The million dollar programming prize

It's 7:50 p.m. on 1 October 2007 at AT&T Labs, in Florham Park, N.J., and three of us are frantically hitting the "refresh" buttons on our browsers. We have just submitted our latest entry in the year-old Netflix Prize competition, which offers a grand prize of US $1 million for an algorithm that's 10 percent more accurate than the one Netflix uses to predict customers' movie preferences. Although we have not reached that milestone, we are hoping at least to do better than anyone else has done so far; if we can make it to 8 p.m. with the best score, we'll win a $50,000 Progress Prize.     

Paying your way [road tolls]

With the strong and persistent upward trend in the volume of road traffic, many major roads in urban areas, estuarial river crossings, national trunk roads and motorways are experiencing a rapid increase in congestion. Toll roads are one answer but it is difficult to collect tolls without more queues generating more delays. Automated collection of tolls is looked at including the problems of lack of privacy for individuals     

Halfway to Mars [next generation planetary rover]

A team of engineers from the Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh has traveled to the Atacama Desert in Chile to test its new concepts and designs for the next generation of planetary rovers to be used in Mars. Using a prototype called Zoe, the team came to Atacama to see how well the rover copes with the kind of terrain its successors will find in Mars. Zoe can roam autonomously and can make some rudimentary decisions about what terrain to explore. Its main task is to hunt for evidence that some kind of microbial life flourished in the planet's warmer, watery past, as well as signs that some of it might have held on to the present day. It uses a fluorescence imager to inspect rocks and dirt for the presence of chlorophyll, lipids, carbohydrates, proteins and DNA. The data collected by Zoe are then compared with those recorded by the scientists using a process known as ground truthing.     

Defying hard times [semiconductor intellectual property business]

The article discusses the challenges facing the semiconductor intellectual property business from the perspective of ARC International. ARC has been working hard to strengthen its position as a one-stop-shop SIP supplier with a highly distinctive processor technology. It is operating in a crowded and highly competitive market. ARC gains an edge on its rivals by virtue of its Tangent reconfigurable processor and by positioning itself as a supplier of integrated system solutions. Using the ARChitect point-and-click configuration tool, customers can fine-tune the parameters of their processor, for example by selecting the size of the data and instruction caches. There is also the opportunity to make customer-specific additions to the instruction set, an option taken up in around 20% of designs. Following a programme of acquisitions, ARC now complements its processor cores with a range of application-specific SIP products supporting USB, Ethernet and 802.11 wireless LANs.     

全球不同的电缆规格

选择电缆时，首先要考虑这一设计是用于北美还是其他地区 工程师们在选择电缆之前面临着很多需要考虑的问题。首先，要关注一些决定性的因素，比如，最终产品是用于北美还是其他地区，之后再分析哪类或哪几类电缆可用。     

It's all in your head [industrial property]

In this paper, the author details how understanding your intellectual property rights could help you protect your ideas and save you a lifetime of legal hassles     

Listen to your data [signal processing applications]

This paper gives emphasis on the importance of testing the performance of signal processing algorithms with real data and learning from the data. The discussion is made primarily within the context of a patient monitoring research. The author suggests six steps on how to test with and learn from real data. These steps are: (1) minimize measurement uncertainty so your physiological phenomenon is consistently observable, (2) understand your data, (3) acquire a significant number of appropriate training and testing sets, (4) construct high-performance validation criteria, (5) design algorithms that can generalize in the clinical environment, and (6) test and learn from your data. Results show that this process is also applicable to other fields as well.     

071/081-where next? [telephone numbering]

The UK National Code Change in 1995 will mark the latest chapter in the short history of telephone numbering. Here, the author reviews the origins of this change, and explores some of the principles behind the choice of numbering schemes     

Not your mother's mammography [breast cancer detection]

Breast cancer accounts for nearly one of every three cancers diagnosed in US women. While great strides have been made in early detection, the conventional method of mammography is not failproof it has trouble imaging dense tissue, it may show suspicious areas where no malignancy exists, and radiologists interpreting the images can miss up to 15 percent of cancers. It's also uncomfortable, requiring each breast to be compressed between plastic plates, which can lead to bruising. Susan Hagness wants to change all that. An assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she is pioneering a novel detection technique that uses ultrawideband microwaves to image even the tiniest malignant tumors in the breast. Breast tumors and normal tissue show much more contrast at microwave frequencies than at the X-ray frequencies used for mammograms. Microwaves are also nonionizing, and the technique requires no breast compression. In Susan Hagness' search for a better way to detect breast cancer, she gets her students involved, too. Such efforts have paid off: her courses consistently receive high marks on student evaluations.     

For your ears only [copy controls for CDs]

After recordable CDs hit the market in 1991, momentum on copying the discs began to build. Copies of original CDs were perfect and could themselves be copied ad infinitum. When blank disc prices dropped, people began copying CDs for their friends, just as they had with cassettes. As a result, recording companies began looking for ways to put the genie of infinitely copyable digital music files back into the bottle, based on the Red Book standard. Some of the techniques being used by the industry are discussed in this article.     

Year of the patent [intellectual property protection, China]

Protecting intellectual property isn't China's strong suit, but the country is trying to tailor its IP laws to assuage foreign companies. How far the country goes in establishing an enforceable intellectual property (IP) regime will affect the nation's economic fortunes, and also will likely determine its ability to make technology a component of its future growth. Without the ability to protect innovations systematically and to use those protections to stake out markets and combat piracy, no firm can hope to compete profitably. Savvy technology companies refuse to play in countries where the deck is stacked. To satisfy WTO standards and address international criticism, China amended its patent laws in July 2001 so that even offers to sell a pirated product (in addition to actual sales) constitute acts of infringement. The new laws allow judicial appeal of adverse decisions in reexamination and invalidation procedures; permit preliminary injunctions before infringement actions are even heard; and make compulsory licensing-that is, forcing a patent owner to license the technology to others-more difficult. But what remains to be seen is how these changes affect matters "on the ground"-whether what looks good on paper actually heralds a new willingness to protect IP rights.     

10 million unknowns: is it that big? [computational electromagnetics]

At the Center for Computational Electromagnetics at the University of Illinois, we recently solved a very-large-scale electromagnetic scattering problem. We computed the bistatic radar cross-section of a full-size aircraft at 8 GHz, involving the solution of a dense matrix equation with nearly 10.2 million unknowns. We regarded this as the "ultimate test" of a massively parallel implementation of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA), called ScaleME. In this paper, we narrate the technical difficulties faced and the experience gained from a very informal point of view. We describe the various methods developed for surmounting each of the obstacles.