News - Cutting Edge

One technology more than any other has stood out as a success story for the U.S. military in Iraq: unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.

The best-known of the UAVs, the MQ-1 Predator, has evolved from its early use as simply a reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft to become a highly valued weapon in its own right. Armed with Hellfire missiles, it can both track enemy combatants and fire on them. A more recent version of the Predator, called the MQ-9 Reaper, was specifically put into service as a "hunter-killer" drone.

The Pentagon has been so impressed with the use of UAVs in combat zones that it has made a high priority out of training and assigning new pilots for the aircraft (though not without some controversy). While the Predators carry out missions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and are handled by ground crews there, the pilots generally operate from thousands of miles away, in places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

In Sunday's installment of the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, correspondent Lesley Stahl traveled to Iraq to talk to Gen. Ray Odierno, the new top commander there, and other senior U.S. military personnel about the role of UAVs.

During last spring's fight for Sadr City, for instance, UAVs including the Predator and the RQ-7 Shadow proved instrumental in finding and destroying insurgent targets. Cameras on the aircraft help commanders on the ground see and map out a wide area of operations with their "persistent surveillance" capability.

Stahl's report shows rare footage of the weaponry in action as the military pursued "fleeting and perishable" targets.

U.S. officials credit the high-tech aerial systems as among the top reasons that violence in Iraq dropped so dramatically this year. And earlier this year, although still a young technology, the Predator and the Shadow were among the half-dozen UAVs recognized with an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution.

The Predator--with its "snowmobile" engine and unobtrusive presence--has also become a favored tool of the CIA. Take a closer look in the January 2003 video below, from the 60 Minutes archives.

(Credit: SkySails )

For the first time, the US Navy is using a new breed of sailing ship to deliver military equipment, a move that can potentially reduce fuel costs by 20 percent to 30 percent, or roughly $1,600 a day per ship, according to the ship's owners.

The Navy's Military Sealift Command (MSC) has chartered the "kite-assisted", fuel-saving 400-foot MV Beluga to deliver Air Force and Army cargo to from Europe to the US.

The MV Beluga uses a paraglider-shaped, SkySails-System, which supplements its conventional, internal combustion engines. The sail is basically a huge, computer-controlled kite that soars 100 to 300 yards into the air, using the wind to tow the ship at the end of a long tear-proof, synthetic rope.

The SkySails System is operated by the crew from a workstation on the bridge. All the steering and flight path adjustments are done automatically. "Emergency actions" are taken care of with a "push of a button." But the SkySail is only deployed offshore, outside the three-mile zone and traffic separation areas--just in case.

Unlike conventional sails, the kite has no superstructures that can get in the way of loading and unloading dockside, or scrape the bottom side of bridges as it sails under. The kite folds up, and can be stowed in an area the size of a telephone booth, according to developer SkySails of Hamburg, Germany. And, the SkySail can "generate two to three times more power per square meter sail area than conventional sails," according to the company. The environmental benefits have yet to calculated.

Though wind power was not a factor in awarding the contract, the shipping company was likely "able to capitalize on fuel savings to make its offer more competitive," according to MSC. "MSC values innovation that leads to cost savings," said Captain Nick Holman, of Sealift Logistics Command Europe.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--It only took a few years for the science of information retrieval to move from an obscure academic niche to the secretive research departments at the heart of multibillion-dollar Internet companies.

But one of those companies, Yahoo, is trying to give a little more power back to the professors and grad students through a program called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). The service lets academics and start-ups build their own search sites around Yahoo's search engine for free, manipulating results however they want.

Two dozen researchers and students from Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue, and other universities met here at Yahoo for a day in September to hear the company's BOSS pitch, show off some ideas they've had for how to use it, and try to coax Yahoo into sharing even more information through BOSS. Overall, their response to Yahoo's program was favorable.

MIT's Harr Chen would love even more data from Yahoo.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

"It enables a lot of research that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do," said Harr Chen, an MIT researcher at the event.

If it works out as hoped, Yahoo will make some money out of the program: corporate users who reach large scale with BOSS will have to show Yahoo's search ads. The academic side is a step removed from direct revenue, instead giving Yahoo some prominence with potentially influential thinkers in a market Google dominates. Piquing the interest of researchers at universities with a reputation for incubating the next big ideas is smart, though, and Yahoo and Google themselves both grew out of Stanford.

