Development by Davis: “Protests demonstrate growing demand for open access to research” plus 4 more

Protests demonstrate growing demand for open access to research
Innovation and collaboration stifled in red tape
Announcing the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Cities
Announcing the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Computational Intelligence
Announcing the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing

Protests demonstrate growing demand for open access to research

Posted: 24 May 2012 04:00 AM PDT

protests demand open access to academic research

Last week, Winston Hide committed what he called "a toxic career move." Hide, an associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at the Harvard School of Public Health, publicly resigned from the editorial board of Genomics, an influential journal in his field.

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Innovation and collaboration stifled in red tape

Posted: 24 May 2012 03:00 AM PDT

It is hard to think of any environment as conducive to innovation as the Internet. With a good idea and the motivation to follow it through, anything is possible. Look at Wikipedia, the Google search engine, and Facebook, to name just a few success stories.

Behind them are thousands of less famous web-based innovations that are also having a huge impact on society. These include many thousands of small firms and individual web developers based in Europe.

Collaboration is vital. Technologies do not emerge out of the blue. They are built on innovations by others – building-block technologies that are offered up as industry standards.

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Announcing the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Cities

Posted: 24 May 2012 01:30 AM PDT

It's with great excitement and anticipation that I write this blog on the launch of the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities based in London; the latest addition to Intel Labs Europe's Energy and Sustainability Lab, and sustainable cities research portfolio.

Why focus on cities? More than 50% of the world's population live in cities. Moreover cities consume more than 75% of the world's energy as well as contributing approximately 70% of greenhouse gases. By 2050 over 70% of the world population shall live in Cities. Cities are places where people meet, exchange and interact. They bring people with different interests, experiences and knowledge close together. They are the centres of culture, economic development and social change.

At this London-based institute; Intel principal investigators (PI's) shall collaborate with PI's from Imperial College London and University College London to drive new frontiers in the application of computing technologies to advance the social, economic and environmental well being of cities. Together we envisage the opportunity to collectively research and create the evolutionary leap for cities in terms of resource efficiency, new services and ease of living. Using a quadruple helix innovation approach involving Government, Industry, Academia and city dwellers we hope to catalyze and drive a new vision for sustainable cities.

Why London? London is the 5th largest city in the world, it has the largest GDP in Europe, and with over 300 languages and 200 ethnic communities, its diversity is a microcosm of the planet itself offering an exciting test bed to create and define sustainable cities. London is the host city to the 2012 summer Olympic games, and we shall seek to understand the experiences of a city under pre-planned stress. What systems worked, failed and why? How were the daily lives of the denizens, workers, and businesses of London affected?

What shall we do?

- We aim to create new, cross cutting inter-disciplinary "Systems of Systems" Cities research methodology to understand key city challenges and technology opportunities.

-We shall create a citizen-lead, technology enabled research agenda

- We shall create cross sector urban infrastructure solutions & services

- We shall partner with London communities and authorities to validate / test our research hypothesis.

- We shall collaborate with fellow travellers to envision future sustainable cities.

Sample research topics:

Citizens and Community :

How can technology "sustain sustainable behaviours"?
How can you design and evaluate connected and sustainable services and user-centred information for diverse needs of city dwellers.
How do you engage city communities to participate in developing technological innovations that will improve their environment, transport systems and local services

City as a Platform

What are the system architectures that would compose the notion of the city as a platform?
How can edge nodes compose an adaptive, resilient urban membrane?

Big Sensor Data Management and Analytics

How do we architect distributed analysis, decision making and resilience from dust to edge to cloud?

Human, Environment Interface

What novel interfaces and interactions are required to encourage participation of citizens, business and government?

Privacy, Security & Trust

How do we protect privacy, security and disconnection in a city of a billion sensors?

Integrated Urban Services

How can technology enable ubiquitous integrated services?

Policy + Business Models

Who pays? Who repairs? Who profits?

The institute will engage with local communities to understand how they want to live in their cities and involve them in designing technological innovations. These innovations will include making cities more 'aware and adaptive' by harnessing data gathered through sensor technologies embedded in city infrastructure and data shared by communities. The institute will use this data to develop models for more sustainable behaviour, including community energy management or water conservation. The institute will also explore how fixed and mobile sensors across the city including intelligent connected vehicles, can be used in the collection of data on the weather, emissions and traffic flows, for use by city planners in the development of more sustainable cities in the future.

We passionately feel the institute shall contribute to Intel's Vision:- "This decade we will create and extend computing technology to connect and enrich the lives of every person on earth "

Within the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities – London; the team are highly excited to collaborate and vision future sustainable cities.

Author:

Charlie Sheridan – ICRI Sustainable connected cities PI & managing sponsor

Contributors,

David Prendergast – ICRI Sustainable connected cities, Intel social science (PI)

Martin Curley – ILE Director

Prof. Yvonne Rogers, University College London (PI),

Prof. Julie Mc Cann, Imperial College London (PI)

Announcing the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Computational Intelligence

Posted: 24 May 2012 01:30 AM PDT

Intel has founded a new Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Computational Intelligence (ICRI-CI). The Institute will focus on long-term research in two directions: machine learning and heterogeneous computing architecture. Machine learning is critical to transform huge volumes of raw data (e.g., spatial and temporal sensory data, online dynamic data …) into "computational intelligence". Heterogeneous architecture enables performing the required computation fast enough and within acceptable power and area constraints. The synergistic combination of new machine learning algorithms and computer architecture that makes these algorithms practical and efficient lay the foundation for many promising and attractive usages together with the needed hardware and software.

