Academic Computing Services Blog

Wolfram Mathematica Workbench Available

2006-11-21T13:25:55Z

Wolfram Associates, the publisher of Mathematica, has announced the release of Wolfram Workbench, a new state - of - the - art integrated development environment for Mathematica technologies. Wolfram Workbench provides an integrated development environment (IDE) for Wolfram products such as Mathematica, gridMathematica, and webMathematica. Tools include Work with code in a specialized editor, a debug to view running programs at the source level, a profiler to map the code's execution, and aids to develop and run tests.

More information about the workbench is available from Wolfram site - http://www.wolfram.com/products/workbench/ .

The workbench is available as part of the University of Vermont's Mathematica Site License,

(Image from Michael Trott of Mathematica, Woldfram Associates.)

]]> As an exclusive benefit of Wolfram Premier Service, we invite you to download Workbench for free and start using it today to manage your most sophisticated Mathematica development projects and rapidly deploy them on any scale.

Access your free download now by visiting our website at:
http://www.wolfram.com/premiersupport/workbench.cgi?License=28173477

Key features in Workbench enable users to:

* Group files, code, and other Mathematica resources into a single project

* Perform source code editing with syntax highlighting, error reporting, local variable coloring, and many more options

* Study code as it runs and easily detect and fix any problems

* Profile the code's execution and develop and run tests, with an array of insightful reporting methods

* Manage multiple versions of files and access version histories

* Build and deploy Mathematica packages

For more information about Workbench, please go to:
http://www.wolfram.com/workbench

Sincerely,

Customer Service
Wolfram Research
info@wolfram.com

MIT Computer ASSISTed Design Demo

2006-10-16T14:18:15Z

Technorati is reporting [1] 300 or so links to this video on YouTube. In YouTube fashion, the video is uncredited. A digging session eventually found an original of the video at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Inteligence Laboratory's Design Rationale's publication page. The original [mpg format, 29 Mbyte] video, circa 2003, is done using a Mimio/whiteboard; the current system enables a more natural sketching style and operates on either a whiteboard and a tablet computer. (The video title mentions the Oxygen program.)

The demonstration is interesting - both for the overall flow of the design process as well as the literal mindedness of the simulation. The front wheel of the cart is sloppily drawn, with an acentric axel, so it wobbles as it rolls down the inclined plane. ]]> http://www.technorati.com/search/http%3A%2F%2Fyoutube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DNZNTgglPbUA

News of the World as seen by Buzztracker

2006-09-22T13:35:06Z

Buzztracker provides a daily graphical analysis of English language world news flows and connections. From http://www.buzztracker.org/about/

On the daily index page, you should see a list of cities with percentages next to them. The number represents the percentage of news stories that city is associated with for that day.
Locations that appear more often are represented by red circles on the map. The more frequently the cities appear, the larger the circle. Connections between locations are determined by intercontextual referencing in news articles. These connections are represented by lines between locations. The stronger the connection, the darker the line.
Move the mouse over the map to read the location names. Click on a city and relevant news stories will appear. Click "+ Enlarge" to get a larger version of the world map.

KU Student Senate Leads Plans to Expand Wireless Internet

2006-08-18T20:01:19Z

A new plan by Student Senate will allow students at the University of Kansas access to wireless Internet from more spots on campus than ever before.

Jason Boots, Plano, Texas, senior and student body president, has been working with Information Services and Network and Telecommunications Services to expand the availability of wireless Internet to the approximate half of campus buildings without it. The expansion of a campus-wide wireless network was one of Boots’ campaign platforms during last spring’s Student Senate elections.

Academic classrooms will be the first to receive wireless networks. Second will be student lab areas such as physics or chemistry labs. Third will be common areas such as the hallways in Budig Hall or meeting rooms in the Burge Union.

Source: Nate McGinnis, Plans for a wireless campus in the works. Student Senate is working on making more wireless Internet connection available across campus. Kansas.Com, The University Daily Kansan, Thursday, August 17, 2006. http://www.kansan.com/stories/2006/aug/17/wireless/

Technorati Tags: Wireless, Campus

How to break Web Software : Meet the Ultimate Web Hacker

2006-08-07T16:04:40Z

On April 13, 2006, Mike Andrews, a senior consultant at Foundstone.com who leads web application security assessments and teachies the Ultimate Web Hacking classes, recentlly spoke at a google lunchtime seminar. Google has posted a video-capture of the 90 minute session on the their video site. Google video allows downloading and playing on a Macintosh, PC, PSP, iPod, ... or TV, if you have a nice multifunction DVD player.

