Computer Science

For those working in a small library, particularly one that may have little technical support, a foundational knowledge of technology is crucial. Written for librarians, library staff and administrators at libraries serving populations of 15,000 or less, “Technology for Small and One-Person Libraries: A LITA Guide,” published by ALA TechSource, shows how to successfully develop, implement, sustain and grow technology initiatives. Editors Rene J. Erlandson, Rachel A. Erb and their contributors draw from personal experience in rural libraries and regional state university libraries to offer guidance for making sound technology decisions. Whether looking for a quick answer or starting an in-depth technology project, readers will quickly find basic information on the full range of library technology, organized into chapters with numerous headings for easy scanning. Topics include: An overview of library technology basics; Electronic resource fundamentals, including a look at licensing issues; Webpage development, Open-source (OS) applications and a six-step plan for social media and social networking; How to create and sustain an effective technology strategy. Erlandson is the director of virtual services at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) libraries, with oversight of computer systems, digital asset management, digital collection development, electronic resource management, emerging technologies, library systems, network infrastructure and Web development. Prior to joining the University of Nebraska faculty, she worked at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Iowa State University over the course of two decades. As the senior cataloger and project coordinator for the Library of Congress-administered Illinois Newspaper Project at UIUC, she visited many small libraries throughout the state of Illinois and was often consulted on technology questions by librarians working in those libraries. Erb has been working in technical services for over a decade with substantial experience in cataloging materials of various formats and in managing integrated library systems. She recently transitioned to focusing on electronic resources and is now the electronic resources management librarian at Colorado State University (CSU). Most of her professional experience consists of working in either rural settings with limited resources or regional state universities. She has also written several case studies of technical services operations in these environments. ALA Store purchases fund advocacy, awareness and accreditation programs for library professionals worldwide. Contact us at (800) 545-2433 ext. 5418 or editionsmarketing@ala.org.

New vacancy listings are posted weekly on Wednesday at approximately 12 noon Central Time. They appear under New This Week and under the appropriate regional listing. Postings remain on the LITA Job Site for a minimum of four weeks. New This Week Digital Archivist, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ Emerging Technology and Systems Librarian , University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, Green Bay, WI Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services, Rice University, Houston, TX Library Associate – AnswerLine, County Library System, Issaquah, WA Reference and Instruction Librarian, Brandywine Campus, The Pennsylvania State University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA

The SemanticWeb.com Spotlight on Library Innovation Update Thank you for all the nominations we received for the first Semantic Web.com Spotlight on Innovation in Libraries. We are pleased to announce that Kevin Ford, from the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress, was selected for the Semantic Web.com Spotlight on Innovation for his work with the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) and his continuing work on the Library of Congress’s Linked Data Service (loc.id). In addition to being an active contributor, Kevin is responsible for the BIBFRAME website; has devised tools to view MARC records and the resulting BIBFRAME resources side-by-side; authored the first transformation code for MARC data to BIBFRAME resources; and is project manager for The Library of Congress’ Linked Data Service. Kevin also writes and presents frequently to promote BIBFRAME, ID.LOC.GOV, and educate fellow librarians on the possibilities of linked data. Without exception, each nominee represented great work and demonstrated the power of Linked Data in library systems, making it a difficult task for the committee, and sparking some interesting discussions about future such spotlight programs. Congratulations, Kevin, and thanks to all the other great library linked data projects nominated! TheSemanticWeb.com Spotlight on Library Innovation team We’d also like to remind the library community that the Semantic Technology and Business Conference is well worth experiencing. SemTechBiz brings together industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities jointly impacting both business leaders and technologists. Conference sessions include technical talks and case studies that highlight semantic technology applications in action. The program includes tutorials and over 130 sessions and demonstrations as well as a hackathon, start-up competition, exhibit floor, and networking opportunities. As supporters of the SemanticWeb.com Library Spotlight, LITA and OCLC members will get a 50% discount on a gold conference pass – use discount code LITA or OCLC when registering - LITA members – http://semtechbizsf2013.semanticweb.com/?c=stsflita – discount code “lita” minus quotes OCLC members – http://semtechbizsf2013.semanticweb.com/?c=stsfoclc – discount code “oclc” minus quotes

The ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board (TAB) has released the latest edition of our technology radar. This is where we highlight some of the technologies that are currently attracting our attention and that we feel are worth you taking a look at. In this edition our themes include my long term interest in breaking down boundaries between people and groups, lightweight option for analytics, infrastructure as code, and applying the practices that have worked well for us in development to places that are missing them.

In this week’s UIEtips, Margot Bloomstein shares examples of how organizations are successfully incorporating content strategy into their information architecture. Here’s an excerpt from the article: What’s in, and what’s out? “In my experience, it is very easy for brilliant information architects (or UX people who do information architecture) to underestimate the importance of editorial planning, voice and tone, and detailed guidelines for content creation. And conversely, it’s very easy for highly skilled content people to underestimate how much information architecture has to do with things other than content: the finicky details of application behavior and interaction design, in particular. I’m a huge fan of collaborations between information architects who care about editorial concerns and content strategists who love structure and talking about data. But whatever your situation, it’s important to know your way around structural design, if only so that you can provide useful feedback and support.” Read the article: Incorporating Content Strategy into Your Information Architecture. How do you incorporate content strategy into your information architecture? Let us know below.

As traditional and mission-critical relational database workloads migrate to the cloud in the form of Database- as-a-Service (DaaS), there is an increasing motivation to provide performance goals in Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Providing such performance goals is challenging for DaaS providers as they must balance the performance that they can deliver to tenants and the data center’s operating costs. In general, aggressively aggregating tenants on each server reduces the operating costs but degrades performance for the tenants, and vice versa. In this paper, we present a framework that takes as input the tenant workloads, their performance SLOs, and the server hardware that is available to the DaaS provider, and outputs a cost- effective recipe that specifies how much hardware to provision and how to schedule the tenants on each hardware resource. We evaluate our method and show that it produces effective solutions that can reduce the costs for the DaaS provider while meeting performance goals.

Tree-based models have proven to be an effective solution for web ranking as well as other problems in diverse domains. This paper focuses on optimizing the runtime performance of applying such models to make predictions, given an already-trained model. Although exceedingly simple conceptually, most implementations of tree-based models do not efficiently utilize modern superscalar processor architectures. By laying out data structures in memory in a more cache-conscious fashion, removing branches from the execution flow using a technique called predication, and micro-batching predictions using a technique called vectorization, we are able to better exploit modern processor architectures and significantly improve the speed of tree-based models over hard-coded if-else blocks. Our work represents the first instance of an architecture-conscious runtime implementation of tree-based models that we are aware of.

