AT&T Labs Research - September 2011

The Connected States of America maps communities

by: Alexandre Gerber, Deirdre W. Paul, James R. Rowland, and Christopher A. Rath, July 3, 2011

Borders—national, state, and city—exist for historical, geographic, cultural reasons. But how do they relate to communities people form through close interactions with others? As highlighted in a New York Times Op-Ed on Phone-call Cartography, researchers are using aggregated, anonymous cell phone data to map people’s self-formed communities and understand how they intersect with administrative borders.

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Michael Jordan on Bayesian nonparametric modeling

Michael I. Jordan will discuss Bayesian nonparametric modeling based on completely random measures, while giving examples of how recursions based on these measures lead to useful models in several domains, including protein structural modeling, natural language processing, compu- tational vision, and speech recognition. The talk, part of AT&T's Distinguished Speaker series, will take place October 5 at 3:30 in the Florham Park auditorium. Click here for directions.

Graphing one billion Internet connections

201108_Yifan-Hu_billion-edges213x108_detailed

This striking image by Yifan Hu represents an Internet graph with over a billion connections. It may well be the first visualization of a billion-edge graph.

To lay out such a large graph requires the tailoring of a 64-bit version of sfdp. In addition, an OpenGL-based renderer is developed, which works in a streaming fashion to save memory. The next challenge: interacting with such a huge graph to make sense out of it.

STEM may be key to upward mobility for Latinos

Median wealth for Hispanic households fell 66% between 2005 and 2009. Alicia Abella, interviewed here by New America Media, sees this alarming statistic as a call for further efforts to promote STEM education among Hispanics and other under-represented minorities. Technology jobs pay well, and their number is growing faster than supply. By 2018, the computer field alone will create 800,000 new jobs, far more than the 24,000 who graduated in this sector in the past three years.

Paper examines the decline of Myspace

Myspace, the once popular social site, sold recently for $35 million, a fraction of the $435 million paid only five years ago. What happened?

A paper by Walter Willinger and co-authors Mojtaba Torkjazi and Reza Rejaie examines the decline of Myspace and the not-unrelated rise of Facebook, while posing the question whether the very success of such sites inevitably leads to users abandoning them for competitors more in fashion.

Maria Fernández recognized by HENAAC

For contributions to computing and for her work in mentoring others, Maria F. Fernández has been recognized with an Outstanding Technical Achievement - Industry award from HENAAC/Great Minds in STEM, a non-profit organization focused on educational awareness of careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Dr. Fernández is executive director of distributed computing research at AT&T Labs - Research.

AT&T's optical research in Photonics Society News

The latest issue of Photonics Society News contains an article on the ongoing research into optical systems being carried out at AT&T Labs - Research. It covers the department’s active areas of research, including technologies for high-speed coherent optical transmission, dynamic photonic networking, fiber characterization, optical access networks, and quantum communications.