Mike Andrews, How To Break Web Software : A look at security vulnerabilities in web software, Google TechTalks April 13, 2006. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5159636580663884360 ]]> Firestone Ultimate Hacking Training at Black Hat 2006, Las Vegas, July 29 - August 1, 2006. http://www.foundstone.com/team/events/blackhat/ Ultimate Hacking: Black Hat Edition. This special action-packed two-day intensive class is based on the more extensive "Ultimate Hacking" class that we offer to the general public, the military, and many government agencies. We've taken the core content from "Ultimate Hacking" and have created a shorter, accelerated version for the Black Hat conference.

Private Property and Common Knowledge

2006-08-03T18:05:26Z

Yesterday's news brought several interesting patent announcements. Blackboard has been awarded a patent for a "Learning Management System" [1, 2] and has instituted an infringment suit against Desire2Learn [3]; Friendster has been awarded a patent for social networking tools and is hoping that it helps built their market share - no law suits have been announced. [4,5]

The abstract of the Blackboard patent [6] announces:

A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can create, manage, and offer a course to anyone else with access to the Internet without the need for an affiliation with an institution, thus enabling the virtual classroom to extend worldwide.

The abstract is followed by 44 specific claims that cascade from the invention - mainly individual components of such a system. An accompanying diagram shows how the system is structured. [7]

The Firendster patent [8], makes 15 claims, primarily focused on their algorithms for searching and selecting "friends of a friend."

Early reactions are focusing on the patent claims, especially the documentation of "prior art." Both the Moodle and Wikipedia communities have created "history of learning sytems" charts. [9, 10] ]]> References

[1] CmdrTaco, Blackboard Patenting Educational Groupware, SlashDot, August 02, @08:36AM. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/02/1217219

[2] Blackboard, About Blackboard Patents, http://www.blackboard.com/patent/

[3] Dan Carnevale, Blackboard Sues Rival Provider of Course-Management Software, Alleging Patent Infringement, Chronicle of Higher Education, Wednesday, August 2, 2006. http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=5g41b7txfvjcn74cbzk1128x9g4trw1x

[4] Nicole Girard, New lease on life for Friendster?, CNET News.com, August 1, 2006, 11:46 AM PT. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6100941.html

[5] Chronicle Wired Campus Blog, Does Friendster Own Online Social Networking? August 2, 2006 http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/1460/does-friendster-own-online-social-networking

[6] U.S. Patent No. 6,988,138. "Internet Based Education Support System and Methods". TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/mtnw3

[7] Patent No. 6,988.138. B1 Illustration of Claims. TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/ocdbp

[8] U.S. Patent No. 7,069,308. TinyURL : http://tinyurl.com/hl2po

[9] Moodle, Online Learning History, http://docs.moodle.org/en/Online_Learning_History

[10] Wikipedia, History of Virtual Learning Environments, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_environments

The Laptop Crusade

2006-07-27T18:02:27Z

Photo from Wired Magazine, From left: Design Continuum; FuseProject . Evolution of a Laptop: The prototype was designed and redesigned over a seven-month period. Early models (from left) had a power-generating hand crank, rubberized edges, and a handle to prop up the PC. All along, they've come in an array of colors.

Wired Magazine (August, 2006) has an interview / profile piece on Yves Béhar (The Fuse Project), who is working on the design(s) for the One Laptop Per Child Project (laptop.org. The article covers the nitty gritty of design factors (what are the clients requirements, where does the battery go, what color is the case, etc). More interestingly, though, is a discussion of the philosophy and significance of this project ... ]]>

Béhar thinks the laptop project is more pragmatic than his skeptics realize. “There’s a criticism that comes up,” he says. “I think it’s the stupidest argument: Send kids food, send them water.” These critics, he says, imagine all the developing world to be a famine-stricken village in Africa. “This is the typical ignorance of the West. There are different conditions in different places,” he says. “And there are a lot of places where kids are not starving, where kids want to learn more than anything else.”

