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Pedestrian Remover in ScienceNews

Last Friday, ScienceNews covered the Pedestrian Remover story.

I liked the final quote from computer science professor Serge Belongie:

“The project is a nice combination of computer science and social awareness,” he says. “All too often, computer scientists implement something just because it is cool rather than there being a need.”

Read the full story by Rachel Ehrenberg on the ScienceNews site: "Protecting innocent — and not so innocent — bystanders "

Largest Earthquake Simulation: Go SDSC!

SDSC Leads Supercomputing Efforts in Creating Largest-Ever Earthquake Simulation

Magnitude 8.0 Simulation, Named a Gordon Bell Prize Finalist, Could Guide Emergency Planning

Seismologists have long been asking not if, but when ‘The Big One’ will strike southern California. Just how big will it be, and how will the amount of shaking vary throughout the region? Now we may be much closer to finding out the answer to at least the latter part of that question, and help prepare the Golden State’s emergency response teams to better cope with such a potential disaster.

Check out the earthquke simulation video on Scivee.tv

Read the full story on the SDSC news site.

Check out the UT story by Gary Robbins. (Includes embedded version of the quake simulation).

Surfing with Onboard Computer in Wired

Wired.com embedded one of the two surfingYouTube videos I made for this story.

Check out the videos and full story here.

Software for Efficient Computing in the Age of Nanoscale Devices

San Diego, CA, August 19, 2010 -- As semiconductor manufacturers build ever smaller components, circuits and chips at the nano scale become less reliable and more expensive to produce. The variability in their behavior from device to device and over their lifetimes – due to manufacturing, aging-related wear-out, and varying operating environments – is largely ignored by today’s mainstream computer systems.
Now a visionary team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from six universities is proposing to deal with the downside of nanoscale computer components by re-thinking and enhancing the role that software can play in a new class of computing machines that are adaptive and highly energy efficient.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today awarded a $10 million, five-year grant to researchers who will explore “Variability-Aware Software for Efficient Computing with Nanoscale Devices.” The grant is part of the funding agency’s Expeditions in Computing program, which rewards far-reaching agendas that “promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society.”

Read more of this Calit2 story written by Doug Ramsey.

Variability Expedition at Variability.org

Researchers on the team include: Rajesh Gupta, Ranjit Jhala, Sorin Lerner, Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steve Swanson and Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou from UC San Diego; Lara Dolecek and Puneet Gupta from UCLA Engineering; Subhasish Mitra from Stanford; Dennis Sylvester from Michigan; Rakesh Kumar from UIUC’s Coordinated Science Laboratory; as well as Nikil Dutt and Alex Nicolau from UCI’s Center for Embedded Computer Systems.

Surfing Discovery News

http://cse-ece-ucsd.blogspot.com/2010/08/surfboard-with-onboard-computer-youtube.htmlhttp://news.discovery.com/tech/computer-hangs-ten-on-surfboard.htmlBenjamin Thompson surfs the board with onboard computer. Image credit: UC San Diego

Benjamin Thompson surfs the board with onboard computer. Image credit: UC San Diego

The UC San Diego surfboard with onboard computer story is on the Discovery.com Web site. Check it out.

CAPTCHA Research in Technology Review

Technology Review covered a CAPTCHA paper from computer scientists at UC San Diego that was presented last week at the 2010 USENIX Security Symposium.

The paper: "Re: CAPTCHAs -- Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving from an Economic Context," Marti Motoyama, Kirill Levchenko, Chris Kanich, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Washington, D.C., August 2010.

The abstract is below. The Technology Review story by Christopher Mims is here.

Reverse Turing tests, or CAPTCHAs, have become an ubiquitous defense used to protect open Web resources from being exploited at scale. An effective CAPTCHA resists existing mechanistic software solving, yet can be solved with high probability by a human being. In response, a robust solving ecosystem has emerged, reselling both automated solving technology and realtime human labor to bypass these protections. Thus, CAPTCHAs can increasingly be understood and evaluated in purely economic terms; the market price of a solution vs the monetizable value of the asset being protected.We examine the market-side of this question in depth, analyzing the behavior and dynamics of CAPTCHA-solving service providers, their price performance, and the underlying labor markets driving this economy.