Electronic voting machines
October 23, 2008 at 5:06 am | In Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Several states are using electronic voting in the coming election. But is it safe? Some are concerned. A company named Diebold created the voting machines and wrote the program code that runs on them. Diebold also creates ATMs, so presumably they have experience in creating rugged machines that cannot be broken by determined hackers.
But there have been some problems with electronic voting so far. Machines in some elections have crashed or otherwise failed. Some also say that the machines have visible, easily exploitable flaws and security problems that could allow an attacker to manipulate the vote counts. One group even published a video showing how easy it was for them to compromise a voting machine. Additionally, the former CEO of Diebold is known to have been a major contributor and fundraiser to George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004, so some critics are concerned that the voting machines might try to bias themselves toward one party or another. (Because of all the bad press and reputation, Diebold has recently renamed its voting machine division to Premier Election Solutions.)
How can we be sure that our votes are counted fairly? Some (including California’s Secretary of State, recently) say that the solution is to make sure that all voting machines are fully open source. This means that everyone would be able to see all of the source code for the machine to make sure it doesn’t contain any sneaky code or bugs. Others think that a paper trail should be made for all electronic votes so that people can hand-count them if necessary to ensure correctness and avoid vote fraud.
RFID
July 31, 2008 at 12:13 pm | In Uncategorized | 2 CommentsTags: ethics, rfid, ubiquitous
A Parisian woman slides her purse across a sensor to get into the metro station. A competitor in the Enduro off-road motorcycle race completes a lap and his time is automatically recorded by a computer. Fluffy makes his way to a local pound, and his relieved owner gets a call alerting her of his whereabouts. At an airport, an American citizen waves his passport in front of a computer to retrieve his ticket information.
All of these scenarios are linked by their enabling technology – Radio Frequency Identification, an automatic identification system. RFID tags are placed on whatever needs to be identified and transmit their information to readers. Tags don’t necessarily need to be powered: they can use energy from a radio signal to transmit back their data. Whether or not a tag is powered affects the range at which it can be read.
This technology brings diverse challenges to computer scientists. Scale is an issue — as more and more items become tagged, how do we design systems to efficiently store and retrieve information? Similarly, if dozens of items are transmitting their IDs in an environment, how do we display the information in a human-friendly way? Surely, a big list of unsorted IDs will not be very useful. The largest challenge, though, is how to deal with issues of privacy and security. How much information can be stored by a transit system which uses RFID for payment? How can we prevent hackers from making unauthorized transactions on RFID-enabled credit cards? How can people manage their own identities if everything they own is tagged?
The RFID Ecosystem at the University of Washington is asking just these questions and coming up with some interesting solutions.
You can also read more about the ORCA public transit card which is supposed to be integrated into Husky Cards this year.
Is CS still a sexy job market?
July 7, 2008 at 11:48 pm | In Uncategorized | 2 CommentsTags: careers, companies, jobs
There’s some concern these days about the job market in technology fields. But Computer Science students certainly have something to smile about. Computer software engineers ranked #1 of 50 on CNN Money.com’s list of best jobs in America.
With an average salary of $80,427 per year, software engineering is the second fastest growing field on the list, with almost 1.2 million jobs expected to be available by 2014. That’s a growth rate of 46.07 percent over the 10 years, or an additional 44,770 new jobs in the field per year.
Additionally, computer/IT analysts ranked seventh on the list. Paying on average $83,247 per year, that field is growing at a rate of 36.10 percent, making it the seventh fastest growing field on the list. The number of jobs for an analyst is expected to jump to nearly 2 million by 2014, an increase of over 67,000 jobs per year.
MONEY magazine, with Salary.com, rated the jobs based on a variety of factors. The magazine collected data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and chose positions that had an above-average growth rate over 10 years and required at least a bachelor’s degree. Positions were also rated on stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity and ease of advancing in the field.
(courtesy UIUC)
Computing companies are well-represented in CNNMoney.com’s list of the best overall companies to work for:
1. Google
2. Quicken Loans
6. Cisco Systems
8. Qualcomm
Many tech companies offer interesting and unusual perks: eBay, Quicken Loans, Google, Microsoft
These computing companies rank among CNNMoney’s top-paying overall companies: Adobe, Cisco, Network Appliance, eBay, Texas Instruments, Yahoo!, SAS Institute, Google
Industrial Robots
July 3, 2008 at 11:20 am | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: industrial, mechanical, robotics
Why use robots on assembly lines and in repair shops? Unlike humans, these can carry on repetitive tasks all day and night without any failures. They can lift extremely heavy loads and systematically move them within .006 inches of their target. All of this, of course, is enabled in large part by clever programming.
There also exist many complex software packages for simulating the behavior of industrial robots and attempting to simplify the task of controlling their many axes.
Wikipedia may not be a very academic source, but it has a great article on industrial robots. You can also learn more about how they are programmed.
One Laptop Per Child
June 30, 2008 at 11:47 am | In Uncategorized | Leave a CommentTags: education, international, python
The One Laptop Per Child project has received a lot of media attention, including a lot of criticism, especially since announcing that the next version of the tiny educational laptop would run Windows XP.
Regardless of its flaws, the MIT-initiated project has inspired many companies, including Intel and Asus to produce their own low-powered machines for developing regions. The design and production of these brings together technologists, designers, educators, economists… cool!
The current OLPC system is mostly written in Python. Once you’ve attended some of our Tuesday sessions, why not start contributing?!
The official website.
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