Dr. Dobb's Journal June, 2005
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing a language-to-code visualizer tool called "Metafor" that translates natural languages (like English) to source code. According to researchers Hugo Liu and Henry Lieberman, Metafor is a "brainstorming" editor that "interactively converts English sentences to partially specified program code, to be used as 'scaffolding' for a more detailed program"—an outliner, in other words. Metafor builds program skeletons in Python and other languages from parts of speech and language syntax, in which noun phrases are equivalent to objects, verbs to functions, and adjectives to object properties. A parser identifies the subjects, verbs, and object roles, and the Metafor software maps these English language constructs to code structures. For more information, see http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/publications/ papers/CHI2005-NLInterfaces.pdf.
IBM's supercomputer-in-progress, Blue Gene/L, has eclipsed its own performance record. The partially assembled system was ranked the fastest in the world last November, when it performed 70.72 teraflops on the Linpack benchmark. Now, although the cluster is still only half finished, it has nearly doubled in speed—clocking in at 135.3 teraflops on the same benchmark, according to the Department of Energy. IBM estimates that when Blue Gene/L is complete, it will be capable of an unprecedented 360 teraflops (http://www .research.ibm.com/bluegene/). When finished, Blue Gene/L will consist of 65,536 dual Power PC 400 cores running at 700 MHz—131,072 processors—with on-chip memory, and two dual floating-point units to speed calculation. The system will be densely packaged into 64 racks and integrated with multiple interconnection networks. The Blue Gene/L supercomputer is being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, where it will perform nuclear weapons simulations.
Hitachi's EMIEW—"Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate"—design is a walking, talking humanoid robot designed to give Honda's ASIMO a run for its money. Hitachi has built two EMIEWs, dubbed "Pal" and "Chum." The wheeled EMIEWs can move twice as fast as ASIMO, although unlike the other robot, they can't climb stairs. While EMIEW may seem to be playing catch-up to ASIMO and Sony's QRIO, the company is quick to point out that it has dabbled in nonindustrial robots before. Its first bipedal robot was shown at the 1985 Tsukuba Expo in Japan. For the EMIEWs, however, Hitachi chose to use a two-wheeled base resembling a Segway, which lets the robots keep up with a normal human's walking pace.
The EMIEWs also feature two arms and hands capable of grasping objects, as well as humanoid torsos and heads. They can talk, and are capable of engaging in dialogue with humans, although their vocabularies are limited to about 100 words. Hitachi estimates that in five to six years of linguistic training, Pal and Chum could be ready for practical jobs as information desk workers or office support staff.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have for the first time captured and digitized electrical signals at the rate of 1 trillion times per second. Professor Bahram Jalali and graduate researcher Yan Han have developed a one-tera-sample-per-second single-shot digitizer that lets scientists see, analyze, and understand lightning-quick pulses. The one-tera-sample-per-second single-shot digitizer uses light to first slow down the electrical waveforms, allowing the ultra-fast waveforms to be digitized at pico-second intervals—or one-millionth of one-millionth of a second. One application being studied is the development of defenses against microwave "e-bombs" that can destroy electronic devices. For more information, see http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?RelNum=6000.
David Vigliarolo Bauer of Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $100,000 scholarship for being named the first-place winner of the 2005 Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS) competition. Bauer, of Hunter College High School, designed a new method using "quantum dots" (florescent nanocrystals) to detect toxic agents that affect the nervous system. Second place and a $75,000 scholarship went to Timothy Frank Credo of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Highland Park, Illinois, for developing a more precise method to measure very brief intervals of time—picoseconds (trillionths of seconds)—over which charged secondary particles of light travel. The $50,000 third-place scholarship went to Kelley Harris of C.K. McClatchy High School in Sacramento, California, for her work on Z-DNA binding proteins, which may play a role in cell responses to certain virus infections. All in all, more than 1600 entries were submitted by students ranging in age from 15 to 18, with Intel awarding a total of $580,000 in prizes. For more information, see http://www .intel.com/education.
The Eclipse Foundation has released Version 1.0 of its Eclipse Roadmap (http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/roadmap.html), a document that outlines future directions of Eclipse. Among the themes and priorities outlined are issues related to scalability and enterprise-readiness; simplicity and extensibility; globalization; and attention to the rich client platform. Among the projects the organization will likely launch over the next year are: more extensive coverage of the software development lifecycle, embedded development, multiple language support, and vertical market technology frameworks.
Martin Nowak, an eye surgeon in Germany, and a long-time volunteer in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) distributed computing project (http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm), has discovered the largest known prime number. Nowak used one of his business PCs and free software by George Woltman and Scott Kurowski. His computer is a part of a worldwide array of tens of thousands of computers working together to make this discovery. The formula for the new prime number is 225,964,951-1. The number belongs to a special class of rare prime numbers called "Mersenne primes." This is only the 42nd Mersenne prime found since Marin Mersenne, a 17th century French monk, first studied these numbers over 350 years ago. Written out, the number has 7,816,230 digits, over half a million digits larger than the previous largest known prime number. It was discovered after more than 50 days of calculations on a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 computer.