The US Supreme Court has rejected a challenge to CA's Proposition 209, a state constitutional amendment that now bans race or gender -- actually race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin -- from being considered in state/local government hiring or school admission. [AP. Mercury Center, 03Nov97.]

The women's share of CS bachelor's degrees has dropped from 37% in 1984 to 28% in 1993-95. [BW, 25Aug97, p. 136.]

Despite the economic success of high tech, companies are starting to realize that they have to participate in politics or they can be blindsided by new laws. DC isn't the kind of place where you can present your slide show once and then go home. You have to maintain an active lobby or your competitors for federal funds will find ways to re-introduce defeated bills. You may even have to play some golf. "You don't come here, give an inoculation on your issues to 535 members of Congress, and say 'Now they're immunized.'" Besides, the battles keep shifting between Capitol Hill and the regulatory agencies. Fortunately, it's not hard for industry executives to get face time with politicians or their staffs. After all, high tech is a sixth of the US economy. [Rory J. O'Connor, SJM, 07Sep97, 1D.]

Want to see Mir? A web page showing good viewing times can be found at . Mir is typically visible for only 4-7 minutes per night. [David Coombs , 22Oct97.]

The Mars Pathfinder lander is not answering, and has most likely succumbed to temperatures of -22 F in the afternoon and -58 F at night. Soon it will get colder as the Martian summer comes to an end. "Sojourner, the rover, is presumably circling the dead mother ship, Bambi-like, waiting for instructions." [Robert L. Park, WHAT'S NEW, 31Oct97.]

French scientist Jacques Blamont says that small probes could be sent to Mars for $15M, compared with $270M for the Pathfinder mission -- itself an impressive bargain. Blamont would launch a 115kg probe and 65kg of fuel in two of the eight "piggyback" small-mission compartments of an Ariane 5 rocket. The probe would circle Earth waiting for a Mars bypass, then head for Mars and descend by balloon. [Mark Ward, New Scientist. SJM, 24Oct97, 8E.]

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Inst. of Technology have developed a specialized self-repairing, self-replicating computer based on "biodule" cells. Each biodule processor can be rewired by software to assume new functions. If cells fail, their functions are taken over by nearby spare cells. [Science, 26Sep97. NewtNews. Bill Park.]

Intel and Digital are settling their lawsuits, with Intel paying $700M for Digital technology and Digital agreeing to develop Intel-based computers. This may mean the end of Digital's Alpha processors. [NYT, 28Oct97. EduP.]

The US will issue approximately 11K software patents in 1997, increasing to 15K in 1999. Increased US patent filings and decreased staff have created a backlog, lengthening patent evaluation to about 2.5 years. Even copyright filings are taking 18 weeks. [AP and the Internet Patent News Service. SJM, 29Oct97, 1C.]

Greater Los Angeles wants everyone to know that its 770+ digital multimedia companies employ 133K people, more than in NY and SF/Northern CA combined (at 264 and 558 multimedia companies). LA's digital information industries also dwarf those of Seattle/WA (88), Austin/TX (106), and Boston/MA (138). Lack of press recognition may be costing Los Angeles investment and business opportunities, not to mention talent. However, the activity is spread out "from Culver City to Santa Monica to Venice to Burbank to Hollywood," and the companies tend to operate independently or in turf wars. LA also lacks Northern CA's infrastructure of venture capitalists and startup lawyers (e.g., willing to work for deferred payment). Various groups in LA are working on the infrastructure problems, from high-bandwidth communications to multimedia incubators. (USC's Annenberg Incubator Project is one seed for a multimedia park.) They're just not sure whether to call the region Silicon Beach or the Digital Epicenter. [Carronade Group, 1996 statistics. Rick Wartzman, WSJ. Bill Park, 28Oct97.]

CLARITECH (Pittsburgh): BS SE in NLP, text processing, algorithm design.

New Jersey: MS/PhD speech scientist in DSP, pattern recognition.

SAS Institute (Cary, NC): PhD in constraint algorithms, genetic algorithms.

UMichigan (Ann Arbor): profs in ML, DB, distributed systems, etc.

Michigan State U. (East Lansing): profs in AI, KBS, robotics, pattern recognition, ML, etc.

UIC (Chicago): profs in HCI, agents, interactive learning environments, etc.

UIowa (Iowa City): prof in automated reasoning, VR, SE, etc.

UKansas: postdoc in VR and data mining for robot calibration.

SwRI (San Antonio, TX): US BS/MS/PhD computer scientists.

UC Irvine: profs in HCI, digital libraries, IR, multimedia, DB, bioinformatics.

UBristol AI Group (UK): researcher/lecturer in fuzzy logic, probabilistic methods for AI.

Carmen Systems (Gothenburg, Sweden): PhD R&D in optimization, operations research, constraint programming.

Odense U. (Denmark): jr/sr lecturer in speech, NL, gesture, HCI. (*)

IDSIA (Switzerland): PhD RAs in AI, transportation simulation, operations research.

German Research Center for AI (DFKI GmbH; Saarbruecken/Kaiserslautern): German-speaking researchers in NLP, dialogue processing.

HKUST (Hong Kong): profs in HCI, NLP, SE, networking, etc.

National Chiao Tung U. (Taiwan): CS/information engineering faculty.

ATR (Kyoto, Japan): BS/MS SE in NLP, ML for Japanese/English speech translator.

* captain's cool job of the week. (Selected by Brian "captain" Murfin.)

