Businessweek Magazine has a special set of articles on innovation in business in its April 28 issue. As in the past, they identified and tanked the 50 most innovative companies worldwide. The list of companies ranked in order are as follows

It’s gratifying to see how many of these are companies based on computing and/or communications or have a business that is largely based on exploiting the latest computing and communications technologies. I think that it is appropriate to look at IT and communications as a group, even though they are traditionally viewed as different business sectors, because the innovations in each tends to be in areas where they overlap.

The distribution of the country in which these 50 companies are based is interesting. Of course, many of these are truly multi-national corporations .

A Wired article, DARPA Nabs Big Bucks for Mach 6 Planes, Giant Robotic Blimps, Next-Gen Networks, summarizes the news in the proposed 2009 DARPA budget.

“DARPA, the Pentagon’s mad science division, got a $324 million boost in the Defense Department’s new budget — a ten percent increase. Which means lots more cash for giant blimps, next-gen wireless networks, Mach 6 planes, shape-shifting drones, and improvised bomb-beaters. … But not everything in the DARPA budget got bumped up. The agency’s much-ballyhooed efforts at “Cognitive Computing” took at $30 million cut, to $145 million. Which could mean that even the Pentagon’s most wide-eyed visionaries see thinking machines are still far, far off in the distance.” (link)

DARPA has traditionally been an important funding source for basic computer science research. While the ORCA program got a healthy increase of $53M, this is the only CS-related program mentioned.

The ACM named Edmund Clarke, E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis winners of the prestigious 2007 A.M. Turing Award for their research on Model Checking.

From the ACM announcement:

“Their innovations transformed this approach from a theoretical technique to a highly effective verification technology that enables computer hardware and software engineers to find errors efficiently in complex system designs. This transformation has resulted in increased assurance that the systems perform as intended by the designers. … Clarke of Carnegie Mellon University, and Emerson of the University of Texas at Austin, working together, and Sifakis, working independently for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Grenoble in France, developed this fully automated approach that is now the most widely used verification method in the hardware and software industries.” (link)

I confess to being thoroughly confused. The revealed wisdom in US higher ed has been that we are simply not producing enough grads in the STEM area, and we need to do more to attract folks to sciences/engineering/IT etc. The National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this as well. We certainly keep hearing that here in our department, with exhortations to increase enrollment.

However, the Urban institute folks (Lowell and Salzman) claim that not only is the US not lagging behind other nations in the quality of STEM education at the school level, it in fact overproduced STEM grads (three times as many as the net growth in jobs) in the period from 1985 to 2000. So not enough or too many STEM grads — which is it ?

This of course further muddies the immigration/ H1B debates. The IT industry claims that there is a shortage of IT grads, and so they need to be able to hire more from overseas. The “Immigration Restrictionists” of various flavors, and the Programmers Guild like organizations, argue that this is just a part of plan by corporations to keep the wages in the IT sector depressed. Many of them have blogged about this new Urban Institute study, offering it as proof that the H1B type programs can be scrapped.

However, if the primary push behind lobbying for increased skilled immigration/H1 workers was depressing (or at least not increasing) the wages, then a factor of three overproduction within the US should take care of this, right ? In other words, all the folks in STEM fields who weren’t getting jobs in their area would sign up for short MSCE/CCNA type courses (or AAs in IT) and then get hired. I presume Bill Gates or others don’t particularly like foreigners enough to go through and pay for the H1B/Green card process when they would achieve the same wage depressing affects by hiring US citizens retrained in IT areas from the oversupply in the overall STEM areas?  On the other hand, there is  a recent statement by Fed chief Bernanke doing rounds of the blogosphere that a non increase in STEM wages would indicate that there wasn’t a shortage in the area. 

Net result, I am not sure what to believe anymore.  In admissions events, I dutifully present data from CRA (which in turn got it from BLS)  that seems to indicate that within the wider STEM areas, IT (strictly, Mathematical and Computer Sciences) would be the subfield where the total production of degrees would fall short of the projected job openings, even factoring in all the outsourcing.

Videolectures.net was recording talks at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007) held in Busan, South Korea this week. They already have up two of the three keynote talks and one tutorial.

This is a great service run by the Jozef Stefan Institute. The videos of computer science talks, lectures and tutorials are professionally recorded and edited and provide a wonderful resource to the international computer science community.

The ISWC 2007 talks that have already been put online are:

• POWERSET - Natural Language and the Semantic Web, Keynote talk by Barney Pell, Powerset, Inc.
• How I was right even when I was wrong, Keynote talk by Chris Welty, IBM
• Automatic Techniques for Extracting Semantic Data (from text and media), Tutorial by Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield

See Videolecture’s ISWC 2007 page for the complete set of videos. I expect to see many more from ISWC 2007 in the coming weeks.

Cnet news has an interview with DARPA directory Tony Tether. The interview, Newsmaker: DARPA sees inspiration as trophy of robot race, mostly focuses on the current $2M DARPA sponsored autonomous vehicle race, Urban Challenge, which takes place November 3 in Victorville CA.

In the interview, he was asked “What are the top three advances to come out of DARPA in the last five years would you say?”. I found his answer interesting.

