Testing Darwin
How to Make the PC
Beautiful
A key differentiator and selling point of consumer
technology is its "sexiness," a quality that PC manufacturers
are trying to instill within their products by enlisting
industrial design specialists to transform generic office
machines into sleek entertainment systems. Hewlett-Packard ...
[read more]
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The Fight Over Cyber
Oversight
Opinion was split at the recent RSA Conference on whether
government regulation of corporate accountability for
intrusions would improve corporate network security. Advocates
such as former national cybersecurity czar Richard Clarke said
such a measure would be beneficial, ...
[read more]
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EU Parliament Approves
Software Patent Restart
The way is now clear for the European Parliament to
formally request the European Commission to restart the
legislative process around IT patenting following the EP
Conference of Presidents' decision to reject the European
Union's proposed directive, which drew fierce criticism from
EU member ...
[read more]
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Engineering the Services of
Tomorrow
Projects funded by Information Society Technologies have
developed software engineering solutions to pave the way for
new end-user service economies. The CAMELEON project was
launched to give designers and software developers of
interactive ubiquitous services techniques, tools, and models
that would ...
[read more]
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Software Firms Fault
Colleges' Security Education
In a panel session at the Secure Software Forum on Feb. 14,
software companies such as Oracle and Microsoft laid a lot of
blame for flawed software on a lack of education in secure
programming for computer science graduates. The software
industry is a target of criticism for some ...
[read more]
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A 3-D View of the City,
Block by Block
Companies are building three-dimensional digital
simulations of cities and other urban areas whose potential
applications include virtual shopping, navigation,
socializing, video games, tenant leasing, and urban planning.
Tel Aviv-based GeoSim Systems is stitching together models of
central ...
[read more]
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Computer Program Matches
Intelligence of Mankind, at Least in
California
The IBM Almaden Research Center's Maisy 5 program has
successfully passed the Turing test for artificial
intelligence--at least by the standards of the California
educational system, according to center director Dr. Mark
Dean. The Turing test dictates that a computer is capable of
thinking if ...
[read more]
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Women Make Inroads Into
IT
Statistics New Zealand estimated that women accounted for
27.5 percent of computer science graduates in 2001, but just
11 percent of technical IT professionals. The firm also
reckoned that there are three male IT professionals for every
female across all IT careers. Meanwhile, a 2004 ...
[read more]
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Geeks to the
Corps
Founded as an altruistic organization for bridging the
digital divide between the world's technology haves and
have-nots, the International Executive Service Corps/Geekcorps
recruits volunteer programmers, network designers, and other
tech-savvy individuals to help set up sustainable tech ...
[read more]
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A Little of Everything at
Demo
Edward C. Baig was impressed by numerous offerings at the
15th annual Demo conference, where some 73 companies showcased
their latest wares. Notable products exhibited at the
conference included AutoXray's CodeScout, an automotive
plug-in that scans cars for malfunctions and identifies them
in ...
[read more]
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Rambling Robots Show Human
Efficiency
Three robots that stride like human beings made their debut
at the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science on Feb. 17. The machines, which were
produced by researchers at the University of Michigan, MIT,
Cornell University, and Delft University in the Netherlands,
...
[read more]
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Inside the
Future
British Telecom's resident futurist Ian Pearson predicts
that computers synthesized from biological cultures will
appear within a generation, and raises the possibility that
computer intelligence will equal human intelligence after
2015. He theorizes that in 15 years' time a bacterium ...
[read more]
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Building Open Blocks for
Composite Web Services
The IST's ADAPT program is developing open-source
middleware for building adaptable, scalable, and composite Web
services. "The problem has been that although distributed
applications are being used on an increasingly wide scale
there has not been much work on advancing the provision of ...
[read more]
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Making Your IM Secure--and
Deniable
University of California at Berkeley researchers Nikita
Borisov and Ian Goldberg have devised a plug-in for the Gaim
instant-messaging clients that can be used to keep IM
conversations confidential and unverifiable by encrypting the
messages without a key. Their off-the-record (OTR) ...
[read more]
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Malware 101: University
Offers Course on Spyware
The University of Calgary's computer science department
next fall will offer a class on spyware and spam that will
lead to each student writing their own spyware program. The
class is not the department's first controversial offering;
two years ago the department began a course on ...
[read more]
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Spring Comes to AI
Winter
Artificial intelligence research is starting to bounce back
after a long fallow period with a resurgence of interest in
neurobiology and a concentration on practical medical,
educational, manufacturing, and customer service applications.
Redwood Neuroscience Institute founder Jeff ...
[read more]
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Mind Over
Machines
Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology is still in an
infant stage of development, but promises to enable severely
disabled patients to live fuller, more independent lives.
There are two leading interface models: Implantable interfaces
that tap brainwaves through a direct neural ...
[read more]
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Rugged Computers Get
Flexible to Fit Any Application
Rugged computers can now be adapted for almost any military
application through modular design that allows on-the-fly
assembly and repair. The pervasiveness of rugged computers in
the military carries design challenges if they are to support
almost all tasks. Kontrol America's Embedded ...
[read more]
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Testing
Darwin
Scientists at Michigan State University's Digital Evolution
Laboratory are using digital organisms to explore and test
Darwin's theories. These organisms consist of command strings
that can replicate themselves into tens of thousands of copies
within minutes, and they can also mutate and ...
[read more]
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