science wire

Software Developer Combines Technology Skills With Journalism in New Dual-Degree Program
Over the course of a six-year career designing online banking software for the British financial firm HSBC, Rashmi Raman would often find herself trolling the Columbia Journalism School website and dreaming of the possibilities.

Alexander Vardy Named First Jack Keil Wolf Chair in Electrical Engineering
Electrical engineering Professor Alexander Vardy, a renowned researcher in information and coding theory, has been appointed as the first Jack Keil Wolf Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

Yale science outreach: Inspiring the next generation of scientists
At age 14, Michael Wilner knew he wanted a career in forensic science. In addition to his studies at New Haven's Hill Regional Career High School, he wanted a rigorous, hands-on experience to help him determine if working in a lab was truly right for him.

Mathematics of Popping Bubbles in a Foam
Written By Robert Sanders Bubble baths and soapy dishwater, the refreshing head on a beer and the luscious froth on a cappuccino.

XSEDE13 Conference to Devote Full Day to Biosciences
San Diego, SoCal Biotech Companies Invited to Attend July 24 Event A panel of distinguished experts will discuss the role of computation and data analytics in supporting discovery throughout the b

Rich data for rural communities
New database compiled by UAlberta researchers helps Canada's rural communities plan for a sustainable future.

Designs on the mind
Part classroom, part carnival, Design & Project Fair showcases diversity of creative work at SEAS Jamie Song '13 ( right ) strummed the invisible strings of a laser harp she designed with Doug Bright '13 ( left ) and their classmate Thomas Esch ( not pictured ).

Momentum builds for campus research computing
Faced with computing infrastructure limitations that might stymie researchers elsewhere, UW-Madison scientists and investigators have always found ways to do more with less.

Bonding with your virtual self may alter your actual perceptions
PARIS - When people create and modify their virtual reality avatars, the hardships faced by their alter egos can influence how they perceive virtual environments, according to researchers.

People may welcome talking tissue boxes and other smart objects
PARIS - Just as people have embraced computers and smart phones, they may also give their blessing to talking tissue boxes and other smart objects, according to Penn State researchers. "Smart objects will become more and more a part of our daily lives," said S. Shyam Sundar , Distinguished Professor of and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory.

Finding a gecko in the crowd
A combination of crowdsourcing and computer vision could identify individuals within endangered populations. Keeping track of individuals in an endangered population of animals is a cumbersome and time-consuming task. Conservationists physically tag animals in the wild to better follow them over time.

Largest-ever gathering of robots and their creators
The robots came in all shapes and sizes to crawl, swim and fly at University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) and York University. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council held its Canadian Field Robotics Network (NCFRN) field trials at U of'T and York April 17–23.

La Cueva High School team takes top award in 23rd New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge

UC San Diego Launches Groundbreaking Policy Research Lab
$1.5 million USAID award to fund interdisciplinary projects dedicated to the design and evaluation of public policy How can we alleviate poverty?

Robot hands gain a gentler touch
Inexpensive tactile sensing technology builds on tiny barometer chips that are widely available : Caroline Perry , (617) 496-1351 An 8x5 tactile array provides gram-level sensitivity in hardware created from MEMS barometers and standard manufacturing processes.

SDSC Hosts First Annual Industry Partners Research Review
June 12 Event to Showcase SDSC's Advanced Computing Resources and Expertise The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego will host its first annual research

Digital mapping at Stanford reveals social networks of 18th-century travelers
Through a digital analysis of correspondence from travelers on the famed European "Grand Tour," classicist Giovanna Ceserani is discovering how international travel fostered cultural and academic trends in the 18th century.

Learning analytics at Stanford take huge leap forward with MOOCs
Stanford's Lytics Lab studies data from massive online courses to learn more about how we learn. The hottest thing about online learning might be the opportunity it affords for learning about how people learn.

New software could alleviate wireless traffic
ANN ARBOR-The explosive popularity of wireless devices-from WiFi laptops to Bluetooth headsets to ZigBee sensor nodes-is increasingly clogging the airwaves, resulting in dropped calls, wasted bandwidth and botched connections.

Researchers tunnel path from lab to real world
Thirty metres below street level, UAlberta engineers test tunnel-boring technology that could save construction time and money.

Penn State researching ways to improve computer speed, efficiency
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Remember when each new crop of computers was ever so much faster than the previous models? Well, those good-old days ended about five years ago when the accelerating rate of computing speeds crashed into the impenetrable wall of fundamental physics.

