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has added a new journalSource : www.newscientist.com
Personal computers could soon fit entirely on a key ring. Researchers at IBM in New York, US, have developed a way to carry a powerful, personalised virtual computer from one PC to the next, without losing the user?s work.
The trick is to store the virtual computer on a USB key, or any portable device with substantial storage space, like an MP3 player.
The virtual computer?s "soul" - as the researchers dub it - can then be uploaded to a new PC simply by plugging the portable device in. This host machine needs no special software or even a network connection to take on an entirely new personality.
The SoulPad system does not provide an instant switch, however. A user must typically wait a couple of minutes while the software configures the host system for use.
It uses three separate layers of software - a base operating system that automatically configures the host computer's various components, a layer of encryption to keep sensitive data secure, and a "virtual machine" containing the user's portable computing environment, for example, their web browsers, word processing or music software.
Mobile goal
"The ability to walk up to any computer, personalise it, and use it as one?s own has long been a goal of mobile computing research," write IBM researcher Ram?n C?ceres and colleagues in an award-winning paper outlining the work presented recently at the Usenix 3rd International Conference on Mobile Systems.
"With this approach, the computer boots from the device and resumes the virtual machine, thus giving the user access to his personal environment, including previously running computations," the researchers add.
A video clip of SoulPad in action is available, courtesy of the IBM researchers, here (14 MB, wmv format).
The IBM team expects other types of device, such as cellphones, to be launched with large storage capacity in the near future which would be able to carry SoulPad ? making it an even more practical solution, they say.
decentguy1972
Oh I see, looks really good, specially when it is such a small size. So what kind of work do you do?
jcw
Nah, its just a PC. Very tightly integrated and ideal for projects like special purpose/embedded systems.decentguy1972
Yes, checked it out, looks good. I am not much of a hardware person, are these processors the same which we talked about earlier in one of the postings? I think something about suprt computing, right?
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has added a new journalNewScientist.com news service
Will Knight
Translation software that develops an understanding of languages by scanning through thousands of previously translated documents has been released by US researchers.
Most existing translation software uses hand-coded rules for transposing words and phrases. But the new software, developed by Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu at the Information Sciences Institute, part of the University of Southern California, US, takes a statistical approach, building probabilistic rules about words, phrases and syntactic structures.
The pair founded a company called Language Weaver in Los Angeles, US, to sell the software as an automated translation tool. They already offer technology that can translate to or from English with four languages - Arabic, Chinese, French and Spanish.
The key to their "statistical machine translation software" are the translation dictionaries, patterns and rules - translation parameters - that the program develops. It does this by creating many different possible translation parameters based on previously translated documents and then ranking them probabilistically.
Genuine insights
Knight told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, DC, US, that this represents a prominent new trend in machine learning. He says the approach will eventually give computers the ability to produce genuine insights into the structure of different languages.
"What's going on now that is really exciting is translation based on syntactic structure," Knight told the meeting. "Before long a machine will discover something about linguistics that only a machine could, by crunching through billions of words."
The translated documents used to teach the translation algorithms can be electronic, on paper, or even audio files. Knight says the system is not only faster than other methods, but also better suited to tackling less common languages and the unusual vocabulary found in specialised or technical texts.
"It's an amazing process," says Benson Margulies of BASIS Technologies, a translation consultant firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. "It's the up-and-coming technology."
"The secret to machine translation is computer power," Knight adds. He says this is the only obstacle to developing even more powerful and effective translation technology. "It takes really big and fast computers."
www.newscientist.com
decentguy1972
It is very interesting, I have been interested in building a translating engine for Urdu language, but just haven't been able to spare enough time/resources for it. But it is getting higher on my priority list.
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has added a new journalDetails of a novel microprocessor design that could supercharge many computing applications were released at an industry conference in California, US, on Monday.
The microprocessor architecture - known as Cell - will appear in the Playstation3 games console, scheduled for release in 2006. But experts say it could ultimately find its way into many home entertainment devices, high-end computers and even supercomputers.
Details of the chip were disclosed at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, stirring debate over the possible implications for the computer industry.
Developed jointly by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, the microprocessor is fundamentally different from the chips that power most computers today. It incorporates eight separate processing cores, or "synergistic processing elements", which are capable of communicating with one another at high-speed. A standard chip has single, larger processor.
The eight cores give the chip the ability to run different software programs simultaneously and to divide up processing tasks more efficiently. It will also be able to run several operating systems, such as Linux or Windows, in tandem.
Clock speeds
In laboratory tests, the Cell chip reached a top "clock speed" of 4GHz, which means it can perform more than four billion calculations per second. By comparison, the fastest Intel Pentium chip is currently capable of 3.8GHz.
This difference in basic speed is not large but Richard Doherty, director of the computer industry analysts Envisioneering, in San Francisco, says Cell's modular architecture will give it a more substantial edge for many applications.
"At first blush I think it's safe to say that it will be 10 to 20 times faster than the fastest graphics cards and processors," Doherty told New Scientist. "We think it is going to revolutionise computer science for entertainment and business."
Radical designs
Doherty says a key challenge will be teaching programmers how to get the most out of the architecture. But he believes the launch of Cell will inspire other chip makers to look to more radical microprocessor designs.
"This is extremely impressive," Kevin Krewell, editor-in-chief of industry publication Microprocessor Report told The New York Times. "And it proves that architectural innovation isn't dead."
Dubbed a "supercomputer on a chip" by its makers, Cell could have a major impact on high-end computing, such as scientific experiments and graphics rendering.
