Peter Harsha reports that the Senate Appropriations Committee included language in the Senate version of the FY 06 Defense Appropriations bill that strips $55M from DARPA’s Cognitive Computing program, specifically “Learning, Reasoning, and Integrated Cognitive Systems”. That’s a 50% cut in the program. Peter points out that this runs counter to recent congressional sentiment that the role of computer science, especially university-led fundamental computer science, should be strengthened at DARPA.

Rob Clyde, Vice President of Technology, Office of the CTO @ Symantec Corporation presented his keynote today morning. Along with the usual security stuff he reported on some interesting statistics –

• Phishing is becoming an increasing threat as 3 to 4% of users respond to such mails — much higher than traditional e-mail spam.
• In the first half of 2005 phishing increased from 2.99 Million e-mails/day to 5.7 Million e-mails/day.
• 31% of online consumers are buying less due to increased web security threat.
• US leads in the number of hacked machine reports followed closely by Germany.
• Broadband penetration is actually increasing security threats. Many personal machines are now vulnerable to hackers using them as web bots for DOS attacks.
• DOS Attacks are now a business. Such attacks are now available for as low as US $300. Where?

Some other interesting comments ..

• The increasing speed at which worms propogate are now demanding better use of proactive measures.
• In the absence of such measures Akamai and it’s expandable bandwith pipes are the only solution against DOS Attacks. Looks like more revenues to Akamai in the days to come! Maybe Akamai’s stock is in for a ride.

Finally, and of importance to us — Symantec is now working on compating web (and blog) spam. They see this as being one of the next big security threat.

Paper presentations at CASCON 2005 started today. This annual event is sponsored by IBM Toronto Labs and IBM CAS in co-operation with National Research Council Canada. Initial impressions — a very good place to demonstrate/present work relevant to IBM.

CASCON 2005, the 15th annual international conference hosted by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, is the premiere computer science and software engineering conference in Canada. CASCON is an excellent venue for exchanging ideas, showcasing results, experiences and tools, and networking with researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.

Check out CASCON blog for information as it happens.

CRA’s computing research policy blog has a long exerpt from Vint Cerf’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. See the CRA post for more or the WSJ piece if you are a subscriber.

America will soon find its grip on the levers of international commerce slipping as we turn our backs on a proud tradition of technology innovation. The stewards of our national destiny are busily tightening the tap on the federal R&D budget, the most important source of funding for programs that seek to answer fundamental questions of science and technology.
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In the 1960s and ’70s, a collection of academics and private-sector technologists, including a co-author of this piece, used findings funded by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA), to participate in implementation of the first wide-area packet switched network (the ARPANET) and the subsequent integrated collection of packet-switched networks (the Internet).

Now DARPA officials have revealed a shift in focus away from its history of open-ended long-range research, which typically has been performed in universities and nonprofit institutions. According to recent news reports, DARPA funding for university researchers in computer science has fallen from $214 million to $123 million from 2001 to 2004. Moreover, the focus of DARPA R&D is more near-term and more immediately defense-oriented than before. While this is defensible in some ways, the largest impacts of long-term research funded in the past by DARPA have been in areas that have wider or dual application to defense and the civilian sector.

The U.S. is already lagging behind in R&D funding. Our total national spending on R&D is 2.7% of our GDP, and now ranks sixth in the world, in relative terms, behind Israel (4.4%), Sweden (3.8%), Finland (3.4%), Japan (3.0%) and Iceland (2.9%). The federal government’s share of total national R&D spending has fallen from 66% in 1964 to 25%.

Yahoo! Research Labs - Berkeley is a new research partnership between Yahoo! Inc. and the University of California at Berkeley to explore and invent social media and mobile media technology and applications that will enable people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media on the web. The joint lab is expected to open in August 2005 and will be led by Marc Davis, UC Berkeley professor of information management and systems. Yahoo is hoping the new lab will aid its efforts to use emerging search technologies to allow users to access and share information from any location that has an Internet connection.

Just when you thought you might actually have to pay attention to that talk at AAAI (you know the one), along comes the AAAI 2005 Word Search Puzzle. It’s new, it’s improved, it’s old-fashioned, and ‘AI’ is particularly easy to find (more than once if you so desire).

As with each of the previous puzzles (such as this one, this one, or even this one), the terms (generously provided by Tim “Rack-Mount” Finin) were interlinked using a heuristic best-first search that favors shared letters, small diagrams and a uniform distribution of word directions. The empty cells were filled using a character 4-gram language model derived from the entries themselves.

The Computing Research Association has been publishing and distributing by email a quarterly newsletter, the CRA Bulletin, containing links to items of interest to the computing research community. The CRA Bulletin has now been refactored as a blog complete with an RSS feed.

Jim Hendler and his students represented the Computing Research Association at the 11th annual Coalition for National Science Funding science exhibition and reception in Washington DC this week. At the event, universities and scientific associations showcase NSF supported research for members of the US Congress and their staff to maintain awareness of the importance of NSF support for US research. Jim’s demonstration of the potential of the semantic web was a big success. See Peter Harsha’s CRA blog for a good write up with pictures.

Yahoo has announced that it is expanding its research labs and intends to and “build Yahoo! Research Labs into a world-class center for scientific innovation and invention and foster an environment that attracts the most talented scientists from around the world.” Usama Fayyad has been appointed to lead the research lab, who’s goals are defined as follows:

“Yahoo! Research Labs will develop the underlying scientific foundation to address complex challenges in areas including search and information navigation, social media, community, personalization, and mobility. Of particular focus is the design of algorithms that will support technologies and interactions to scale to Yahoo!’s hundreds of millions of users.”

“You and Your Research” is a transcript of a talk given by Richard Hamming almost 20 years ago. It focuses on the question “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?”.

It’s an inspirational read, especially if you’re a bit depressed by the minutia of your professional life and are at risk of being bitten to death by ducks. Maybe you can do something really significant.

There are many copies of this floating around the web, and now there is one more. (I spotted this on Lambda the Ultimate

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PITAC, the US President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, has released a report on Cyber Security: a Crisis of Prioritization. Free hard copies can be requested.

Vital to the Nation’s security and everyday life, the information technology (IT) infrastructure of the United States is highly vulnerable to disruptive domestic and international attacks, the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) argues in a new report. While existing technologies can address some IT security vulnerabilities, fundamentally new approaches are needed to address the more serious structural weaknesses of the IT infrastructure.

In Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization, PITAC presents four key findings and recommendations on how the Federal government can foster new architectures and technologies to secure the Nation’s IT infrastructure. PITAC urges the Government to significantly increase support for fundamental research in civilian cyber security in 10 priority areas; intensify Federal efforts to promote the recruitment and retention of cyber security researchers and students at research universities; increase support for the rapid transfer of Federally developed cyber security technologies to the private sector; and strengthen the coordination of Federal cyber security R&D activities.

The W3C will hold a workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services 9-10 June 9-10, 2005 at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Innsbruck, Austria. Position papers must be submitted to obtain an invitation to participate and are due by 22 APril 2005.