Then there are the critics who believe the project requires villagers to run a T1 line into the center of town. It doesn’t. In fact, many laptops will go to areas with no Internet access. “Our emphasis is peer-to-peer,” Negroponte explains – connecting kids with each other over the mesh network, and offering schools a $100 server packed with 200 gigabytes of educational mat-erial. If every textbook resided on a server, a country like Brazil would save roughly $20 per kid per year (minus the cost of licensing). When fast Internet access becomes more widely available, the laptops will simply become more valuable. “Let’s not wait,” Negroponte says.

Douglas McGray, The Laptop Crusade, Wired 14.08, August 2006. http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/laptop.html

Technology Review interviews Marvin Minsky

2006-07-17T19:27:28Z

On July 13th, Marvin Minsky co-opened the 50th anniversary conference of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (1956). Technology Review interviewed Professor Minsky on July 11th. They preface their review with a suscinct summary of his career path:

Working with Seymour Papert in the MIT AI Lab, for instance, Minsky began in the 1970s to develop the "Society of Mind" theory, which posits that layers of purposeful yet mindless "agents" work together to generate consciousness.
Technology Review interrupted Minsky on July 11, as he was proofing the galleys for his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine, which reinterprets the human mind as a "cloud of resources," or mini-machines that turn on and off depending on the situation and give rise to our various emotional and mental states.

The interview maybe found online at Wade Roush, Marvin Minsky on Common Sense and Computers That Emote, Technology Review, Thursday, July 13, 2006, http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17164&ch=infotech

Online Tutoring

2006-07-05T14:28:37Z

Mackie Dougherty '03 is the founder and president of Harvard Online Tutoring, a new community service organization that links the academic firepower of Harvard students to the questions and conundrums of Boston high school students. (Harvard University Gazzette Staff photo by Jon Chase)

Sometimes "spam" really contains "steak" (or perhaps, otoro). Last week I received a blanket email about a tool to create an "online tutoring environment." The leading lines from a AskOnline caught my attention :

We build online tutoring centers for colleges and universities where your students will work with YOUR tutors. Harvard, Duke and Berkeley College are already realizing the benefits of giving students access to tutors over the internet.

The mention of Harvard, Duke, and Berkeley sent me to google - what are these guys up to. The first links were to an article in the Harvard Gazette on the Harvard Online Tutoring program; a visit to the AskOnline About page shows that this product is the commercialization of the Harvard student program. Another Facebook? ]]> Academically, the system seems fairly mature ...

[The] online tutoring center [offers] a wide variety of tools, including whiteboard technology, to help students and tutors communicate while tutoring writing, math or any other subject. There are also asynchronous tools that students can use to ask questions or search for previous sessions when no tutors are available to help them. For administrators [it offers] extensive tracking and reporting tools that allow you to log contact hours and even look at transcripts of tutoring sessions.

The original program at Harvard was a tutoring service offered for Boston area high school students and was coordinated with the Boston Public Library (and possibly other partners). There is a nice set of administrative, mentoring, and monitoring services built into the package.

AskOnline wants you to use your own tutors. We feel that it is very important that you know exactly who is communicating with your students. We offer a solution that allows you to choose your own staff of tutors. It is absolutely vital that you have the ability to teach the material the way you think it should be taught. Another benefit of this model is the freedom to set tutors' wages, which makes AskOnline the most cost-effective solution on the market.

Notes:

Beth Potier, Online tutoring connects: For high-schoolers, Harvard students make a difference without having to make a trip. Harvard Gazette, February 07, 2002. http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/02.07/18-tutoring.html.

Media Lab Speechhome Project

2006-05-25T17:39:54Z

The Media Lab’s Human Speechome Project, led by Associate Professor Deb Roy, has been amassing several terabytes per week of digital audio and video (A/V) recordings of early childhood learning and socialization data. These massive quantities of A/V data will be processed and analyzed using a suite of innovative data mining tools that Professor Roy and his team have been developing. By mid-2008, the information will have been assembled into a database exceeding one petabyte (1,000 terabytes) in total capacity. The speech and video data will be processed and analyzed by several hundred parallel processing devices in one of the most extensive scientific analyses of long-term infant learning patterns ever undertaken. Speech and video mining technologies emerging from this research will impact multimedia data management, business intelligence, and securities industries.

When fully built out, the Human Speechome Project computing infrastructure is expected to be composed of more than 3,000 Seagate SATA drives, more than 300 Hammer Z- Rack storage enclosures, more than 100 Marvell-based 10G/GbE switches, and about 400 blade processors. High-performance storage I/O anticipates the processing of 700 terabytes of data during each 12-hour overnight analytical run. To achieve the desired performance requirements, 150-drive stripes (aggregated virtual volumes) will be created using the native virtualization capabilities of Z-SAN. Protection against data loss will be delivered through RAID 10 mirrors (duplicate copies) of the raw video data, transform data, and metadata files.

