Building a Technology
Portfolio
Pentagon Drops Plan to Test
Internet Voting
Deep-rooted security issues have pressured the Pentagon to
scrap a $22 million pilot initiative to test Internet voting
for Americans stationed overseas, according to officials. An
audit of the Internet voting system conducted by academics in
late January concluded that the integrity of an ...
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A Better Way to Squelch
Spam?
Recently proposed anti-spam sender authentication measures
such as Yahoo!'s DomainKeys and Microsoft's Caller ID are
unlikely to be effective spam deterrents because they are
centralized solutions that chiefly benefit major ISPs and
advertisers. The Camram (Campaign for real mail) project is
...
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U of C Takes First Victory
at ACM Tournament
On the eve of the Association of Computing Machinery's 2004
World Finals in Prague, a team of students from the University
of Calgary won an international programming competition, the
Java Challenge, which pitted them against 67 other
participating teams. Teams had to write components ...
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How E-Voting Threatens
Democracy
Much of the voting community's drive to address flaws in
touch-screen voting systems has been fueled by the crusading
efforts of Bev Harris. Harris was intrigued when an online
article she read raised the concern that e-voting systems
cannot verify the accurate recording of votes, making ...
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Purdue Engineers Design
'Shape-Search' for Industry Databases
Purdue University engineers are working on a system that
will allow people to mine industry databases for engineered
parts by basing searches on the components' three-dimensional
shapes. Karthik Ramani of the Purdue Research and Education
Center for Information Systems in Engineering ...
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CMI Launches 'Pervasive
Computing' Initiative
The Cambridge-MIT Institute, a cross-Atlantic collaboration
meant to boost academic and industry partnership, is launching
a Pervasive Computing Community that will find ways to make
computers more responsive to human needs. The proliferation
and commoditization of computers over the last 40 ...
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Black Scholars Tackle
Digital Divide Problem
Bridging the gap between those who have computer access and
those who do not is one of the goals of the nonprofit
Institute for African American E-Culture, which was founded in
2001 to establish a robust online black community. "There's a
need in the context of the digital divide to create ...
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Open Solution to Managing
Distributed Software Developments
Information Society Technologies' open source GENESIS
software platform was designed to tackle the challenge of
coordinating distributed teams of people working on the same
project so that they are kept apprised of any developments,
according to Pierluigi Ritrovato of the Center for Research
...
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Passport Safety, Privacy
Face Off
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is
developing new worldwide passport standards that include
digitized photos and may also feature radio-frequency
identification (RFID) chips for storing and transmitting
information about travelers, which a computer could compare to
...
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Future Search Efforts Will
Make Google Look Like 8-Tracks
Kevin Maney forecasts that within 10 years--if not
sooner--the popular Google search engine in its current
iteration will be as archaic as eight-track tapes, as the
building blocks of far more intuitive searches start to take
shape. Most search engines query the visible Web, which ...
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Researchers Question I.T.
Subcultural Values
Over three-quarters of IT projects are doomed to failure
not because of complexity, usability, and new technology's
unpredictability, as many people assume, but because an IT
occupational subculture often clashes with users and managers,
according to Jeffrey Stanton of Syracuse University. ...
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Advanced Speech Research
Sounding Sweet to IBM
Increasing the power of speech applications and interactive
voice response systems is the goal of advanced
speech-technology research efforts at IBM, declared general
manager of IBM's Pervasive Computing Group Gary Cohen during
his keynote speech at the AVIOS SpeechTEK 2004 conference. The
...
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InfiniBand
Ambivalence
InfiniBand could be seriously undermined by an alternative
technology should one emerge fast enough, according to
industry experts. Startup Precision I/O does not yet sell
products, but claims to have a more cost-effective solution
that uses standard Ethernet instead of requiring ...
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ICANN Chief Meets
Annan
ICANN President Paul Twomey met for the first time with
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on March 26.
Though Twomey declined to discuss the nature of the talks, the
meeting was held at a time when the global Internet community
has become increasingly vocal about having a say ...
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Federated Identity
Standards: Confused?
Real-time business relationship management is becoming more
important as business itself is decentralizing and becoming
more virtual, making access to distributed resources and
identity management a top concern. Federated identity
technology lets companies share identity information between
...
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Time to Enlist a 'National
Guard' for IT?
Military emergency management officials, speaking at the
recent Norwich University e-ProtectIT conference, said the
United States is not prepared to recover quickly should a
major cyberterrorism attack take place. They also say that
such an attack might require government mobilization of IT ...
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Computer, Heal
Thyself
Computers that can self-configure, self-repair, and
self-optimize are highly desirable for organizations that
implement information grids and other highly distributed
computing models, while autonomic computing's promised
benefits to others include more reliable and resilient
machines ...
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The Gentle Rise of the
Machines
A recent report from the United Nations Economic Commission
for Europe concludes that the growth of the domestic robot
market is poised to overtake the industrial robot market
within the next several years. The projected domestic robot
explosion is attributed to the falling cost of ...
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Building a Technology
Portfolio
A core component of the U.S. Defense Department's push
toward network-centric warfare is horizontal fusion
technologies that integrate data from a wide array of sources
for rapid decision-making among warfighters. John Osterholz of
the office of the DoD CIO says the ...
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