Long ago in a land far away (well, actually only about 2.5 hours east of here -- but definitely a very different day and time), I started teaching high school math (in a very progressive school system), and I thought, "This is my dream job." Every day was different and working with students and other educators was wonderful. Farther down the road in a new time and place, I started teaching computer programming to high school and college students, and I thought, "No, this is my dream job." Not only was every day different and the students were still fabulous, but teaching with computers was fun! They were actually paying me to have fun! Now, much later in my career path, I am no longer in the classroom, so I miss the students. However, every day is still different, and the responsibilities of my position are so varied that I am still enthusiastic about education -- specifically Computer Science/IT Education. My primary job responsibility is in the development and maintenance of our statewide IT curriculum. I have the pleasure of networking with business and industry partners and in working closely with teams of our state educators to develop or revise curriculum. That in itself is rewarding, challenging, and fun. We recently revised our very outdated Computer Programming I and II courses. The courses are being field tested in schools throughout the state this year. Last Monday, I had the pleasure of visiting a terrific high school in the southern part of our state. I was participating in a monitoring visit (monitoring and accountability are some of my other job responsibilities). What a pleasant surprise it was to me to visit both a Computer Programming II and a Computer Programming I classroom and to see the students actively engaged in programming games to test the computer programming coding skills that they had learned earlier in the year (C# and Visual Basic 2010). They were so engrossed in their work and having so much fun working, that I hated to interrupt them, but I did. I asked what they were doing (and all were able to articulate that quite clearly), and I asked if they liked the class (and they overwhelmingly said yes). Some of the students told me that they were going to college to study Computer Science, and some told me they were going to take another programming course or take AP CS. How great is that! I was able to see the "curriculum in action" with students who loved it. What fun! Almost as much fun as teaching it, but not quite. Responding to inquiries from stakeholders and interested parties is another fun part of my job. In January of this year, my division director forwarded me an email from a Russian Computer Science professor who was a Fulbright Scholar at the local state university. He wanted information about our Computer Science and IT curriculum, which I shared with him. He then shared a paper he had written about high school informatics in Russia. I read the paper and then we had the pleasure of meeting in person to discuss the similarities and differences between CS & IT in the United States and Informatics in Russia. Of course, the discussion included the new CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards. We had a delightful meeting (though occasionally I had to ask for him to repeat something he had said), but otherwise we communicated quite well. We decided that there were many similarities and some differences, and that both countries had room for improvement. (Which is a perennial state, as the CS and IT world changes constantly and poses a challenge to try to keep up to date!) Soon after I met with my Russian friend, I was asked to meet with a Japanese Computer Science Professor in my role as the CSTA Curriculum Committee Chair as well as the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards Task Force Chair. We met briefly at SIGCSE (though we saw each other in breakout sessions quite frequently throughout the conference). We also had a discussion noting the similarities and dif

Chronicle of Higher EducationEdX announced that 15 additional universities have agreed to offer free massive open online courses, bringing the total membership to 27 institutions. The new partners include five universities in the United States, six in Asia, three in Europe, and one in Australia. EdX, a nonprofit provider of MOOCs founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aims to help colleges use technology to rethink campus education and deliver online courses. "What we hope to get out of our partnership with edX is actively learning from and building upon each other’s educational innovations," says Kyoto University professor Toru Iiyoshi. Several professors recently have raised questions about the implications of free online courses, especially as colleges run pilot projects in which they ask students to watch edX video lectures and use edX professors. "It’s a good thing that people are debating and discussing all the issues of this transformational technology," says edX president Anant Agarwal. "The way we look at it is this is increasing choice." Agarwal notes there currently are more than 900,000 people enrolled in edX programs.From "MOOC Provider edX More Than Doubles Its University Partners" Chronicle of Higher Education (05/21/13) Jeffery R. Young View Full Article - May Require Paid Subscription

University of Michigan News ServiceAn international research team demonstrated the ability to forge an erratic heartbeat with radio frequency electromagnetic waves, exposing a vulnerability in the sensors used in medical devices, Bluetooth microphones, and computers in Web-based phone calls. "We found that these analog devices generally trust what they receive from their sensors, and that path is weak and could be exploited," says University of Michigan researcher Denis Foo Kune. The researchers tested cardiac defibrillators and pacemakers in open air to determine which radio waveforms could cause interference. They then exposed the medical devices to those waveforms in a saline bath and a patient simulator. The researchers found that in both cases, an attacker would need to be within five centimeters to cause interference. "The problem is that emerging medical sensors worn on the body, rather than implanted, could be more susceptible to this type of interference," says Michigan professor Kevin Fu. The researchers propose that software could ping the cardiac tissue to determine whether the previous pulse came from the heart or from interference. "This type of interference can be prevented with shields and filters like those seen today in military-grade equipment," notes Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology professor Yongdae Kim.From "Security Risks Found in Sensors for Heart Devices, Consumer Electronics" University of Michigan News Service (05/16/13) Nicole Casal Moore View Full Article