting,” the respondent wrote. “For people actually there, they maybe spend more time with their computer or phone than talking to people.” —Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Tuesday May 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [5]

May 12, 2009

Physicist Set to Unveil 'WolframAlpha' Web Site, a New Kind of Research Helper

What if you could ask your encyclopedia to not only spit out facts, but to perform an analysis with those facts or compute the answers to a math problem for you? A free Web site set to go live this month promises to do just that, potentially becoming a virtual research assistant for professors — or a new way for students to cheat on their homework.

The new site, called WolframAlpha, seems bound to be a useful — and possibly controversial — tool on college campuses. The service will present users with a simple search box, as Google does. But WolframAlpha won’t just point to Web sites about what the user types; it will attempt to compute an answer based on its vast collection of facts and statistical-analysis software.

The hype for the service has been building all week, after a New York Times article called it “one of the most anticipated Web products of the year.”

The site is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and entrepreneur who is best known for creating Mathematica, number-crunching software popular with engineers and mathematicians.

The product is so new and different that the best way to get a sense of it is to watch a demonstration. Thankfully, Mr. Wolfram presented a sneak peek to researchers at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society late last month. A video of the talk is available online.

Professors at the event asked tough questions about the service. There are plenty of scientific issues that are unsettled, one attendee said, so how will the Web site deal with those? Mr. Wolfram said that the site would return footnotes on how it reached its solutions or might even offer users choices of which assumptions they want to use to get an answer.

Another asked who is the audience for the service — students working on homework or serious scientists? “The goal is to make expert-level knowledge accessible to anyone anywhere, anytime,” Mr. Wolfram said. —Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Tuesday May 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]

May 8, 2009

How Close Are Your Opinions to Nancy Pelosi's? OpinionSpace Knows.

During the 2008 election season, a “Purple America” map made the rounds on the Internet. Instead of showing a country divided into red and blue states, the map colored each voting precinct in shades ranging, usually, between red and blue.

Moving beyond simple divisions is what also drives OpinionSpace, which launched at the end of April from the Center for New Media at the University of California at Berkeley. Ken Goldberg, a professor at the university and director of the center, says that the project was “inspired by the discussion of party identity” in the 2008 election. It shows how close a person is to like-minded people who fill out a survey on the site.

The OpinionSpace site is a “visualization of opinions,” Mr. Goldberg says. To participate, you adjust sliders to show the degree to which you agree or disagree with five political statements. Recent statements included “Torture is justifiable if it prevents a terrorist attack” and “Gasoline at $0.99 a gallon would be good for Americans.” You can also comment on an open-ended discussion question.

The visualization part comes when “we compute a ‘projection’ of answers into our opinion space, which is a ‘night sky’ metaphor” with individuals shown as stars in the sky, Mr. Goldeberg says.

OpinionSpace uses its own scoring system to place other peoples’ stars closer or farther away based on how they agree as the five “dimensions” of your slider answers. You can click on other stars to read each person’s response to the open-ended question. OpinionSpace includes “landmarks,” or the projections of where public political figures such as Nancy Pelosi might stand (or twinkle).

The site builds on an algorithm Mr. Goldberg helped develop for Jester, a joke-recommending web site.

Mr. Goldberg hopes to learn more about how opinions can be expressed, and what this could mean for an era of “participatory democracy”. He says his team is already collecting interesting ideas from the 14,000 people who have used OpinionSpace.

And furthering the cause of participatory democracy, OpinionSpace will be open-source, meaning the software code will be available for those who wish to tinker, on the SourceForge site. —Dan Turner

Posted on Friday May 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [14]

May 5, 2009

Georgia Tech Plays Video Games to Save Journalism

Ian Bogost, the primary investigator of the Journalism and Games project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has found the question of how journalism and games intersect to be “much bigger than I originally thought.”

Mr. Bogost, an associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, teaches in the undergraduate Media Computation and the graduate Digital Media programs. He is also a founding partner at video game developer Persuasive Games.

His goal is to investigate how video games can work within, and perhaps help rescue, the ailing field of journalism. His graduate students ask questions such as: Is there anything in the game-development process that could be applied to the practice of journalism? Can games be used to make an editorial statement? Can the lauded “citizen journalism” model be considered a game and managed as such? Would it help bring new life to a failing industry?

“If we wanted to design games to interact with journalism” — such as building one with storytelling resources that could be leveraged into longer-form articles and investigative reports, for example, or one that would explore the next equivalent of adding a crossword puzzle to raise sales — “how would one go about doing it?” Mr. Bogost said.

Mr. Bogost founded Persuasive Games, and wrote a book of the same title, to show how games can make arguments. Video games, he argued, can be a new form of rhetoric through rule-based procedures and interactions. This interactive medium can teach, cajole, challenge, and collect information.

Using this concept of games as both a medium and a tool, Mr. Bogost centered the Journalism and Games project to explore what each area has to contribute to the other, he said. And the answer may be nothing, he added. But given the number of newspaper closures and downsizings recently, he hopes to contribute something positive. —Dan Turner

Posted on Tuesday May 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [3]

May 4, 2009

Should Computer Scientists Make Social-Networking Research a Higher Priority?

Facebook and Wikipedia are just the beginning. The real power of social networks will be showcased by projects that unite far-flung participants to help track disease outbreaks, revolutionize neighborhood-watch programs, encourage energy conservation, and serve other civic and community goals, according to a group of researchers calling for greater government and university investment in social networking.

More than a dozen researchers met at the University of Maryland at College Park last week to draft a white paper calling for the creation of “a National Initiative for Social Participation.” They argue that computer-science programs at universities and federal agencies need to move faster to support research into social-networking technology, which they see as the next frontier of innovation.

Not everyone in higher education sees Wikipedia as a model of quality, of course. Many professors have criticized the online encyclopedia, which anyone can change and add to, as being too prone to errors and vandalism. The idea of using a “crowdsourcing” approach to share health information or crime reports is likely to run into plenty of controversy. (See the full article in today’s online edition of The Chronicle.)

Should researchers be doing more work on social networking? —Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Monday May 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]

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