UC San Diego Computer Scientists Develop First-person Player Video Game that Teaches How to Program
Children learn some of the basic of Java after just one hour of play Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have developed an immersive, first-person player video game des

NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress announces partnerships with four national laboratories
Collaboration between NYU'S Center for Urban Science and Progress and the Department of Energy's laboratories is an indication of New York's growth in the science and technology industry.

SDSC’s Gordon Supercomputer Assists in Crunching Large Hadron Collider Data
UC San Diego/Open Science Grid Collaboration Speeds Quest for Dark Matter Discovery Gordon , the unique supercomputer launched last year by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, recently completed its most data-intensive task so far: rapidly processing raw data from almost one billion particle collisions as part of a project to help define the future research agenda for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Stanford to collaborate with edX to develop a free, open source online learning platform
EdX will be available as an open source learning platform on June 1. In support of that move, Stanford will integrate features of its existing Class2Go open source online learning platform into the edX platform.

Multidisciplinary Research Institute at UC San Diego Named in Honor of Qualcomm
The University of California, San Diego is renaming its division of the California Institute for Tele and Information Technology (Calit2) in honor of the philanthropy of the San Diego-based wireless technology leader, Qualcomm Incorporated.

New website offers one-stop resource for all things research at Stanford
Designed with the user in mind, the website offers easy access to a broad array of resources that support research and scholarly activities on campus.

UC San Diego Team Achieves Petaflop-Level Earthquake Simulations on GPU-Powered Supercomputers
The image shows a snapshot of ground motion of the 2008 magnitude-5.4 Chino Hills earthquake in an east-to-west direction; the red-yellow and green-blue colors depict the amplitude of shaking.

The grooviest words of medieval times
From hepcat to slacks, from right on to whassup, words and phrases have helped novelists and filmmakers evoke a particular time or place.

End of the road for Roadrunner
Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the once-elusive petaflop barrier-one million billion calculations per second-will be decommissioned on Sunday, March 31. Once the World's Fastest Supercomputer; Central to the Success of Stockpile Stewardship LOS ALAMOS, N. M., March 29, 2013—Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the once-elusive petaflop barrier—one million billion calculations per second—will be decommissioned on Sunday, March 31.

Meeting the Computing Challenges of Next-Generation Climate Models
Remember when a megabyte (10 6 bytes) seemed like a lot of data? Then a gigabyte (10 9 ) became routine.

New Book by Carnegie Mellon Roboticist Suggests Humans Brace Themselves for Robo-Innovation
Press Release: New Book by Carnegie Mellon Roboticist Suggests Humans Brace Themselves for Robo-Innovation-Carnegie Mellon News - Carnegie Mellon University "Robot Futures" Foresees Society That

Teachable moments: Robots learn our humanistic ways
Robots can observe human behavior and - like a human baby - deduce a reasonable approach to handling specific objects.

Robot meets world
A new way of reasoning about what happens when a robot's limb strikes an object could lead to more efficient and reliable robotic-control systems.

Viewing Research Bandwidth Through A New Prism
Currently there are 144 fibers tunneling into Atkinson Hall, and 36 fibers into the main 2,000-square-foot Calit2 server room, plus additional fiber into an adjacent room where Calit2 network research equipment is located.

Penn State team receives Google grant for app security
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - An international research team including Penn State computer engineers has received a $50,000 Google Faculty Research Award focusing on smartphone application security.

U of’T spinoff company launches tiny, smarter keyboard
For users of mobile, touchscreen devices it's an appealing idea: what if you could make a smarter, more accurate keyboard yet gain more space on your touchscreen?

Google acquires U of’T neural networks company
University Professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his graduate students from the Department of Computer Science have sold their start-up company to Google Inc.

Making cloud computing more efficient
For database-driven applications, new software could reduce hardware requirements by 95 percent while actually improving performance.

MIT ’cheetah’ robot rivals running animals in efficiency
Robot's custom-designed electric motors are powerful and efficient. A 70-pound "cheetah" robot designed by MIT researchers may soon outpace its animal counterparts in running efficiency: In treadmill tests, the researchers have found that the robot - about the size and weight of an actual cheetah - wastes very little energy as it trots continuously for up to an hour and a half at 5 mph.

