News and Information for the Broad EOT Community

Upcoming Conferences. Workshops and Festivals

Cloud Futures 2012 – Call for Participation
May 7-8, 2012 – Berkeley, California

Cloud computing is an exciting platform for research and education. It has already advanced scientific and technological progress by making data and computing resources available at unprecedented economy of scale. To realize the full promise of cloud computing for research and education, however, we must think about the cloud as a holistic platform for creating new services, new experiences, and new methods to pursue research and teaching. Pursuing these goals presents a broad range of interesting questions. The Cloud Futures 2012 workshop is a joint venture between the Microsoft Research Connections, Azure Research Engagement, and Developer & Platform Evangelism Academic groups, and is in association with and supported by the University of California, Berkeley. For more information and to register, please visit http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/cloudfutures2012/.

The 21st International ACM Symposium on
High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing
(HPDC'12) – Call for Participation
June 18-22, 2012 - Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands
Early Bird Registration – May 25, 2012

The ACM International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC) is the premier annual conference on the design, the implementation, the evaluation, and
the use of parallel and distributed systems for high-end computing. HPDC'12 will take place
in Delft, the Netherlands, a historical, picturesque city that is less than one hour away
from Amsterdam-Schiphol airport. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.hpdc.org/2012/.

2012 BioQUEST Workshop: Making a Difference with Data
June 16-22, 2012 - Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

The learning environments we create must prominently feature data if we wish to provide learners with real opportunities to engage in scientific practices in our curriculum.  E-science, open data repositories, and online visualization and analysis tools have lowered the technical barriers to bringing data-rich science into our classrooms. However, we need new curricular and instructional strategies to help us use these resources effectively. Join the workshop for a week of exploring new models and ideas for creating data centric classrooms. Learn from others who are teaching with research data and develop collaborations and materials that will change your courses. Please visit http://bioquest.org/summer2012/ for more information and to submit an application. If you have any questions, please contact Sue Risseeuw at risseeuw@beloit.edu or 608-363-2012.

NSF-Sponsored Interdisciplinary Workshop on Computational Thinking Through Computing and Music
June 21-22, 2012 – Lowell, Massachusetts

The University of Massachusetts, Lowell Departments of Music and Computer Science are pleased to offer our first NSF-sponsored interdisciplinary Performamatics workshop on Computational Thinking through Computing and Music.  The purpose of this workshop is to share our techniques and materials and to provide an environment in which other pairs of professors can work together to develop interdisciplinary relationships and materials of their own to use in courses at their home institutions. Workshop participants are required to attend in interdisciplinary pairs, preferably from the same institution.  This will ensure that the workshop itself models interdisciplinary collaboration and produces outcomes that connect directly to participants' own situations.  Professors and instructors from 2- and 4-year colleges are encouraged to attend.  For more information and to apply, please visit http://teaching.cs.uml.edu/~heines/TUES/ProjectHome.jsp.

International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers (ROSS 2012)
June 25-29, 2012 – Vienna, Italy

The complexity of node architectures in supercomputers increases as we cross petaflop milestones on the way towards Exascale. Increasing levels of parallelism in multi- and many-core chips and emerging heterogeneity of computational resources coupled with energy and memory constraints force a reevaluation of our approaches towards operating systems and runtime environments. The International Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers provides a forum for researchers to exchange ideas and discuss research questions that are relevant to upcoming supercomputers. For more information, please visit http://www.mcs.anl.gov/events/workshops/ross/2012/.

7th Annual Computer Science for High School Teachers Summer Workshop
August 1-3, 2012 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University is running their 7th annual CS4HS summer workshop. The workshop includes activities that help high school teachers understand the breadth of computer science beyond Java programming. We provide hands-on activities that teachers can use in their classrooms to show their students how to use computational thinking principles to solve problems, explore the use of robots and other software to solve real-world problems, and learn more about the various fields of study within computer science including machine learning and human computer interaction. Teachers will visit the local Google office in Pittsburgh to speak with Google engineers about how to help prepare their students for jobs in the computing industry, and there will be an open forum to discuss ways to improve the perception and relevance of computing in K-12. For more information and to register, please visit
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/cs4hs/summer12

