Can Johnny Still Program?

ACM President David Patterson says the United States' poor showing in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest could be partly attributable to the fact that programming skill is not really a matter of national pride in America. He notes the contest's past foreign winners ...

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Carter-Baker Commission Weighs U.S. Voting Changes

Underfunding and a lack of paper ballots were some of the problems with America's voting system cited by witnesses appearing before a commission headed by former president Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III at an April 18 hearing. "The lack of money is the single most ...

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Summarizer Ranks Sentences

A University of Michigan research project funded by the National Science Foundation has yielded LexRank, a new method for summarizing multiple documents on the same topic by ranking sentences according to their importance. The technique, which will be incorporated into the ...

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Next Gen Weighs a 'Secure' Future

Four Seattle teenagers discussed topics such as privacy, blogging, and First Amendment rights in a panel moderated by UC Berkeley graduate student Danah Boyd and Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kevin Bankston at ACM's Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference last week. ...

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Making Video Easier to Search and Find

Basic components of a system for searching, retrieving, and delivering video content from PCs and mobile devices comprise the end result of the IST BUSMAN project, which is considered to be one of the most outstanding research and development projects underwritten by the European Union's ...

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Studies Recharge Computer Science

Yale's Computer Science Department is developing a wide range of new technologies all focused on delivering practical applications. Computer science professors Holly Rushmeier and Julie Dorsey head a lab working on interrelated projects for devising new computer graphics applications, ...

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EU Task Force to Study IT Critical Infrastructure

The European Union has organized a task force to identify the 25 member states' efforts to protect the critical infrastructure against cyberthreats, as well as determine the needs of telecom operators, power companies, and other critical-infrastructure providers. The task force is ...

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Collaboration to Create Better Computer Systems

Computer science professors and students from Vanderbilt University will work with power grid and telecommunications companies to build computer systems that are more reliable. The university's Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) will work with Oak Ridge Laboratory, the ...

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Supercomputing Power Made Real

Making supercomputing applicable to everyday real-world problems is the goal of IBM's new Center for Business Optimization, which is directed by professor Bill Pulleyblank, former leader of IBM's Blue Gene project. Supercomputers are currently being used in such areas as climate ...

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The Art of Mobile Technology

The expansion of practical mobile phone applications is helping spawn new forms of creative expression and communication. One example is Yellow Arrow, a New York City-based public space art project in which participants post yellow, arrow-shaped stickers around the metropolis to mark locations ...

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New Sensors Detect Speech Without Sound

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Advanced Speech Encoding project is developing non-acoustic sensor technologies that could have uses outside of the military communication applications they are designed for. The initial phase of the project yielded an "active noise ...

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Some Say ICANN Too Heavy-Handed

ICANN's recent decision to approve two new top-level domains--.travel and .jobs--has once again sparked debate over the organization's domain-approval process. The Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), a non-profit think tank that supports free markets and limited government ...

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Robot Walks, Balances Like a Human

University of Michigan scientists say that have created a robot called "Rabbit" that is the first to resemble a human in the way it walks and balances. Instead of feet, Rabbit has stilts that can pivot on a point, and if the robot is pushed, it can step forward and regain its balance. ...

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Captcha the Puzzle

Over the last few years, computer scientists have developed CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) as a security measure which uses computer programs that automatically generate and grade puzzles that most people can solve without difficulty, but that ...

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What IT Women Want

A virtual roundtable of successful businesswomen moderated by Kathleen Melymuka discussed the challenges faced by women in IT and what recruiters and employers should do to attract and retain them. Scites Associates President Jan Scites said "the fundamental issue for women is that very few ...

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Why George Bush Needs a Technology Czar

Despite rumblings from CIOs and technology policy experts that the United States is in danger of losing its global lead in tech innovation to Asia, the federal government still has not placed a high priority on devising a comprehensive tech innovation agenda that sets specific milestones for ...

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Guide to Speech Standards

Speech technology standards offer a sturdy infrastructure for platforms and applications because they can augment interoperability, lower technical risk, and reduce costs. Standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force have developed or ...

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Web Service References

Registering service references in notification systems is often necessary for receiving notification messages, and IONA Technologies' Steve Vinoski, a member of the WS-Addressing working group, details several issues that must be addressed in order to transform the endpoint reference (EPR) ...

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Advancing Sensor Web Interoperability

The goal of the SensorNet project is to develop the components of a nationwide system for real-time detection, identification, and evaluation of various threats through an interoperable framework that collects and integrates sensor data from all over the country. SensorNet is a joint ...

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