FCC chairman to speak at MIT
Julius Genachowski will field questions on wireless spectrum policy during 'Fireside Chat' at Stata Center On Wednesday, March 6 at 4 p.m., Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the United States Fed

Dr. Michael Michalisin's study on use of new technology published
Michael Michalisin co-authored an article on new technology use for the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability. Michael D. Michalisin, professor of management and business program coordinator at Penn State Worthington Scranton, and two co-authors, recently published an article in the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability.

Hand over your email inbox to boost productivity, Stanford team says
Stanford Report, March 4, 2013 Users of the new research application EmailValet grew comfortable with sharing their inbox with remote assistants, who perused the emails to create to-do lists.

Teaching machines to see
How do we know if we're looking at the three-dimensional world or at a kind of trompe l'oeil image painted on the inside of a huge glass sphere?

‘Robot Combat League’ Stars Calit2’s Saura Naderi in ‘Fight to the Death’
Calit2 Outreach Coordinator Saura Naderi (left) and mixed martial arts fighter Amanda Lucas combine their talents to control Robo Hammer, one of the robot fighters in SyFy's "Robot Combat League."

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will be the 2013 Commencement speaker at Stanford

UC San Diego Computer Scientist Among Young Faculty Recipients of Sloan Research Fellowships
An expert in bioinformatics and computational mass spectrometry at the University of California, San Diego is among the 2013 crop of young faculty members identified by the Alfred P. Sloan Foun

Playing devil's advocate
Students study maps in the Red Cell Analytics Lab at Penn State's Information Sciences and Technology Building on the University Park campus.

Red Cell Lab offers realistic terrorism lessons for future intelligence analysts
Students study maps in the Red Cell Analytics Lab at Penn State's Information Sciences and Technology Building on the University Park campus.

Picture-perfect
Quick, efficient chip cleans up common flaws in amateur photographs. Your smartphone snapshots could be instantly converted into professional-looking photographs with just the touch of a button, thanks to a processor chip developed at MIT.

Mobile phones can make us healthier, researcher tells AAAS audience
More than 6 billion people worldwide (including almost 400 million in the United States) now carry mobile phones, which could be used to enhance mental and physical health, a Cornell researcher proposes.

Krzysztof Gajos named 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow
Award recognizes computer scientist's "research accomplishments, creativity, and potential" Krzystzof Gajos , Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been named a 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.

SDSC’s Chaitan Baru Named Associate Director, Data Initiatives
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has named SDSC Distinguished Scientist Chaitanya Baru the Center's Associate Director, Data Initiatives.

Humans and robots work better together following cross-training
Swapping of roles improves efficiency as well as robots' confidence and humans' trust. Spending a day in someone else's shoes can help us to learn what makes them tick. Now the same approach is being used to develop a better understanding between humans and robots, to enable them to work together as a team.

Scientists create automated ‘time machine’ to reconstruct ancient languages
Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated "time machine," of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.

Research Could Ensure That Crowd Work Becomes a Career Option, Not a Dead End
: Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 / bspice [a] cs.cmu (p) edu PITTSBURGH-Crowdsourcing is an effective way to mobilize people to accomplish tasks on a global scale, but some researchers fear that crowd work for pay could easily become the high-tech equivalent of a sweat shop. Trivial work for rock bottom pay isn't inevitable, however, and they've outlined a research agenda to make crowd work both intellectually and monetarily rewarding.

Computer modeling breaks new ground in study of root architecture
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - The UN estimates that one in every seven people around the world are hungry. Fortunately, Jonathan Lynch uses information technology (IT) to get to the root of this problem. Lynch is a professor of plant nutrition in the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences. His research focuses on plant root architecture, and how the study of plant roots can increase crop yields and improve global food security.

For Three Decades, Computer Science’s Susan Davidson Has Led by Example
After more than 30 years on the job, Susan Davidson has some perspective on her discipline.

SDSC Mourns the Loss of Dr. Robert P. Harkness
Robert P. Harkness, a computational astrophysicist with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, died on Sunday, January 27, after a brief bout with cancer.

’holy grail’ of evolving modular networks
Many biological entities, from brains to gene regulatory networks, are organized into modules - dense clusters of interconnected parts within a complex network. Engineers also use modular designs, which is why a car has separate parts, from mufflers to spark plugs, rather than being one entangled monolith.