BMEI'12-CISP'12
October 16-18, 2012 - Chongqing, China

BMEI'12-CISP'12 is a premier international forum for scientists and researchers to present the state of the art of multimedia, signal processing, biomedical engineering and informatics. To promote international participation of researchers from outside the country/region where the conference is held (i.e., China’s mainland), researchers outside of China’s mainland are encouraged to propose invited sessions. The first author of each paper in an invited session must not be affiliated with an organization in China’s mainland. All papers in the invited sessions can be marked as "Invited Paper". The organizer(s) for each invited session with at least 6 registered papers will (jointly) enjoy an honorarium of US*D 400. Invited session organizers will solicit submissions, conduct reviews and recommend accept/reject decisions on the submitted papers. Invited session organizers will be able to set their own submission and review schedules, as long as a list of recommended papers is determined by 10 August 2012. Each invited session proposal should include: (1) the name, bio, and contact information of each organizer of the invited session; (2) the title and a short synopsis of the invited session. Please send your proposal to cisp-bmei@cqupt.edu.cn. For more information, please visit http://cisp-bmei.cqupt.edu.cn/.

16th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications – Call for Papers
October 25-27, 2012 - Dublin, Ireland

DS-RT provides an international forum for the discussion and presentation of original ideas, recent results and achievements by researchers, students, and systems developers on issues and challenges related to distributed simulation and real time applications.  Authors are encouraged to submit both theoretical and practical results of significance. Demonstration of new tools/applications is very desirable. For more information on the scope of the workshop and to apply, please visit http://ds-rt.com/2012/.

SC12
November 10-16, 2012 – Salt Lake City, Utah

The SC Technical Papers program is the premier forum for submissions of excellent scientific merit that introduce new ideas to the field and stimulate future trends in high performance computing, networking, and storage. New features in 2012 include: eight topical areas for presenting the highest-quality, original research: Algorithms; Applications; Architectures and Networks; Clouds and Grids; Performance, Energy, and Dependability; Programming Systems; Storage, Visualization, and Analytics; System Software and "State of the Practice" integrated into technical papers as the ninth topical area for presenting contributions that can advance the practice of high performance computing, including facilities, services and systems. For more information, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/overview-0

XSEDE Happenings

XSEDE12: Richard Tapia Selected as Keynote Speaker

Richard Tapia, Rice University Professor of Engineering and Computational and Applied Mathematics, recent recipient of the National Medal of Science, and longtime diversity advocate, has agreed to deliver a keynote speech during the XSEDE12 conference in Chicago, July 16-20. XSEDE is the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, a new NSF-funded national cyberinfrastructure service that began in July of 2011, succeeding the TeraGrid. The XSEDE12 conference is the inaugural conference for science, education, outreach, software, and technology related to XSEDE and to the NSF Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21). Tapia serves XSEDE as director of the XSEDE Scholars Program, assists underrepresented minority students who are earning degrees in computing-related fields at research institutions and provides them with opportunities for learning more about high-performance computing and XSEDE, networking with the research community, and participation in XSEDE-facilitated research experiences. At Rice University, Tapia is a mathematician and professor in computational and mathematical sciences, the Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education. In December 2011, he was named a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) “for significant contributions in optimization theory and numerical analysis and extraordinary efforts to foster diversity, inclusiveness and excellence in the mathematical sciences.” In October 2011, he was presented the National Medal of Science — the highest national honor that can be bestowed on a U.S. scientist — by President Obama in a White House ceremony. Tapia received the award “for his pioneering and fundamental contributions in optimization theory and numerical analysis and for his dedication and sustained efforts in fostering diversity and excellence in mathematics and science education.” 

Richard Tapia Bio: http://www.caam.rice.edu/~rat/brief_bio.html

XSEDE12: https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/welcome

Call for Presentations - Extreme Scaling Workshop from Blue Waters and XSEDE
July 15-16, 2012  - Chicago, Illinois

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications' Blue Waters and eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) projects are hosting the sixth in a series of Extreme Scaling workshops. The workshop will address algorithmic and applications challenges and solutions in large-scale computing systems with limited memory and I/O bandwith. The presentations and discussion are intended to assist the computational science and engineering community in making effective use of petascale through extreme-scale systems across the spectrum from local campus-scale to national systems. For more information and submission guidelines, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xscale.

