The prankster, known only by his pseudonym Schlangemann (which he used to submit the paper), created the paper using SCIGen - the automatic CS paper generator. His pseudonym is taken from a German movie called Der Schlangemann.

"Schlangemann" reported to Slashdot today that the paper had been accepted to the conference, which is sponsored by the IEEE, a highly-regarded professional group for engineers in the United States. You can see the accepted paper posted on the IEEE's website. Here you can see where Schlangemann is named chair of a panel [PDF]. The abstract reads:

Recent advances in cooperative technology and classical communication are based entirely on the assumption that the Internet and active networks are not in conflict with object-oriented languages. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the visualization of DHTs that made refining and possibly simulating 8 bitarchitectures a reality, which embodies the compelling principles of electrical engineering. In this work we better understand how digital-to-analog converters can be applied to the development of e-commerce.

The good news is that the IEEE has done its job so well that now computers themselves can submit papers and present them at its conferences. The bad news is . . . well, pretty obvious. I guess this means Alan Sokal can finally, at last, shut the hell up about how science journals never accept fake articles.

SOURCE: Slashdot

I-WAY is a project funded by the European Union that uses existing technology, much of it off-the-shelf, to detect, combine and analyze tons of information about traffic. Cameras spot back-ups, accidents and lane closings. Sensors within cars note speed and braking data. They can even detect unsafe driving behavior, such as frequent lane changes or excessive speed. On top of that, sensor packages inside cars monitor the driver's heart rate, steering wheel grip and eye position.

The key to all this data acquisition is a computer system that can analyze it all, take stock of the situation, and issue warnings in real-time. Drivers can use their awareness to drive more cautiously if a high risk is present. Highway officials could use the information to adjust lane closings or traffic lght patterns to remove some of the elements causing the risk.

I-WAY is still in the testing phase, but it was designed to use low-cost technology already proven to work. It just combines the technology in an innovative way. We could see this in use on certain highways in a few years. I can't wait until I get my first ticket for an unsafe lane change I didn't actually make yet. Image by: InfoMofo.

Preventing Traffic Accidents Before They Happen? [Science Daily]

Says a summary of the research from UC San Diego:

Much of the richness in images created with photon mapping algorithms comes from precise accounting for the amount of light is in a scene and where that light is. Photon mapping algorithms provide a way to follow the light around the scene, as it bounces off various objects and lands on other objects. Photon mapping can also determine how light will interact with fog, smoke or other "participating media" that absorb, reflect and scatter some portion of the light - a task that has been traditionally quite computationally costly to perform because it requires sampling the light at many locations in order to make sure that nearly all the light is accounted for.

"Instead of computing the light at thousands of discrete points along the ray between the camera and the object, which is the conventional approach, we compute the lighting along the whole length of the ray all at once," said [computer science researcher Wojciech] Jarosz.

Computer Science Fog Machine [UC San Diego]