The website for Generic Evolutionary Design discusses evolutionary algorithms for producing art, at . See also the rule-based AI artist called Aaron, at . [Matthew Stanfield , comp.ai.alife, 16Oct97.]

GP sites about building 3D forms include Karl Sims' work on Virtual Creatures, ; "Computer Evolution of Buildable Objects" by Funes and Pollack, ; and a GP97 paper by Nagasaka, Ichiro, and Toshiharu Taura called "Geometric Representation for Shape Generation using Classifier System." Craig Reynolds says he may have a few related links on his own website, . [, genetic-programming, 18Oct97. Bill Park.]

You can find a good introduction to genetic algorithms at . Another starting point is the genetic algorithms archive, . [Matthew Lybanon , comp.ai.genetic, 06Oct97.]

For genetic programming resources, see , , , , and . Also or . [Craig Reynolds , comp.ai.genetic, 09Oct97.]

There is a C++ genetic algorithm (GA) library for DOS/Windows, Mac, or Unix at . [Daniel Koch , comp.ai.genetic, 15Oct97.]

Argonne National Laboratory is offering a commercial developer's kit for its embedded Genetic Algorithm Package (PGAPack) Version 1.0 library. PGAPack is a general-purpose, data-structure-neutral, parallel genetic algorithm library for any parallel or serial platform that has an ANSI C compiler and 16MB RAM. Callable from Fortran or C; more than five person-years of development. . Paul Betten , (630) 252-4962, (630) 252-5230 Fax. . [CBD, 24Oct97.]

Shareware and freeware neural network software can be found at . For instance, one DOS backprop package with an XOR demonstration is Brain Neural Network Simulator from Technion (Israel). [Frank Willett , comp.ai.neural-nets, 25Oct97.]

Pulse-coupled neural networks and other spiking neurons have found some applications in image processing, mammography, noise reduction, target recognition, etc. There are no books yet, but papers can be found at . See also <...vi-dynn.html> for Vi-DYNN'98 conference information. [Thomas Lindblad , comp.ai.neural-nets, 20Oct97.]

Michigan State U. has put its reinforcement learning repository on the Web, at . It offers survey articles, tutorials, articles, applications, and a directory of researchers. [Lynn Ryan , comp.ai.neural-nets, 21Oct97. David Joslin.]

The neural network toolbox in Matlab's new beta version 3.0 (not yet released) will have an implementation of the Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) algorithm. [Yovan D. Lukic , comp.ai.neural-nets, 15Oct97.]

Conferences, workshops, and other events related to neural networks -- including vision and speech applications -- are listed on . Updated daily; new listings are solicited. [Georg Thimm , connectionists, 16Oct97.]

Makh-Shevet (Israel) is making a lie detector for real-time use over the phone. It analyzes stress in full speech, not just "yes" or "no" responses. The company is about to release its "Truster" product in Israel, Germany, and then the US, and is working on a next generation for Internet/videoconferencing systems. [TechWire, 16Oct97. NewtNews.]

Home Automated Living will soon release its HAL2000 voice command software, for controlling household functions by phone, intercom, or a home microphone network. The software (from Lernout & Hauspie) runs under Windows 95, and will cost about 400 pounds. [The Times. Lily Laws, 15Oct97.]

Speaking of speech, have you noticed that the name of composer Debussy sounds like a quickly spoken "WC"?

A "voice fingerprint" can refer to any discriminatory characteristics of a person,s voice, not just a 2D representation. One approach starts with the Time Encoded Signal Processing and Recognition (TESPAR) toolbox for MATLAB, from Domain Dynamics. TESPAR reduces any band-limited waveform to a sparse matrix of one or more dimensions. 1x29 and 29x29 matrices are used for many purposes. [Martin George , comp.dsp, 20Oct97.]

The Cantata programming language and digital image processing environment by Khoral Research is designed for pattern recognition, among other things. "It can be a memory hog and disk-space eater, but is remarkably good and fairly easy to learn." [Elliott Oti , comp.graphics.algorithms, 14Oct97.]

Hong Kong police will soon test automatic identification of photos from Identikit sketches. [South China Morning Post. IT Daily, 28Oct97. Bill Park.]

GIFIC is a new data visualization add-in for Excel, for knowledge-based display of complex datasets. The GIFIC Corporation is looking for developers, and will supply a free GIFIC display development package. Offer good through 12/31/97. . [Michael Lesser , comp.graphics.visualization, 25Oct97.]

The Chinese Information Processing Open Laboratory (CIPOL; Beijing) of CCID, Ministry of Electronics Industry (MEI), is interested in technical cooperation with foreign corporations via the Internet. CIPOL has developed commercially usable Chinese language software products, including Huanyu Tong Chinese-English machine translation, bidirectional dictionaries, text correction, and Chinese full-text information retrieval. Intelligent text classification is in development, and other projects can be considered. CIPOL is also interested in providing human translators for technical manuals, and also data entry in Chinese or English. [Y.Q. , comp.ai, 26Oct97.] (Their collaborations have included a Sino-Japan joint project and ties with the Apple-ISS Research Center in Singapore and IBM China Research Center in Beijing.)

The Informix for Innovation Software Grant Program has provided $10M in database products to over 100 schools and non-profit organizations in the past 10 months. Recipients get a five-year product license, software, documentation, and a year of updates, support, and training. Apply to Holly Lugassy , 650-926-6055, 650-926-6940 Fax. [dbworld, 28Oct97.]

-- Ken