Thomas Murphy Appointed Vice President for Information Technology at Penn

With Popsicle Sticks and a Glue Gun, Penn’s Allison Pearce Got Her Start in Engineering
It was 3 a.m. at an engineering camp in Houston when insight struck Allison Pearce, now a junior at the University of Pennsylvania.

Big medical data
At the intersection of medicine and computer science, researchers look for clinically useful correlations amid mountains of information.

Robot challenge inspires kids to help seniors
Edmonton children, including home-schooled students and kids with special needs, are getting a hands-on opportunity to help seniors lead healthier lives, thanks to scientific know-how and some robotic help from the University of Alberta.

Engineering Prof. Martha Kim Wins NSF Award for Software to Track Energy Consumption
Computer Science Assistant Martha Kim has won a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to develop energy tracking and monitoring techniques to audit and control software energy consumption.

Stanford scholar Roland Greene holds up poetry as cultural mirror
Stanford Report, January 11, 2013 Through a survey of the world's poetry, the professor of English and comparative literature finds that globalization and technology are changing the way poetry is viewed and used.

Machine Perception Lab Shows Robotic One-Year-Old on Video
Different faces of Diego-san: video of robo-toddler shows him demonstrating different facial expressions, using 27 moving parts in the head alone.

UW, Pacific NW National Lab join forces on computing research
The University of Washington and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have announced the creation of the Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing, a joint institute based at the UW that will foster collaborative computing research between the two institutions.

Guaranteed delivery -- in ad hoc networks
A new algorithm for message dissemination in decentralized networks is faster than its predecessors but, unlike them, guarantees delivery.

Computer scientist Leslie Valiant named 2012 ACM Fellow

Small, Portable Sensors Allow Users to Monitor Exposure to Pollution on Their Smart Phones
The CitiSense sensors transmit their air quality readings to smart phones. More pictures of the sensor and its smart phone interface can be found here.

For Stanford programming class, the bigger the better

For a day, geek is chic

For honest voting, write a message the ’man in the middle’ can’t intercept
In the run-up to the last election warnings about computer hacking were rampant. Experts demonstrated how the hardware in voting machines could be modified.

Phase 1 of New Edison Supercomputer Arrives at NERSC

Crowdsourcing site compiles new sign language for math and science
A multimedia feature published this week in the New York Times, “ Pushing Science's Limits in Sign Language Lexicon ,” outlines efforts in the United States and Europe to develop sign language versions of specialized terms used in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Don R. Swanson, information science pioneer, 1924-2012
Don R. Swanson believed laboratories weren't the only source of new scientific discoveries. Swanson, a specialist in the relationship between natural and computer languages, thought electronic databases also held the key to medical knowledge. A trailblazing information scientist, Swanson died Nov.

SDSC’s CAIDA Internet Research Group Awarded Cybersecurity Contract
Department of Homeland Security Announces 34 Contracts The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of Calif

How "senior friendly" is that bistro?
A newly-released app lets seniors rate the ‘age-friendliness' of restaurants, community centres, libraries, crosswalks, shopping centres and public transit in their city - and share their ratings with others.

NSF Renews Funding for National OpenTopography Project
LiDAR-derived image of Meteor Crater, AZ. Color bands show range of elevations from 1541 meters at the bottom of the crater, to a maximum of 1835 meters on the crater rim.

DELPHI Project Foretells Future of Personalized Population Health
NSF awards $2 million over four years to UC San Diego computer scientists and physicians Imagine a new type of healthcare app that does it all - it helps you understand your current health status,

UC San Diego and Verizon Team to Improve Tuberculosis Care
Verizon Foundation to provide grant, in-kind technology solutions to scale up novel approach to TB treatment As part of an innovative philanthropic health care program targeting reduction of healt

The robotic equivalent of a Swiss army knife
Reconfigurable robot a step toward something that can become almost anything. The device doesn't look like much: a caterpillar-sized assembly of metal rings and strips resembling something you might find buried in a home-workshop drawer.

Seven Yale researchers named to leading scientific society
Four Yale faculty members have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for their distinguished efforts to advance science.

Leading breakthroughs in speech recognition software at Microsoft, Google, IBM
Groundbreaking work on speech recognition software by the University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science (DCS) is transforming Microsoft, Google and IBM.

Computer programming team advances to World Finals again
For the first time, the University of Chicago computer programming team has won the Mid-Central USA regional contest.