Change in Requirements for XSEDE Resource Requests 

Effective Monday April 9, 2012, all new XSEDE resource requests require that the Principal Investigator (PI) of a request have an XSEDE portal account. The PI's username is now required to be entered in the appropriate field on the PI information page during the submission process. This new requirement is necessary to ensure that projects and allocations are properly created at the various XSEDE sites. Even if the submitter of a resource request is not the PI, a successful submission will still require that the PI's portal username be properly entered during the submission of the request. Along with these changes, the internal process has been improved to increase the turnaround time for the subsequent addition of user account requests to existing allocations. In the past, the processing of these requests would require multiple days; now, in most cases, the requests should be processed within one business day.

XSEDE Student Engagement Program Seeks Undergraduate Students for Summer Internship Opportunities

The XSEDE Student Engagement Program is seeking undergraduate and graduate students for a 10-week project experience for this summer. Working with XSEDE researchers and staff, students will make meaningful contributions to research, development and systems projects that benefit the national scientific and computational community. In exchange, students will be provided with travel support for project orientation and to attend the XSEDE’12 conference in Chicago, IL in July, and a small stipend. Available projects are listed at https://www.xsede.org/student-engagement-projects. To apply, complete the form online at https://www.xsede.org/student-intern-form and email your current resume and current academic transcripts to outreach-stueng@xsede.org. Your application will not be considered until all material has been received. Questions can be sent to outreach-stueng@xsede.org.

Students: Participate in the XSEDE12 Student Program! 



XSEDE12, the first conference of XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, will be held July 16-19, 2012, at the InterContinental hotel in downtown Chicago. 
XSEDE provides high-performance computational resources and services for scientists and researchers around the world. 

If you are a high school, undergraduate, or graduate student and are interested or engaged in computational research, we encourage you to participate in the XSEDE12 Student Program. Attend introductory tutorials tailored for students new to computational science or more advanced tutorials designed to help you get the most out of XSEDE resources. 
 - Present your research that uses XSEDE or OSG resources by submitting a paper to our Technical Program. 

Pending final approval, the National Science Foundation may provide limited funding to support student travel, lodging, and/or registration costs for attending XSEDE12. 

For details on submitting posters and papers, see the Call for Participation: 
https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/call-for-participation. To apply for travel funding, see the Student Program Support Request: 
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XSEDE12StuProg 


Campus Champions

Thinking of Becoming a Campus Champion? What Will XSEDE Provide?

XSEDE will support the Campus Champion representative by providing the following:

• Regular correspondence on new resources, services, and offerings to Campus Champions,
• Participation in User Services Working Group teleconferences,
• Forum for sharing information among other campus champions and XSEDE personnel,
• Campus visits by XSEDE personnel,
• Waived registration fee for the annual XSEDE conference,
• Training for Campus Champions via the XSEDE conference, meetings of the representatives, and through online forum,
• Allocations of time to allow the representative to get local users started quickly on XSEDE resources, and
• Success stories of impact of XSEDE on research and education.

For more information, contact: champion-info@xsede.org 

XSEDE Training Classes for May and June 2012 

May 14, 2012

XSEDE Workshop @ NCCU
12:00 - 05/14/2012 17:30 EDT

May 17, 2012

Gordon 101: An introduction to using SDSC’s Appro Gordon Compute Cluster
12:00 PDT

June 4-8, 2012

1st Temple-XSEDE High-Performance Code-a-thon ( Extreme Science, Data & Cheesesteaks )
08:00 - 12:00 EDT

June 9-13, 2012

I2PC Summer School on Multicore Programming
09:00 - 17:00 CDT

To register online, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar.