And honestly, with Google hogging 63 percent of the U.S. search market to Yahoo's 19.6 percent, what does Yahoo have to lose?

"We're not a market leader," said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search. "From a strategic standpoint, it does make sense to let other people innovate on top of us. If the pie grows, our share of the pie grows at the expense of somebody else."

The ultimate hope is that BOSS will mean money, too.

Yahoo has made the investment in a massive infrastructure that constantly scans and re-indexes the Web, filters out some of the dreck, interprets search queries, and provides search results in high volume in very short order. This infrastructure is prohibitively expensive for start-ups, just as it is for academic researchers, so Yahoo is letting companies use BOSS as well. Those operating on a small scale may use BOSS for free, but Yahoo requires larger efforts to either show ads or sign a custom revenue-sharing deal.

Mashing up Yahoo results
One possibility for BOSS is that Yahoo's search results can be combined with other data sets. "Other parties may have more info about their users," said BOSS engineer Vik Singh. For example, a social-networking site can track movies or the activities of friends that could be useful in shaping search results. "This is stuff we may or may not have," Singh said.

Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Chengxiang Zhai and Bin Tan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign showed one example of BOSS in action that uses this idea of modifying Yahoo's search results. Their application steered Yahoo's search engine in particular directions based on the data stored on a user's own computer.

In the example, the computer was able to discern what type of jaguar the user was more likely to be looking for--the cat, not the car, or the version of Mac OS X--based on evidence on the computer.

"We believe the client side of personalization has a few advantages over the server side," Zhai said. "It can alleviate concern over privacy and it can provide more information about user activity. And it can naturally distribute computation," so a search company's machines share work with the user's own computer.

Qualitatively different
Researchers could investigate search and related technologies such as natural-language processing (NLP) without BOSS. But with it, that research is vaulted into a different domain. It isn't just a matter of taking more time; with BOSS's vast index of the Web, the possibilities are qualitatively different.

"You gain enormously from access to the data. There are all sorts of things you can do with tons of data" that you can't with a smaller set, said Stanford's Christopher Manning.

Manning works in the active field of natural-language processing, technology that aims to let computers discern the meaning of real human speech or text and that's behind search technology from search start-up Hakia and Microsoft-acquired PowerSet. NLP benefits tremendously from having large-scale data sources, Manning said.

"To understand what words mean, you look at how they're used. We do that on a large scale, (examining) usage and context to learn about meaning," Manning said.

Please, sir, I want some more
It also was clear the researchers' appetites were whetted by BOSS. Nobody sounded ungrateful, but heck, as long as Yahoo is sharing some important data, why not share a little more?

Yahoo is headed that direction. On the research day, it opened up access to another slice of search-related "prisma" data.

Vik Singh, an engineer behind Yahoo BOSS

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Prisma powers Yahoo's search assist feature that suggests searches based on what people have begun to type into the search box, which can make searching more convenient for users, but for researchers trying to build more technology atop Yahoo search results, prisma data is bigger than that. For example, it can show a search term's variations, its membership in categories such as place names, movies, and government, and the likelihood that people search for the term by itself or as part of a larger query.

"That's got a lot of potential," said Dan Ramage a natural-language processing Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. Ramage said BOSS is useful for his research, which focuses on determining the various relationships that can connect a pair of words, he said, but he'd like it better if he could get better control over the snippets of text Yahoo shows with its search results.

Yes, Yahoo will share more
Yahoo plans to release more. "Over time you'll see we'll offer a lot more ingredients, a lot more power," said Ashim Chhabra, senior product manager with the BOSS project.

Some researchers are hungry for as much as they can get. Chen, for example, hoped Yahoo could become an engine to run software supplied by researchers that plumbs its entire Web index.

"We give you a little code, you run that code on every document, then you give us a number," Chen suggested. It would be useful, for example, "to track evolution of themes and memes on the Web, different buzz trends."

Graham Mudd, product marketing manager for Yahoo search, said the idea is "not as crazy as you think," though he also gave the impression that researchers shouldn't hold their breath for that level of access. But Yahoo clearly wants to offer what he could.

When it comes to search research, "The pool of talent is divided between a half a dozen companies," Raghavan said. "We think it behooves us to open up."

Ask and ye shall receive.

At least if the supplicant is the Net's most prominent techie cartoonist and Google is in a position to fulfill the request.