MIT , http://www.media.mit.edu/press/speechome/speechome-sponsor.pdf

MIT Press Archive, Speechome, http://www.media.mit.edu/press/speechome/

MIT Media Lab project explores language acquisition, Press Release, May 12, 2006. http://www.media.mit.edu/press/speechome/speechome-mit.pdf

Celeste Biever, Watch language grow in the 'Baby Brother' house, New Scientist, 14:18 15 May 2006. http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9167-watch-language-grow-in-the-baby-brother-house.html

e-Science 2006 - December 4 - 6, 2006. Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2006-05-19T21:06:35Z

The e-Science 2006 conference is designed to bring together developers and users of e-Science applications and enabling IT technologies from leading international and interdisciplinary research communities. The conference serves as a forum to present the results of the latest research and product/tool developments, and highlight related activities from around the world.

Accepted Workshops:

Session on Innovative and Collaborative Problem Solving Environment (PSE) in Distributed Resources
Scientific Workflows and Business workflow standards in e-Science
Running Production Grids
Biologically-inspired Optimisation Methods for Parallel and Distributed Architectures: Algorithms, Systems and Applications
Global Grid Forum
Collaborative Remote Laboratories (CRL 2006)
Engineering e-Infrastructures for the Benefits of e-Science
e-Humanities - an emerging area of concern
e-Science in and Beyond the Classroom: Usability, Practicability and Sensibility
HealthGrid

Call for Papers

You are invited to submit a paper with unpublished original work for e-Science 2006 or to one of its workshops.

Please, see http://www.escience-meeting.org/eScience2006 for details.

Derek Bok on the New U

2006-04-21T14:07:14Z

Derek Bok, former Presdent of Harvard University (1971 - 1991), and the appointed Interim President of Harvard University (July 2006), has contributed a column to Forbe's Magazine's "Blank Slate" section - The Nes 'U'. His latest book, Our Underachieving Colleges, was published in January.

The essay / editorial starts with a list of short comings he attributes to outmoted teaching methods being a major embarrassment to higher education but then makes a leap to imagining a cure based on standardized assessments of student performance - using "computers capable of scanning and evaluating written essays to measure students' understanding of complex material or their clarity and style in writing the English language."

]]> He observes

For all their success, however, American universities have one major weakness. The quality of education they provide is not all that it should be. According to a large body of research accumulated over the past 30 years, students do make progress in attaining the knowledge and skills they need, but the progress is typically modest. For example, college freshmen with critical thinking skills at the 50th percentile of their entering class only improve to a level equivalent to the 69th percentile by the time they graduate. Many students who major in science and engineering leave writing English no better than they did when they entered. Conversely, seniors majoring in the humanities often graduate without the improvement in quantitative skills needed to understand simple statistics or compare different options for financing their home. Fewer than ten percent of college seniors believe that they have made substantial progress in mastering a foreign language. According to one former college president, the rest “know enough to read a menu, but not enough to compliment the chef.”

After exploring some possible reforms and some wishful thinking ...

Other reforms would be welcome if only someone could figure out how to achieve them. It would be wonderful if colleges could strictly limit the time undergraduates spend with their iPods, computer games and television sets, and thereby halt the seductive distractions that are gradually eroding the quality and quantity of time spent preparing for classes. It would be a blessing if American high school seniors could graduate with academic skills that were at least equal to the average levels in other industrialized nations. But these reforms, however valuable, are beyond the reach of universities.

... he come up with suggestions for standardized assessment measures ...

What I would wish for is a set of reliable, universally accepted measures for evaluating and comparing student progress toward all the educational goals appropriate to every college and professional school. Some of these measures might be artfully constructed short-answer tests that could accurately assess student progress in critical thinking, moral reasoning, quantitative skills and foreign language competency. Others would require computers capable of scanning and evaluating written essays to measure students' understanding of complex material or their clarity and style in writing the English language.

Williams Hall in the Evening

2006-04-21T13:31:09Z

Williams Hall in an evening's "Alpine Glow" setting. Winter's over, but it's still cold.

Offered as an opening to the Academic Computing Blog.