To promote airline safety, weather researchers are turning to neural networks as a means of forecasting conditions that contribute to ice buildup on aircraft wings. The 1994 crash of American Eagle Flight 4184 has been attributed in part to the extra weight and uneven air flow caused by ice. By being aware of weather conditions causing ice buildup, pilots can avoid factors that lead to such disasters.
According to Don Macao, a meteorologist at the Aviation Weather Center, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, forecasting involves detecting patterns, something neural nets are good at. The neural net that Macao built, which is based on a system he implemented several years ago for thunderstorm research, detects times when low temperatures and high relative humidity combine with a slow updraft-a pattern that often results in icing formations. Where the neural net falls short is in distinguishing between "light" and "heavy" icing conditions.
-Jonathan Erickson
For a hardware manufacturer that dominates the microchip industry, netting over one billion dollars in revenue last quarter, Intel sure tries hard to be taken seriously, as was evident at Intel's Internet Media Symposium.
Intel CEO Andy Groves kicked off the one-day conference by making a video phone call to blues artist Keb Mo, who was then touring France with Tina Turner. Keb Mo made the most insightful comment of the day when he asked Groves, "This is a really fancy phone call, ain't it?"
It was, but Groves and company aimed to prove that the technology for those "fancy phone calls" had arrived, and that Intel could provide it. The rest of the talks were devoted to hyping "hybrid applications," Intel's response to rumors regarding the Network Computer. Hybrid applications are designed to require both the Internet and high-speed, high-bandwidth (and presumably Intel-based) desktop PCs. Intel demonstrated upcoming hardware and software hybrid apps, including those that make use of its MMX extensions, DVD-ROM drives, and video phones running over the Internet.
-Eugene Eric Kim
Rolling along at, well, warp speed, the Microsoft public-relations juggernaut managed to place front-page stories in both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In a gushing ("users can much more easily embellish their creations with visual and aural flourishes") expos, the Times gave readers an advanced look at Microsoft's ActiveX-based Internet strategy, acknowledging by the end that OLE is perhaps "less elegant and less powerful" than alternatives such as OpenDoc. This was followed by an uncritical Windows NT 4.0 product announcement on WSJ's front-page a week prior to the product's release. (It was particularly appetizing to learn that "mock dog droppings" were used as a motivational incentive for the NT development team.)
-Jonathan Erickson
The Sixth Usenix Security Symposium provided a quick time trip through the coming decade of security. Some of the talks looked at today's technology: Marcus Ranum described how to get the most out of a firewall. Others looked at the technology currently finding its way into widespread use: Isaac Hollander discussed how one company is using Kerberos, an authentication system developed at MIT, and Tatu Ylonen described the SSH facility, a secure alternative to the telnet protocol. Other speakers looked farther into the future. Dan Boneh and Richard Lipton showed how cryptographic techniques could be used to "delete" files from physically inaccessible backup tapes (basic idea: encrypt files during backup so that forgetting the key makes the file unrecoverable). Several speakers discussed mechanisms for handling electronic commerce, including the intriguing problem of "digital cash."
One particularly interesting technical development was "sandboxing," a technique for restricting the run-time environment of a program. This technique is being developed to provide UNIX programs (or users) with specific subsets of root privileges, and also to protect personal systems against possibly malicious (or simply buggy) programs, including Java applets or Netscape plug-ins downloaded from the Internet.
-Tim Kientzle
In the dog-eat-dog world of disk-drive distribution, IBM recently began pumping millions of dollars into developing drives based on magneto-resistive recording (MR) technology. At press time, IBM had spent the last few weeks investing up to $380 million into several disk-drive plants. MR-based drives store more data, are less expensive, and require less power than current-generation drives. Other manufacturers of MR-based drives include Seagate, Read-Rite, TDK, and Yamaha.
According to Disk Trend, a Mountain View, California market-research firm, 1996 disk-drive shipments are expected to be about $109.2 million. While IBM has been beefing up its disk-storage manufacturing capabilities, Hewlett-Packard has been cutting back, closing plants at a restructuring cost of $150 million.
-Jonathan Erickson
Semiconductor manufacturer Micron Communications has released a beta version of its MicroStamp, a single-chip integrated circuit with a high-frequency, direct-sequence spread spectrum, microwave-frequency radio transmitter built in. The IC ranges from postage-stamp to credit-card size. It also contains a synchronous serial port allowing additional memory expansion. The device can be attached to anything from an employee badge to, say, a suitcase, which could be programmed to identify its contents. The radio-transmission capabilities enable the chip to be read from 15 feet away. MicroStamp is available in an evaluation and development system called the "MicroStamp Standard Simulator."
-Jonathan Erickson