XSEDE Releases New Online Tutorial on Using the Lustre File System

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project has released a new online tutorial titled "Using the Lustre File System" in CI-Tutor. This tutorial provides users of high-performance computing applications with a basic understanding of the Lustre file system and how to use it to achieve optimal I/O performance.  Lustre, a blend of the words Linux and cluster, is open-source storage architecture for cluster computing environments. It is an object-based, parallel-distributed file system that enables scaling to tens of thousands of nodes, petabytes (PB) of storage, and high aggregate throughput up to hundreds of gigabytes per second. These features make Lustre advantageous for many scientific computing applications across a broad range of domains. Lustre file systems are used in computer clusters ranging from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site clusters. A number of the top supercomputers in the world use it, such as the Kraken XT5 at the National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee. Information on XSEDE resources using Lustre can be found on the XSEDE Storage web page. To read further, please visit https://www.xsede.org/new-online-lustre-file-system-tutorial.

Research News and Announcements

NCSA's Forge to be Decommissioned in September 

NCSA's Dell/NVIDIA cluster, Forge, will be decommissioned due to lack of ongoing support. Support for Forge has come primarily from the National Science Foundation, but there are also allocations supported by the University of Illinois, NCSA's Private Sector Program, and the NCSA Director's Office. The batch queues on Forge will be set to drain by 5 pm Sept. 28. After this time, batch jobs that remain in the queues will not be executed. User access to the Forge login nodes will be available until Sept. 30, 2012 to allow for data retrieval. Data remaining in the scratch, projects, and home directories after Sept. 30, 2012 will be deleted. To read further, please visit http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/12/0410NCSAForge.html.

PSC's Blacklight to Leverage Shared-Memory System for Novel and Innovative Projects initiative 

Times are changing for HPC (high-performance computing) research, as non-traditional fields of study have begun taking advantage of powerful HPC tools. This was part of the plan when the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program launched in July 2011. In recent months, the program took big steps toward this objective, in that a number of non-traditional projects — the common denominator being the need to process and analyze large amounts of data — were awarded peer-reviewed allocations of time on XSEDE resources. To read further, please http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-03-30/xsede_allocating_time_to_hpc_projects_with_shared_memory.html. visit

UCSD Engineers Test Life Saving Technology in a Seismic Stress Test

What happens when you put a fully equipped five-story building, which includes two hospital floors, computer servers, fire barriers and even a working elevator, through a series of high-intensity earthquakes? Structural engineers at the University of California, San Diego began to get some answers last week, when they launched a series of tests conducted on the world’s largest outdoor shake table at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center. The overarching goal of the $5 million project, which is supported by a coalition of government agencies, foundations and industry partners, is to ascertain what needs to be done to make sure that high-value buildings, such as hospitals and data centers, remain operational after going through an earthquake. Researchers also will assess whether the building’s fire barriers have been affected by the shakes. To read further, please visit http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/features/seismic_stress_test/

TACC Releases New Software to Drive Large-Scaled Tile Displays

he Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has released a new open-source software package called DisplayCluster that is used to drive large-scale tiled displays and allows scientists to interact and view high-resolution imagery and video up to gigapixels in size. Large-scale tiled displays are increasingly used by scientific communities for their effectiveness in visualizing immense data sets. Whether it is a microbiology professor teaching about viruses in the bloodstream, a doctor reviewing high-resolution medical scans, or an art student studying the brush strokes in Van Gogh's Starry Night—all of these domains use large, high-resolution displays to visualize information that may not be apparent on a smaller, lower-resolution screen, thereby improving comprehension. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/press-releases/2012/tacc-releases-new-software.

Educator Programs and Curriculum

SCRATCH@MIT CONFERENCE
June 25-28, 2012 – Cambridge, Massachusetts

Join educators and researchers from around the world to share experiences and imagine the possibilities of Scratch! With Scratch, everyone can program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations -- and share their creations with one another online. More than 2 million projects have been shared on the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu), with thousands of new projects every day. The conference will feature workshops, panels, presentations, demos, and posters on a wide variety of Scratch-related topics, from technologies to pedagogies, from applications to implications. For more information, please visit http://events.scratch.mit.edu/conference/

Faculty News and Opportunities

For Women to Think Mathematically, Colleges Should Think Creatively
Excerpt from the Chronicle of Higher Education