In late September, I chuckled at Randall Munroe's XKCD cartoon about living to regret YouTube comments. The cartoon suggested a virus that would read people's YouTube comments back to them before they posted. The result was the mass realization that we're all a bunch of morons, which, judging by the average YouTube comment I see, doesn't seem too far off the mark.

Well, lo and behold, such a thing now exists, as Google Blogoscoped pointed out Thursday, though alas not with the mandatory listen-before-you-post requirement Munroe suggested. Google added a text-to-speech button that will play back your comments.

YouTube comments, now with a text-to-speech engine.

(Credit: CNET News)

Is it a coincidence? Speak your mind in the comments below, and I'll update if Google gets back to me with a response.

Though I could be persuaded otherwise. I suspect it's evidence of Google being witty, mostly because I'm having trouble figuring out the utility of the feature besides to show off what I see as a generally pretty impressive text-to-speech engine. Perhaps they're trying to see how well the engine can handle a little more load.

It would be more useful if there were some way to train the audio engine when it flubs, as it does with some foreign terms and proper nouns, or at least let it know its errors. I was impressed it could handle some awkward terms, though, including "CNET" and "syzygy." It runs out of available syllables before the comments field runs out of room for words, though it seems well suited to the typically brief, if inane, YouTube comment.

Update 7:52 a.m. PDT: Matt Cutts, Google's Web spam guru, believes the audio feature is indeed a hat-tip to XKCD. "I love that Google had the sense of humor to add this feature," he said.

Also, Munroe himself remarks on his own blog about the audio feature, aptly pointing to one commenter's post: "It's the DUMBEST FEATURE I've seen thus far. There is no practical use for it. None. Zero. Nada. Sheesh. (The audio preview of my own post sounded moronic!)"

WASHINGTON--Is the idea of widespread biometric data collection still too spooky to win over the American public?

At some level, it's already becoming commonplace: California and some other states demand fingerprints from driver's license holders. The Verified Identity Pass program includes iris scans, as does the U.K's border control system. And prisoners have their blood forcibly drawn for a DNA sample.

But more widespread use of biometrics, especially by the government, raises substantial privacy concerns that may alarm many Americans and prove difficult to resolve, panelists at a conference here said Tuesday.

"How would I transact business, if I knew someone was following me everywhere and watching me?" asked Scott Hastings, president of the IT consulting firm Deep Water Point, who previously worked in the federal government for 23 years. "We need to grab hold of that and decide how that's going to modify our behavior."

Hastings sat on a panel at a forum on identity management hosted by the Information Technology Association of America.

"Will there be underground transactions? Will it affect our economy?" he asked. "When people (become aware of) the electronic footprints they leave behind, there will be a reaction."

Homeland Security's US-VISIT program is moving from collecting two fingerprints to 10 at U.S. borders.

(Credit: Stephanie Condon/CNET )

The increasing sophistication of identity management has had clear benefits, Hastings said. He noted how the rollout of the Department of Homeland Security's immigration and border management system--United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology--has virtually erased the once-prominent problem of document fraud at U.S. borders. The US-VISIT program, implemented in 2003, involves the collection of biometric data such as fingerprints to monitor for criminals and terrorists at the borders.

US-VISIT is the world's first large-scale biometrics program, according to director Robert Mocny. He said the program has stopped 2,400 criminals based on biometrics alone.

The program is currently transitioning from collecting two fingerprints to a 10-fingerprint standard. Mocny said US-VISIT is also pursuing other forms of biometric identification, such as iris-scanning technology.

"The biggest challenge since day 1 with any service has been the privacy and security aspect of it," said Chase Garwood, chief information officer of US-VISIT. He said the program extends to non-U.S. citizens many of the same protections afforded to citizens.

Protecting Americans' privacy at other borders presents an additional challenge, pointed out Mary Dixon, director of the defense manpower data center for the Defense Department.

Governments in Japan, Australia, the European Union, and other places have begun collecting biometric data at their respective borders as well. The United Arab Emirates has been utilizing iris scans for some time, Mocny said.

"As biometrics increases worldwide, consistent standards are essential," Mocny said. "We can transform the way the world travels."

He said that in order to make the collection of identifiable information palatable for consumers, it has to be noninvasive and familiar to people.

Some panelists suggested that younger generations are more accepting of handing over their personal information, but Dixon took issue with that point.

"They might share" their information online, she said, "but it's their decision whom they share with--they don't want the federal government collecting all of their information."