But Cell is also expected to impact upon other areas of technology. For example, Toshiba has revealed that it plans to use the chip in high-definition televisions from 2006.
"Today we see the tangible results of our collaboration," says William Zeitler, senior vice president at IBM's Systems and Technology Group. The open, multi-core microprocessor heralds "a new era in graphics and multi-media performance", he adds.
Source : www.newscientist.com
jcw
Also, The cell processor does not look new to me. It seems that it's just the integration of the same kind of processing element used in the Thinking Machine CM-5 (of jurassic park fame) onto one die. See this www.top500.org for more info. Basically they used a SuperSPARC for scalar processing and 2 Vector units for handeling SIMD tasks. Each were given local static ram cache and shared in a pool of memory with all the other processors. They also won several industrial design awards: www.personal.psu.edudecentguy1972
You are right, it is all relative to what we have today.jcw
I would argue that there can never be a supercomputer on a chip. Simply because some latter-day Seymore Cray will come along and wire 1024 of them to a big-*ss data buss and build a supercomputer with them. This would obviously relegate the single (or double, or quadruple) CPU systems to the status of "plain old computer". :)
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has added a new journalstory.news.yahoo.com
By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press Writer
TROY, N.Y. - Among the handiest villains in science fiction are Computers That Know Too Much. Think of the dream-weaving despots of "The Matrix" or murderous HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey." But in reality, even the most super supercomputer lacks the reasoning capacity of a child engrossed in a Dr. Seuss book. Computers can't read the way we do. They can't learn or reason like us.
Narrowing that cognitive gap between humans and machines ? creating a computer that can read and learn at a sophisticated level ? is a big goal of artificial intelligence researchers.
The Pentagon (news - web sites)'s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, granted a contract worth at least $400,000 last fall to two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors who are trying to build a machine that can learn by reading.
The academics hope to create a machine that can read sections of textbooks and answer questions based on the material. Down the road, professor Selmer Bringsjord believes such artificial intelligence, or A.I., machines might be able to read military plans or manuals and adjust on the fly in the heat of battle.
"We have such a complex military now, it's so high tech, we need A.I. to help us," said Bringsjord, director of RPI's Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning lab. "There's no going back."
A.I. is already ingrained in our lives, from programs used by banks in evaluating potential borrowers' credit ratings to software that suggests corrected spellings for unrecognized words to investigative programs that mine databases seeking non-obvious relationships.
But reading is difficult for machines. Sentences must be converted into formal logic equations or other computer-friendly formats. Computers can do this on a modest scale. What has proved more elusive, however, is software that can make heads or tails of the verbal thicket contained in sentences like this one.
"Natural language is very ambiguous," said Boris Katz of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "If you go beyond sentences like 'John loves Mary,' to something like a paragraph from The Wall Street Journal ... there are some pretty complex phenomena in language that are pretty hard to represent."
Bringsjord and fellow RPI professor Konstantine Arkoudas want to create algorithms, or mathematical formulas, that allow their "Poised-for-Learning" machine to convert sentences into formal logic. The next step would be to create an additional set of algorithms that would allow the machine to use the information it takes in to figure things out. To reason, in other words.
For example, if the machine reads up on the planets, it should be poised to answer the question "What is the largest planet?" even if the text never explicitly states that Jupiter is the sun's most voluminous satellite.
The DARPA grant is for a year, with options to extend it into a three-year $1.2 million contract. Bringsjord hopes to have the Poised-for-Learning machine reading some basic texts, like algebra and astronomy, in three years.
DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker said the RPI grant is not tied to any particular Pentagon program but part of the agency's larger interest in cognitive systems. Ronald Brachman, director of DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office, has talked openly about the military's "computer-permeated future."
"In order to succeed, we'll need systems that can remember where they've been and what they've seen and improve themselves over time," Brachman told researchers at a conference last year.
The interwoven connection between soldier and computer ? battlefield laptops control backpack-sized aerial surveillance drones and other computers let combat troops see the location of friendly units on digital displays ? is expected to tighten considerably in the coming years.
A downside to the heavy reliance on technology, at least as it exists now, is that machines that might be asked to help make battle-related decisions can't adjust to quickly changing conditions in the field, Bringsjord said.
Bringsjord envisions A.I. robots of the future taking in information in real time, by either reading or listening to spoken instructions. He said that once a machine has vacuumed up all the relevant cultural, historical, geographical data about an area, an officer could say, "Here's the current situation in Fallujah. Go scout it out."
It all might sound like science fiction, but it's not that far-fetched. Machines can already be considered cognitive, depending on your definition of the word.
In Austin, Texas, Cycorp Inc. has been building a "knowledge base" called Cyc (pronounced "psych") with the goal of becoming a repository of human knowledge that can make intelligent decisions.
Cycorp vice president of research Michael Witbrock said Cyc can reason based on the 2.5 million assertions in its system, such as inferring what sort of salary you're likely to have based on your job.
Machines already exist that understand spoken words, recognize faces and make inferences based on experience, says Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Tom Mitchell. But Mitchell, past president of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, offers a big caveat: Even though researchers have made a lot of progress in different areas of cognition, there is still a big mystery about how the pieces go together.
In other words, worries about an all-knowing computer might be premature. Katz believes a computer that can reason at the level of even a toddler is far off.
"I'm still looking for that common sense these 3-year-olds have," Katz said. "And we don't have it yet."
___
On the Net:
Bringsjord's home page: rpi.edu
DARPA: darpa.mil
Katz's natural language question answering system: ai.mit.edu