Better Displays With Organic
Films
U.S. Firms' Outsourcing to
India Reaps Big Savings, Political Heat
U.S. companies see undeniable financial rewards from moving
their IT and business services work overseas, especially to
India: Brean Murray & Co. senior vice president Ashish
Thadhani says the general rule is that firms save between
$20,000 and $30,000 per worker based in India, while also ...
[read more]
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University Unveils Chatty
'Roboceptionist'
Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's computer
science and drama departments have created a robot
receptionist named Valerie that exhibits her own personality
in an effort to develop an engaging machine with social
skills. In addition to practical operations--giving
directions, answering ...
[read more]
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Scientists Tweak
Robots
University of Memphis professors Stan Franklin and Robert
Kozma are working on "biologically motivated" computer
software that could make next-generation interplanetary rovers
more intelligent and less dependent on human operators. Rick
Welch of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes ...
[read more]
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Inventors Strut Stuff at
Demo Show
Dozens of high-tech innovations, ranging from small PCs to
blogging tools to "augmented reality" software, were
spotlighted at the Demo conference in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Perhaps the most incredible product on display was Total
Immersion's D'Fusion software, which uses Windows XP hardware
to render ...
[read more]
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This Humvee Is Car and
Driver
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Grand
Challenge competition on March 13 will pit robotic vehicles in
a race to see which machine can cover over 200 miles of rough
desert the fastest without human intervention, with the winner
receiving a $1 million prize. The entrant ...
[read more]
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Perl's Extreme
Makeover
Programmer Larry Wall and the Perl development community
are performing a dramatic facelift of the Perl high-level
programming language, known as Perl 6. Perl Foundation
President and Perl 6 core developer team member Allison Randal
characterizes Perl 6 as "a complete rewrite of the internals
...
[read more]
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For the Multitasking
Motorist, a Third Eye
MobilEye Chairman Amnon Shashua used his experiences with
computer vision and machine learning at MIT's
artificial-intelligence lab to design a computerized camera
system that can enhance road safety by alerting motorists to
potentially hazardous situations, such as lane drifting or ...
[read more]
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Facing Up to New
Technology
University of California, Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Tamara
Miller and computer science professor David Forsyth have
invented a system that automatically correlates 45,000 face
images extracted from online news articles with the names of
the people in the photos, and relays information ...
[read more]
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2 Brothers' High-Tech
History in California
In every field of study there is some unsung genius that is
well regarded by peers but not known by outsiders: Ivan and
William "Bert" Sutherland are the computer science field's
"engineer's engineers," having been involved in nearly every
major computer innovation to date. Ivan helped ...
[read more]
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View From the Alpha
Geek
Programmer Rael Dornfest keeps track of IT innovation and
innovators as part of his job putting together O'Reilly &
Associates' Emerging Technology Conferences. He says the key
to understanding technology trends is to find the
trend-setters, or alpha geeks, that are widely recognized by
their ...
[read more]
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Coincidences Set Up Mental
Error
Researchers at the Universities of York and Newcastle upon
Tyne in the United Kingdom believe airplanes and other
machines could be made safer with human-computer interfaces
designed to bypass people's penchant to assume causal
relationships between a sequence of events if those events ...
[read more]
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Interplanetary
International Internet Launched
A Feb. 6 "pioneering demonstration" of what is coming to be
called the Interplanetary Internet (IPN) involved NASA mission
controllers relaying instructions to the Spirit rover on Mars
via a European spacecraft in orbit around the red planet.
"This is the first time we have had an in-orbit ...
[read more]
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Se Habla Open
Source?
Developing countries without basic desktop software in
native languages are turning to open-source solutions,
jeopardizing Microsoft's long-term interests in those
potential markets. Proprietary software vendors usually wait
until a market is well-enough developed economically before
localizing ...
[read more]
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Flurry of Worms Hits
Companies Already on Guard
A number of smaller, less vicious worms--such as Netsky-B
and Bagle-B--are causing problems all over the world,
spreading rapidly even if they are not shutting down networks
or using too much bandwidth. They are nuisances to IT and
security managers watching for major viruses to attack using a
...
[read more]
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Converging on Network
Security
Solving the most formidable network security problems is
one of the goals of the National Security Agency (NSA), which
has launched programs to address Internet interoperability,
network convergence, and wireless security bugs. The
convergence of different networks and appliances has ...
[read more]
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Spam-Busters Sort Out the
Fakes
Email authentication strategies announced to delegates at
the annual Spam Conference could be a more effective measure
against the growth of unsolicited commercial email than
content filters or anti-spam laws. Most spammers resort to
spoofing, a tactic in which their junk email pretends to ...
[read more]
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Valid
Voting?
Stanford University computer science professor David Dill
says a major flaw in electronic voting systems is the voter's
inability to observe the votes that are recorded, and argues
that e-voting machines should be enhanced with
voter-verifiable audit trails. Such a feature would support
accurate ...
[read more]
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Better Displays With
Organic Films
Organic light-emitting diode (OLED)-based displays offer a
far more radiant, energy-efficient, and flexible alternative
to liquid crystal displays (LCDs), and promise to increase the
convenience and pervasiveness of electronic viewing. The
organic materials used in OLED displays are ...
[read more]
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