A team of Hewlett-Packard scientists has developed a technique that, they say, could potentially replace the transistor. With their crossbar-latch technology, the researchers have built very small junctions of platinum wires that can perform switching and Boolean logic functions now handled by transistors. HP, like other companies, is working on the challenges chip makers face in trying to improve processor performance by reducing the size of transistors and circuitry. A crossbar latch, consisting of two switches, can handle three functions a transistor must perform to do calculations using Boolean logic: signal restoration, which keeps a signal functioning and thereby avoids data corruption; signal inversion, which enables the Boolean logic function; and logical latch functionality, which lets a system store results of one operation for use in another. HP makes crossbar latches via nano-imprint-lithography, a common approach that let companies employ existing manufacturing techniques but that has not been used previously on such a small scale.

Intel researchers have developed a prototype silicon-based modulator that switches light-based signals. This merges lower-priced silicon technology with high-speed, fiber optics. In essence, the technology promises to move photonics to silicon. Optical communications has been limited to specialty markets such as wide area networks and telecommunications because of the manufacturing process's expense and complexity. The system splits an incoming beam of light into two parts as it passes through the silicon. It then uses a transistor-like device to create a phase shift by hitting and subsequently slowing one beam with an electric charge. When the system recombines the two beams for transmission into optical fiber, the phase shift can cause the light signals to cancel each other out and shut off the beam. This gives the beam on and off positions and creates the ones and zeros of binary data.

The article looks at two new display technologies: Heliodisplay, which condenses the air above a video projector - the device then projects an image onto the condensed air; and FogScreen, a display surface made out of a cloud of water vapor diffused into the air as a very dry fog - a projector can display images on the FogScreen.

IBM has developed prototype silicon-polymer flash-memory chips using a process based on self-assembling nanocrystals. The process uses a technique in which two polymers, when heated, self-organize into patterns that researchers can manipulate to make one of the stencils used to produce the chips. This self-assembly process could enable manufacturers to produce smaller chips and reduce the high cost and complexity of traditional lithography, which uses expensive tools to precisely draw on a silicon substrate the places where every transistor, wire, and other element will go.

The US has reduced the number of people admissible under its controversial H-1B visa program, which lets skilled foreign workers - many in the computer technology field - take jobs in the country for up to six years. The H-1B visa program has sparked ongoing controversy. Many technology companies say they hire US workers when possible but need higher visa caps to fill important positions requiring skills for which qualified domestic workers aren't readily available. H-1B opponents, on the other hand, have assailed the program for taking away scarce technology jobs from US workers and giving them to workers from other countries who, they say, often accept lower salaries. US technology firms are currently finding some of the overseas employees they want by using L-1 visas, which permit intracompany transfers of foreign managers and workers with specialized skills.

Spam, a controversial issue for e-mail, has begun to hit instant messaging (IM) in large quantities, creating a phenomenon called spim. Some industry observers say the crackdown on spam by Internet service providers, lawmakers, and users may have caused marketers to turn to IM. Spim has many of spam's characteristics, including deceptive subject lines and fake sender names. And like spam, many spim messages advertise and link to Web sites for pornography and various services and products, such as low-cost prescription drugs. In addition, some security firms embed their services in proprietary IM clients. Zone Labs has launched two antispim, rule-based, filtering products that, for example, prevent users from clicking through links that might take them to an executable that would let a Trojan horse take over their systems.

Nantero has created NRAM - the "N" stands for both nanotechnology and nonvolatile - a high-density RAM chip that saves its contents when a device is turned off or loses external power. Nantero manufacture its chip with carbon nanotubes, cylindrical structures consisting of hexagonal graphite molecules. Carbon nanotubes are up to 100 times stronger but one-sixth the weight of a steel object the same size. Because of nanotubes' strength, NRAM undergo many more read-write processes than other types of nonvolatile memory. The nanotubes also offer better electrical conductivity than many other materials frequently used in chips and thus enable faster performance.

Researchers are experimenting with a new type of compact, inexpensive, high-capacity electronic memory for small devices that uses a plastic material also sometimes employed as an antistatic coating for computer screens. A team of Princeton University and Hewlett-Packard scientists has used polyethylenedioxythiophene, called Pedot, to develop the memory system for deployment in cameras, MP3 music players, cellular phones, and other small devices. The new system is a type of WORM technology. "Write-once, read-many memory is very useful for large archival files such as digital photographs, music, etc.,".