Addressing the U.S. shortage of women in hard sciences requires getting women into a more mathematically inclined mindset, which can be facilitated by more creative thinking by colleges, write Georgia Institute of Technology professor Theodore P. Hill and former California Polytechnic State University professor Erika Rogers. They cite a failure by experts to "connect the dots between creativity, hard sciences, and basic gender differences." Hill and Rogers refer to broad agreement among experts and lay observers that men achieve more creatively than women. They argue that research on women's dearth of representation in other creative disciplines also may yield insights about their underrepresentation in hard sciences. Research has uncovered greater playfulness, curiosity, and willingness to take risks among men than among women, and suggested ways to instill more creativity in women include setting up playrooms and apportioning time for creative play. Researchers also have suggested creating an "innovation hothouse" that drives the goals of teaching imagination, selecting risky, unconventional solutions, and working through failures as part of the creative process. "Encouraging a culture of creative opportunity may not directly increase the relative creative achievement of women in the hard sciences ... but it's worth a try," Hill and Rogers conclude. To read further, please visit http://chronicle.com/article/For-Women-to-Think/131547/

Early Career Faculty NASA Space Tech Research Opportunities
Submission Deadline – May 3, 2012

NASA is seeking proposals from accredited U.S. universities on behalf of outstanding early career faculty beginning their independent careers. This inaugural Space Technology Research Opportunities for Early Career Faculty solicitation seeks to sponsor research in specific, high priority technology areas of interest to NASA. Specific topic areas were selected because they can best benefit from early stage innovative approaches provided by U.S. academic institutions. The research will investigate unique, disruptive or transformational space technologies or concepts. For information on the solicitation, including specific technology areas of interest and how to submit notices of intent and proposals, please visit http://go.usa.gov/P31. For more information about the Space Technology Program and the crosscutting space technology areas of interest to NASA, please visit http://www.nasa.gov/oct.

Student Engagement and Opportunities

SC12: Student Cluster Competition - LittleFe Track
Deadline Extended – May 15, 2012

SC12 will again feature the Student Cluster Competition as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. Held in collaboration with the Communities Program, the Student Cluster Competition is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the last couple years, the competition has drawn teams from around the world, including Europe and Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia, and Taiwan. In this real-time, non-stop 48-hour challenge, teams of six undergraduate or high school students design and assemble a small cluster on the SC exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications. The teams have to partner with vendors to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components, that does not exceed the 26 amp power limit. New at SC12 is the addition of a second LittleFe Track to the cluster competition. This track follows the format of the traditional standard "big iron" competition, however, teams will use LittleFe systems. Eligible to apply to this track are teams of any educational institution that has not previously participated in the Student Cluster Competition. Institutions are not allowed to send teams to both tracks. For more information, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/student-cluster-competition.

Who, What, Where - XSEDE Across the Country

Make your plans for XSEDE12
July 16-20, Chicago – Chicago, Illinois
Bridging from the eXtreme to the campus and beyond

Begin making your plans for the annual conference of XSEDE, which is scheduled for July 16-20, 2012, XSEDE12 promises to bring together staff and users for an engaging, productive five days at the Intercontinental hotel on Michigan Avenue, in the heart of the city's downtown and its prime shopping area, the Magnificent Mile.  Please bookmark the following link and check back for updates, which will be posted as they become available: https://www.xsede.org//xsede12

Last But Not Least  - Odds and Ends of Interest

ACM Names MIT Researcher as 2012-13 Athena Lecturer

The Association of Computing Machinery's Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) recently named Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Nancy Lynch its 2012-2013 Athena Lecturer. Lynch has been recognized for her advances in distributed systems enabling dependable Internet and wireless network applications. The Athena Lecturer award comes with a $10,000 honorarium to celebrate female researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Lynch's "ability to formulate many of the core problems of the field in clear and precise ways has provided a foundation that allows computer system designers to find ways to work around the limitations she verified, and to solve problems with high probability," says Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the ACM-W Athena Lecturer award committee. Lynch devised new distributed algorithms, designed precise models for analyzing distributed algorithms and systems, and discovered limitations on what distributed algorithms can achieve. Her research produced the FLP result, which is characterized as a mathematical problem encompassing the challenge of establishing agreement in asynchronous distributed systems in the presence of failures. The research has had a major impact on the design of fault-tolerant distributed data management systems and communications systems. To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2012/04/19/acm-names-2012-13-athena-lecturer/.