Conor White, chief technology officer of security systems vendor Daon, said consumers are growing more comfortable with the use of biometrics on an everyday basis, as evidenced by products like the Registered Travelers card, which identifies travelers who pose a minimal security risk.

"People are doing it because they recognize the security and convenience trade-off," he said.

CNET's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.

While many in the tech industry have their eyes on the cloud, Ester Dyson has set her sights on the stars.

The longtime tech pundit and investor on Tuesday said she is putting aside most of her day-to-day activities to undergo full-time astronaut training. She'll be a backup to another member of the tech industry, Charles Simonyi, who is set to make a second trip to the International Space Station next spring.

Dyson and Simonyi are indulging their cosmic interests under the auspices of Space Adventures, a company that arranges space flights for private citizens and in which Dyson is an investor. The cost of participating in the backup crew member program is $3 million, according to Space Adventures. (Simonyi reportedly paid about $25 million for his first trip to orbit in April 2007.)

"If, for some reason, he doesn't go (and I can scrounge up some extra cash), I get to go instead!" Dyson wrote on her Flight School blog, where she will chronicle her training, including a less-than-posh stay at Russia's Star City research and training facility. She reckons that her chance of getting into space next spring at about 5 percent.

I'm expecting it to be cold, staying in Star City through a Moscow winter, with a lot of detailed material to learn and exams to pass. Each Soyuz flight has three cosmonauts, and the other two want a colleague they can rely on to do the right thing in an emergency. By all accounts, the food is "stolovaya" (canteen), and the accommodations are spartan.

Dyson says she'll be heading to Russia soon to watch the October 12 launch of Space Adventures' next client to venture into orbit, video game developer Richard Garriott.

The interest in space flight is hardly out of the blue for Dyson, who ran the PC Forum conference for more than two decades. More recently, she launched the Flight School conference for entrepreneurs focused on air and space undertakings. Troubles in that business sector led Dyson to cancel this year's conference; she's aiming to revive it, eventually, she wrote, "but probably not until 2010."

The CERN Computer Center features 8,000 servers, 40,000 Intel processors, and many, many petabytes of data.

(Credit: CERN)

GENEVA--The CERN Computer Center is the number-crunching hub that powers the physics research lab's quest to discover the nature of the universe.

A formidable 8,000 servers housing 40,000 Intel processor cores provide the grunt to help crack the petabytes of data spewed out from CERN's cutting-edge particle accelerators, based here. Editors' note: This story was originally published on Silicon.com as a photo gallery. Click here to see all the images.)

About half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will generate about 15 petabytes of data by colliding protons with protons.

The computer center will provide only about 20 percent of the processing power used to examine the LHC data, with the rest coming from the LHC Computing Grid, a dedicated network of more than 100,000 processors.

Scientists hope the LHC will offer a "glimpse" at the Higgs Boson, a particle thought to give mass to the universe.

The LHC will produce up to 600 million particle collisions per second. To store the huge amount of data the LHC produces, the center houses 8 petabytes of hard disks and 18 petabytes of magnetic tapes. This will increase to 16 petabytes of disc and 30 petabytes of tape by the end of the year.

Even this is insufficient to store the vast amounts of the raw data produced by the LHC, so its four detectors--which each look for different particles and energy signatures--have built-in electronics and smaller computer centers that analyze petabytes of data per second they collect and that throw away the bulk of the information not of interest to the physicists.

The data that's left is sent on to the computer center and its racks of servers.

"A lot of processors are devoted to data processing for physics. We are collecting a tremendous amount of data from the collision points," said Jean Michel Jouanigot, head of network services at CERN.

The computing center holds 1,500 10-gigabit ports for data exchange and 70,000 1-gigabit ports for information flow among CERN sites. These are just some of the switching points.

(Credit: CERN)

The grid is linked to the center through dedicated 10-gigabit-per-second connections. It can handle about 50,000 users at once, sharing out bandwidth and processing power between scientists.

"The grid is a worldwide collaboration through many hundreds of sites and will get information through very powerful networks," Jouanigot said.

CERN serves as an Internet exchange point and is one of the oldest in Europe.

Within the computing center itself, the data exchange is handled by 1,500 10-gigabit ports, while information flow within CERN's various sites is handled by 70,000 1-gigabit ports.

Four robots are on duty to fetch data from CERN's StorageTek vault.

(Credit: CERN)

The center has four robots, each holding about 20,000 tapes, and it's planning to fit in two more.