“Let’s see, we’ve revolutionized the whole computer science industry by moving into cognitive processing, that is, computers that learn you as opposed to you having to learn them. Stanford Research, by the way, in Menlo Park is a major contractor in that area. We’ve also done a lot in biology, again for finding ways for people out in the battlefield to be able to survive their environment. Then wireless, I guess. If you take your cell phone, you might think that you’re wireless and you are. But there’s a big infrastructure called towers that really make it work. And what we proved and have developed is the ability to have no infrastructure and still have total cellular wireless type of communication. That’s important from a military viewpoint because when we go into an area, we don’t have time to build the towers. Now that’s also going to be a big commercial thing because if somebody doesn’t have to build the infrastructure to have a wireless network, that means that the cost for it is much less than somebody who does, (and it) gives them a great price advantage. Those are three, but I’m not supposed to have favorites.”
(link)

Spotted on AAAI’s AI in the news.

The MIT Tech reports on a plan in which MIT is collaborating with the city of Cambridge to deploy a free wireless mesh network. The article has some interesting technical details and says that the plan is based on MIT’s roofnet project, an experimental 802.11b/g mesh network in development at MIT CSAIL.

A collaboration with MIT researchers may provide Cambridge with a free, city-wide, wireless internet service as early as late summer. The project will rely on a mesh networking technology that allows individual computers to become new access points, projecting the reach of the network beyond its original antennas.
…
Traditionally, a wireless network is centralized around one wireless access point, which communicates with a wireless card in any laptop or desktop computer, Hart said. Mesh technology allows individual computers to propagate the network and act as new access points, making it unnecessary for a user to be within range of the original wireless signal, she said.
…
[the wireless access points] are constructed from $15 commercial access points purchased from the software manufacturer NETGEAR, he said. The 40 milliwatt chip inside the commercial product is replaced with a 400 milliwatt chip and ‘hacked’ to include computer code that enables the mesh technology, he said.
…
The code, which is publicly available, was written by an MIT research group called Roofnet. Daniel E. Aguayo G, a Roofnet researcher, said that though they were not the first to write a code for mesh technology, they were the first to conduct a large-scale test of their software. …

In today’s NYT, John Markoff writes:

With federal funds for basic computer science research at universities in decline, three of the industry’s leading companies are joining to help fill the void.

University of California computer scientists plan to announce on Thursday that the companies–Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems–will underwrite a $7.5 million laboratory on the Berkeley campus. The new research center, called the Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems Laboratory, will focus on the design of more dependable computing systems.

The Berkeley researchers say that under the terms of their agreement with the three companies, the fruits of the research will be nonproprietary and freely licensed. Each company has agreed to support the project with $500,000 annually for five years.
… MORE …

While this is great for Berkeley, it may not be so good for the academic research computing community if (1) industry starts concentrating it’s research in the top 10 departments and (2) if government decides that its support for basic computing R&D is less neccessary because industry woll fund universities to do it.

AAAI-06 will include a special technical track on Artificial Intelligence and the Web. This year’s conference will Celebrate “Fifty Years of Artificial Intellligence” and be held at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center in Boston 16-20 July 2006. The deadline for submitting papers is 16 February 2006.

The track is especially interested in receiving papers in two active research areas: (i) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (ii) developing and exploiting Semantic Web languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Innovative papers in other areas describing research involving both AI and the Web are also encouraged. See the track web site for details.

Here is what a smart doorknob can do.

“When you approach the door and you’re carrying groceries, it opens and lets you in. This doorknob is so smart, it can let the dog out but it won’t let six dogs come back in.

It will take FedEx packages and automatically sign for you when you’re not there. If you’re standing by the door, and a phone call comes in, the doorknob can tell you that ‘you’ve got a phone call from your son that I think you should take.”

This smart doorknob is part of a MIT research project called “Internet of Things” (see IHT). An interesting thing about this system is that it relies on the extensive usage of RFID tags. When it comes to RFID technology, some people are very worried, and some others are very excited.

The Workshop on Models of Trust for the Web (MTW’06) will be a one-day workshop held on May 22 or 23, 2006 in Edinburgh in conjunction with the 15th International World Wide Web Conference. Tentative deadlines are January 10 for paper submission and February 1 for acceptance notification.

“There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and facts found on the Web.” — anon

“As it gets easier to add information to the web via html pages, wikis, blogs, and other documents, it gets tougher to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate or untrustworthy information. A search engine query usually results in several hits that are outdated and/or from unreliable sources and the user is forced to go through the results and pick what she/he considers the most reliable information based on her/his trust requirements. With the introduction of web services, the problem is further exacerbated as users have to come up with a new set of requirements for trusting web services and web services themselves require a more automated way of trusting each other. Apart from inaccurate or outdated information, we also need to anticipate Semantic Web Spam (SWAM) — where spammers publish false facts and scams to deliberately mislead users. This workshop is interested in all aspects of enabling trust on the web.”

UMBC is searching for a new Dean of its College of Engineering and Information Technology — see the UMBC Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology search site. I am happy to field questions from or talk to anyone who might be interested in applying for the position or nominating a colleague. It’s a great opportunity for someone who wants to help shape and guide a strong College that wants toward biger and better things.