I BM is developing an XML-based architecture designed to unify various machine-learning, statistical, and analytical approaches to improve computer systems’ ability to retrieve and use data, autonomously in many cases. IBM’s unstructured information management architecture (UIMA) will apply the Combination Hypothesis to help advance data analysis, explained David Ferrucci, a staff member at IBM Research. The Combination Hypothesis states that using a variety of techniques— such as natural language processing, statistical analysis, and syntactical and grammatical rules-based intelligence— together may result in significant dataanalysis improvements. UIMA is designed to provide a framework that facilitates the combination process and thereby lets an application apply multiple learning techniques in parallel, Ferrucci said. For example, he noted, when responding to a question using natural language input, a UIMA application could combine statistical learning and rule-based technology to analyze a corpus of XML-tagged documents and determine the question’s most likely answer. It is difficult to effectively combine multiple techniques in parallel to improve data access and use. XML offers a key way to meet this challenge. Using XML tags on documents provides structure and adds semantics, thereby facilitating searching and analysis, particularly of otherwise unstructured data, Ferrucci said. XML thus also helps integrate unstructured and structured data for analysis. The growth of Internet use and the number of data types, including multimedia, has generated more data than humans can efficiently manage, said Ted Schadler, principal software analyst with Forrester Research. “Finding all that stuff, accessing it, keeping track of it, and keeping it current is a tremendously difficult task,” he explained. This increases the need for systems to be able to retrieve and use data autonomously. IBM still considers UIMA to be a research project and does not have a timetable for implementing the technology commercially. —Linda Dailey Paulson IBM Seeks to Unify Data-Access Approaches

Sunnyvale, California; and Washington, D.C. All cities house major scientific research centers. West said the network’s first backbone segment, between Chicago and Pittsburgh, is scheduled to be available by the end of this year. The project’s first full phase, running from California to Jacksonville, is scheduled for completion by May 2004. The consortium plans to have the rest of the initial nodes running by the end of next year. The network will use existing cable. Cisco Systems will provide the new network’s equipment, including routers and switches. This optical equipment initially will accommodate four networks with a maximum speed of 10 Gbits per second each, but the system will eventually scale to 40 A consortium that includes US universities and organizations, as well as Cisco Systems, has announced plans to build a national high-speed infrastructure for experimental opticalnetwork research and scientific projects that must be run on high-bandwidth networks. National LambdaRail (www.national lambdarail.org) will provide an infrastructure for multipurpose advanced networking, said Tom West, the project’s president and CEO. Multiple high-speed networks will be able to run on the infrastructure simultaneously. The network’s initial nodes will be in Atlanta; Chicago; Cleveland; Denver; Jacksonville, Florida; Pittsburgh; Raleigh, North Carolina; Seattle; 10-Gbits-per-second networks. National LambdaRail would be different from the Internet 2 project’s Abilene, a single high-performance, optical backbone network designed for the development and deployment of advanced Internet applications and services (http://abilene.internet2.edu/). Abilene users lease the network from Qwest Communications, a private firm. National LambdaRail, on the other hand, will be owned and managed by its participants, which will have exclusive access to the infrastructure for research. According to West, 16 to 20 major participants will invest a total of $80 million to $100 million during National LambdaRail’s first five years. He said the project may receive additional grants. Current participants include the Committee on Institutional Cooperation; the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California; Duke University, representing a coalition of North Carolina universities; Florida LambdaRail; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Internet 2; the MidAtlantic Terascale Partnership; the Pacific Northwest GigaPop; the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; and the Virginia Tech Foundation. “It’s a very good move on the part of the community, and its importance from our perspective is that it provides potentially greatly enhanced capacity for networking that will certainly be needed in the future,” explained Peter Freeman, the assistant director of the US National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. “It’s a very good omen that this is being done at this stage without any federal money or any federal direction.” —Linda Dailey Paulson The US’s proposed National LambdaRail high-speed, experimental, optical-networking infrastructure plans an extensive implementation of nodes and fiber. Source: Philips Research Phase I POP Future POP Signal regeneration site Phase I fiber route Future fiber route Possible future route Acquired service San Diego Los Angeles Sunnyvale Seattle

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An academic researcher is using ideas from artificial intelligence and other types of computer science, as well as narrative theory, in an effort to make video games more engaging. R. Michael Young, assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, is studying various ways to use technology to generate games that react to players and provide different challenges and situations based on users’ actions, interests, and preferences. This would create a new experience every time they play. Typically, designers determine all choices players might make in a game and establish in advance a set number of playing paths that will be entertaining. However, this limits the playing options and story lines. In contrast, much of Young’s research focuses on ways to provide an initial story and then on-the-fly plots that a game can customize as it unfolds for a particular player. The researcher said he is working with AI planning: “the process of representing and reasoning about action and how you might piece together action to achieve a set of goals.” Young said a game can use this technique to build abstract models of all appropriate actions available. The program then searches for action sequences that could provide a narrative that fits in with what has happened so far. This has been difficult to implement, Young said, because there is no computational model of narrative structure. He is thus using techniques such as computational linguistics to figure out how best to tell a story created by an AI planner. Analyst Jay Horwitz at Jupiter Research, a market analysis firm, said AI has already been used in some games to bring to life characters not controlled by players. However, he said, “I don’t think AI is the key business factor when it comes to producing games. It’s one of many elements of developing a game that are very important.” Nonetheless, Young expressed hope his research will be commercialized in the next few years. He said this will be more likely as processing power increases and can better handle his techniques. In addition, he noted, a lot of past game development has focused on improving graphics. Now, Young said, graphics are much better and faster than in the past, so developers can consider how they might improve other aspects of the games, such as the content. —Linda Dailey Paulson Mediator

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