The institute will be based in Israel at the Technion in Haifa and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (HUJI). The Institute is co-led by Ronny Ronen (Intel, Senior PE), by Prof. Uri Weser (Technion), and by Prof. Naftaly Tishby (HUJI). It will also draw researchers from other Israeli universities.

Bringing together a multi-university team that includes the top minds in the field of machine learning and computer architecture, Intel wants to accelerate the fundamental research in 3 major themes:

Advanced Machine Learning. Future devices will use a lot of data arriving from various sources (sensors, web etc) at high rate. Making fast, real time, intelligent decisions requires new type of machine learning algorithms;
Brain-inspired computing. Humans easily outperform computers in many domains, especially, in learning and recognition tasks. We will apply the deep understanding of brain fundamental structures, principles and mechanisms to explore new, computing architecture that can do these tasks better than traditional computers.
Novel heterogeneous computing platforms, accelerators. Future usages demand a lot of computing power at tight energy budget to perform tasks like speech and gesture recognition. A promising way of bringing such performance demanding tasks to low power mobile devices is through heterogeneous systems, where building blocks, differing in their capabilities and performance/power characteristics, are combined. The Institute will also investigate the applications of novel machine learning methods in traditional processor architecture to achieve higher performance and efficiency at reasonable complexity.

The institute will apply findings of above fundamental themes to two applications areas and examples of usage scenarios:

Intelligent Agents. We envision future devices which use machine learning to proactively assist the user's daily activities, based on data coming from "real" sensors as well personal and global data accumulated over a long time via many sources.

Imagine that you just landed in a city you have never visited before. It is quite late and you do not speak the local language. The intelligent device – or agent – will direct you to the taxi station nearby. When you are at the hotel it will suggest a good Italian restaurant in the neighborhood, knowing you like Italian cuisine. It will also remind you to take a coat since it is cold out there…

Learning Audio/Visual Systems. Most of the world's data today consists of video and audio streams. The amount of data exceeds the human ability to view and infer from. We envision systems that use machine learning to automatically analyze this data and extract useful relevant information.

As in other Intel Science and Technology Centers funded by Intel, the Collaborative Research Institute for Computational Intelligence will be based on truly open IP model to foster an innovative ecosystem that will lay a foundation for future computing paradigms and usages.

Announcing the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing

Posted: 24 May 2012 01:30 AM PDT

We are living in the Digital Age. Every day we interact with a multitude of electronic devices which are increasingly pervasive, mobile, and highly integrated. As Moore's law continues to hold true, mobile and embedded systems will become even more highly integrated, computationally powerful, and inter-connected, which in turn will enable many new application scenarios. In particular, we are seeing the emergence of converged solutions that combine personal mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) with the many embedded systems we interact with on a daily basis. Furthermore, these converged solutions are leveraging the cloud to enable new services and business models.

While the benefits to society are enormously valuable, this trend also introduces substantial security risks. Mobile phones today store/process security-critical and privacy-sensitive data and will soon manage all aspects of an individual's digital life. Similarly, tiny embedded controllers will control automobiles, homes, industry, and most other parts of our physical lives. To continue reaping productivity gains, we must mitigate these risks by dramatically increasing the trustworthiness of devices that form the bedrock of this connected world.

Today, we have launched the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (ICRI-SC) @ TU-Darmstadt to address this urgent need. TU-Darmstadt is a top university in Germany and a major player in the EU for security research. The Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED) is the entity within TU-Darmstadt where security research is concentrated. The Institute will bring together thought leaders from Intel and CASED to conduct research and deliver early prototypes that demonstrate how to advance the trustworthiness (safety, dependability, reliability) of our mobile and embedded systems.

The Institute will focus on 3 research themes in the context of Mobile & Embedded systems:

Novel Usage Models will be systematically explored in order to investigate the threat landscape and develop security architectures and requirements that deliver enhanced trustworthiness across a range of market segments. The initial focus will be on the automotive sector, exploring Car-to-Device applications that integrate mobile devices such as smartphones with in-vehicle systems in order to deliver converged solutions that enable improvements in driver and occupant comfort and safety.
Secure System Software will focus on increasing the resilience of systems to today's sophisticated malware. The emphasis will be on behavioural approaches such as control-flow integrity enforcement which will have an important role in moving beyond traditional signature-based anti-malware defences.
Hardware Security Primitives will be investigated which enable security solutions to be extended to resource-constrained mobile/embedded devices, with focus on lightweight crypto building blocks, privacy preserving protocols and cost-effective HW trust anchors.

Only an integrated end-to-end approach, which is cognizant of the technologies from the resource-constrained embedded controller right up to the cloud-based server, is capable of delivering the safer mobile and embedded world we depend on. This is an ambitious as well as exciting research agenda. I eagerly look forward to the ICRI-SC making a significant and lasting impact towards "safer mobile & embedded computing".