Dr. Dobb's Journal January 2001
A study conducted by the University of California at Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems indicates that the directly accessible "surface" of the World Wide Web consists of 2.5 billion documents and is growing at a rate of 7.3 million pages per day. If you include connected databases, intranet sites, and dynamic pages, there are about 550 billion documents — 95 percent of which are publicly accessible. According to the study (available at http://www.sims.berkeley .edu/how-much-info/index.html), "The world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 MB per person for each man, woman, and child on earth."
Meanwhile, worldwide production of books increased by only 2 percent last year, and production of newspapers declined 2 percent during the same time period. An interesting statistic in the study indicates that, in 1994, the United States accounted for 90 percent of the world's e-mail boxes, but now accounts for about 60 percent. The authors of the study, Hal Varian and Peter Lyman, are struck by the "dominance of digital information and its phenomenal growth" and by the "democratization of data," which is "potentially accessible anywhere on the Internet."
Researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute (http://www.weizmann.ac.il/) have developed an algorithm that can decipher the vast amount of data generated in genetic research. The algorithm, which is described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 17, 2000; http:// www.pnas.org/), uses the concept of clustering to organize similar pieces of data. The clustering concept is based on the statistical mechanics of granular magnets.
The algorithm has been successfully applied to evaluate approximately 140,000 genetic figures (derived from tissue samples) representing the "cellular expression of 2000 genes from 70 subjects." The researchers, led by Professor Eytan Domany, believe that the algorithm will eventually find broader application in data mining and other fields requiring large-scale data processing.
The creators of the MP3 audio encoding standard have received the prestigious German Future Prize, which is awarded annually to recognize outstanding performance in research and technology in Germany. The year 2000 winners are Karlheinz Brandenburg, Bernhard Grill, and Harald Popp, all of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (http://www .iis.fhg.de/), which developed MP3.
The 500,000 Deutsch-Mark prize (about $300,000 US) was established in 1997 as a national prize presented by Germany's President to promote homegrown advances in technology. The finalists for the 2000 award included the designer of a new type of radio sensor, a team working on an integrated paper production process, and researchers working on helium-3 atomic spin tomography. Apparently, the judges were most jazzed about downloading music from the Internet. For more information on the German Future Prize, see http://www .deutscher-zukunftspreis.de/.
So far, the most successful method of applying experiments in quantum computing has been the use of nuclear magnetic resonance instruments to detect the superposition states of atoms within a molecule. Using this technique, Isaac Chuang of IBM-Almaden, working with graduate students at Stanford University and the University of Calgary, has announced a quantum computer containing 5 qubits, exceeding the previous largest quantum computer consisting of 3 qubits. Chuang demonstrated the 5-qubit system at the annual Hot Chips 2000 conference (http://www.hotchips.org/), held at Stanford University.
Now, the use of linear optics quantum computation is challenging more conventional techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance, ion-trapping, and solid state quantum computing. According to researchers at Australia's Queensland University working with colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the trick is coming up with a single photon source to produce individual particles of light, which could then form the qubits of an optical quantum computer. Gerard Milburn of Queensland University's Centre for Quantum Computer Technology (http://www .physics.uq.edu.au/quant_comp_tech/) claims to have developed a single photon source. With linear optics entering the picture, the race is on between these various techniques to develop a quantum computer of several dozen qubits, which could then be applied to solve real-world problems.
The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) has announced that the core content of its proposed 10-gigabit fiber channel (10GFC) standard has been completed. The 10GFC standard is scheduled to be implemented in early 2002. The 10GFC standard will support a single physical transmission infrastructure for Fibre Channel, Infiniband, and Ethernet. In other words, the same cables, connectors, and optical transceivers can be deployed to support these three network applications under the proposed standard. 10GFC translates to a 12-fold increase in transmission speed over the 1-Gbps Fibre Channel, since it will be more efficient, according to the FCIA's prepared statement. For more information, see http://www.fibrechannel.org/.
The National Science Foundation has begun awarding grants to researchers as part of its $90 million Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative. Selected from over 1400 proposals, the initiative will help sponsor about 60 large projects averaging $1 million per year for three to five years, and another 150 smaller projects totaling $500,000 or less for up to three years. These include a University of Pittsburgh project to develop personal robotic assistants for the elderly; a University of Colorado project to design new interfaces for analyzing bacteria, viruses, and other genomes; and an Institute for Quantum Information to be established at CalTech. A project to construct a large-scale prototype of error-sensing software that would automatically repair damaged data involves the University of California at Berkeley, Mills College, and private industry. The NSF has also kicked off a second ITR competition and has requested from Congress an additional $190 million in funding. See http://www.nsf.gov/ for more information.