Open Source Hardware Movement Seeks Legitimacy

A group of technologists recently established the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHA) to promote the creation and sharing of hardware or electronic designs. OSHA aims to foster growth in the open source hardware movement. Open source hardware is similar to open source software because designs can be applied to commercial applications from which companies can make money. "It has many similar principals of open source software, but differs because hardware is a different beast [with] different methods, formats, and issues than software," says OSHA founder Alicia Gibb. She says OSHA will host the annual Open Hardware Summit conference, which will act as a forum for technology professionals to discuss devices, manufacturing, design, business, and law. "We publish all the files needed to improve, make derivatives, or re-manufacture the things built," Gibb says. Many open source hardware projects are based on the Arduino microcontroller, which serves as a prime example of how open source hardware works. The open source hardware movement also has received support from organizations such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research. "Many open source hardware projects will not be the type of thing that are eligible for copyright protection," notes Public Knowledge attorney Michael Weinberg. To read further, please visit http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/041712-open-source-hardware-movement-seeks-258372.html.

New Research Could Mean Cellphones That Can See Through Walls

University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) researchers have developed an imager chip that enables mobile phones to see through walls, wood, plastics, paper, and other objects. One aspect of the technology involves tapping into an unused range in the electromagnetic spectrum, while the other aspect is a new microchip technology. "We’ve created approaches that open a previously untapped portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for consumer use and life-saving medical applications," says UTD professor Kenneth O. The technology enables images to be created with signals operating in the terahertz range without having to use several lenses inside a device. The new UTD microchip is based on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, which the researchers note is common in many electronic devices. "The combination of CMOS and terahertz means you could put this chip and receiver on the back of a cell phone, turning it into a device carried in your pocket that can see through objects," O says. He notes consumer applications for the technology could include finding studs in walls and authenticating documents. "There are all kinds of things you could be able to do that we just haven’t yet thought about," O says. To read further, please visit http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2012/4/18-17231_New-Research-Could-Mean-Cellphones-That-Can-See-Th_article-wide.html?WT.mc_id=NewsHomePageCenterColumn.

[WWW] Founder Berners-Lee: CISPA a Threat to Privacy Rights

With a U.S. House vote on the contentious Cyber-Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) rapidly approaching, World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns that the legislation jeopardizes everyone's privacy rights, not just those of U.S. citizens. He says legislation “is threatening the rights of people in America, and effectively rights everywhere, because what happens in America tends to affect people all over the world.” Advocates say CISPA provides government and businesses with the tools required to defend against cyberattacks. However several advocacy groups say CISPA could suppress the Internet's basic freedom and openness as well as provide the government with too many intimate details about Web users--a point Berners-Lee raises. He notes that "often people will confide in the Internet as they find their way through medical Web sites ... or as an adolescent finds their way through a Web site about homosexuality." CISPA closely follows the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, proposed bills that Berners-Lee notes were stopped by a big public outcry. "It’s staggering how quickly the U.S. government has come back with a new, different threat to the rights of its citizens,” he says. To read further, please visit http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Internet-Founder-BernersLee-CISPA-a-Threat-to-Privacy-Rights-436464/.

University of Chicago Researchers Develop Software to Help Spot Groups of Fake Online Reviews

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and Google have developed software that can identify groups of fraudulent online reviews that attempt to steer the sentiment of products or businesses. In the past, researchers have used Amazon's the Mechanical Turk to assess reviews, but UIC's Arjun Mukherjee and Bing Liu and Google's Natalie Glance decided to use paid experts, and then train software to differentiate between spammers and genuine reviewers. The researchers say the behavior of groups who collude to kill or hype products stuck out like sore thumbs. Spamming groups often file their reviews in quick bursts and the language they use is very similar, considering each reviewer is briefed by a contracting agency. "Although labeling individual fake reviews and reviewers is very hard, to our surprise labeling fake reviewer groups is much easier," the researchers say. Deceptive reviews are a growing problem, but the research suggests that moderators of sites will be able to identify them more easily in the future. To read further, please visit http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/04/software-engineers-turn-guns-o.html.

Contribute to the XSEDE Education Blog Spot

XSEDE News and Information is updated continually. To submit information for inclusion, please send email to amason@ucsd.edu.