Using existing tape technology, the room would be filled up within 10 years. However, Jouanigot said, the center is constantly upgrading to tapes with higher data density, adding that each tape now stores about 750GB compared to about 200GB two years ago.

Jouanigot said that the center refreshes its hardware about every three to four years. All the hardware in the computing center uses off-the-shelf components, and the servers run a customized version of Red Hat Linux.

The LHC is fed with protons by a series of particle accelerators that increase the speed and energy of the particles. The particles are then are fed into the LHC's 17-mile ring and accelerated to 99.9 per cent the speed of light.

Each beam that will collide in the LHC consists of up to 100 billion protons, and the center's 39 consoles allow operators to manage the beams' passage around the accelerators and monitor their cooling. The facility's cryogenic cooling system brings the collider's temperature to just above absolute zero to allow the superconducting magnets that drive the beams to work.

But for the time being, that cooling system has been switched off. The LHC is being returned to room temperature to allow repairs to be carried out on a fault. It is expected to start up again in April.

Nick Heath of Silicon.com reported from London.

Washington University engineering student Lee Cordova (left) looks on as his punching bots, posing as the vice presidential candidates, fight it out.

(Credit: Karren Knowlton)

Joe Biden and Sarah Palin weren't the only ones duking it out on Washington University's campus last week. So were two punching robots created by engineering students at the school and appropriately marked for the occasion with photos of the VP candidates affixed to their steel heads.

The bots, which are made of machine parts, did battle on the main courtyard of the St. Louis campus for about six hours Thursday as the candidates prepped for the much-anticipated faceoff inside. Not to be left out, the presidential candidates got a swing, too, with John McCain and Barack Obama's mugs getting swapped in and attached to the heads with magnets for matches of their own.

Students took turns manning the red and blue robots, whose arms operate via pulleys attached to straps. Two cables connect to a control bar, which can be pointed back and forth to make the bot move right and left. A good punch to the opponent's chest causes its spring-loaded head to fall off, which nets the aggressor a point.

Ford's MyKey will come standard in the 2010 Focus coupe. Other models will follow.

(Credit: Ford Motor)

Ford Motor has found a new way for parents to keep teen drivers in check when they lend them the car, the company said Monday.

MyKey, a car key with a chip, can be programmed to curtail the top speed of its user to 80 mph.

The MyKey will come standard with the 2010 Focus coupe and eventually will be available on other Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury models, according to Ford.

In addition to implementing a speed limit, the key can be used to limit the volume of the car stereo system and emit a chime for six seconds every five minutes until the driver puts on a seatbelt.

MyKey can also be programmed to chime once each time the car reaches 45 mph, 55 mph, and 65 mph to alert young drivers about their acceleration.

Another feature, useful to anyone who fails to notice when the fuel light goes on, chimes when the car is 75 miles from empty. (The light on a Ford usually goes on at 50 miles to empty.)

The new gadget is part of Ford's Driving Skills for Life program, which is dedicated to educating drivers not only about safety but also on techniques for reducing fuel consumption.

The Large Hadron Collider will be turned on again at the beginning of April, according to Robert Aymar, CERN's director general.

The LHC, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, was built by the European nuclear-research organization to conduct experiments to test fundamental physics theories and to search for important new science such as the Higgs Boson.

Click image for gallery on the Large Hadron Collider.

(Credit: Maximilien Brice for CERN)

The particle beam machine, located at the border between France and Switzerland, was first powered up on September 10, but the experiment had to be closed down on September 19 after a malfunction caused a leak of liquid helium.

Aymar said that at the moment, the scientists at CERN do not know what caused the leak, as the equipment, which needs to be cooled to operate, still had to heat up to room temperature to be examined.

"We have to perform a test, but we cannot believe a magnet is faulty," Aymar told ZDNet UK on Friday at the official launch at CERN of its grid-computing system, which has actually been running since 2003. "At the moment, we think it is an (electrical) connection. We have thousands of connections, and they can't all be tested...We'll see after the magnet returns to room temperature."

The LHC will come back online at the beginning of April, after a period of maintenance. Aymar said that from November 15 to the beginning of April, all the accelerators are closed down each year for maintenance. The closure period also reduces the winter load on the French power grid, which normally supplies power to the experiment.

"In general, we call (the maintenance period) 'consolidation,' but really we have to do it; otherwise, (the accelerators) would fall apart," Aymar said.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from CERN's headquarters.