E-Commerce Gets
Smarter
UC Berkeley to Lead $19
Million NSF Center on Cybersecurity
Research
The National Science Foundation has selected the University
of California, Berkeley, to head its eight-university Team for
Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) center, and
the facility is expected to receive a five-year grant of about
$19 million, with the possibility of a $20 million ...
[read more]
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Russia Looks to Make IT Its
Next Natural Resource
Russia has committed $650 million to invest in the
development of IT as the "flagship industry of its modernized
economy," according to Russian Minister of Information
Technology and Communications Leonid Reiman at the Russian
Economic Forum on April 12. The money will be channeled into
...
[read more]
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Why Robots Are Scary--And
Cool
St. Bonaventure University professor Anne Foerst, a former
MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory researcher and author
of the new book, "God in the Machine: What Robots Teach Us
About God and Humanity," explains in an interview that
people's motivation for designing and building robots is ...
[read more]
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Copyright Reform to Free
Orphans?
The U.S. Copyright Office is attempting to rectify the
problem of "orphan works," or copyrighted properties whose
owners are unidentified or impossible to find, which makes
securing permission for their use a costly, time-consuming,
and often fruitless endeavor that could carry the ...
[read more]
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Diffie: Infrastructure a
Disaster in the Making
Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems' chief security officer
and co-creator of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, says in an
interview that his biggest concern is the proliferation of
Windows systems into critical infrastructure, which could
result in major failures in the event of an ...
[read more]
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'Minority Report' Inspires
Technology Aimed at Military
Raytheon, inspired by a gesture-controlled digital display
interface in the 2002 sci-fi movie "Minority Report," has
developed a similar device for military use by tapping the
knowledge of John Underkoffler, a scientist who consulted on
the film. The user wears reflective gloves to manipulate ...
[read more]
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Brooks Forecasts Future of
Robotics Technology
Roboticist and director of MIT's Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Rod Brooks
discussed how intelligent robots could impact society over the
next half century in an April 12 lecture. He said humans and
robots exhibit greater similarities to each other than ...
[read more]
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Benching the Benchmarks:
Measuring Performance in HPC
High-performance computing (HPC) researchers are developing
a suite of codes that will measure HPC systems in a meaningful
way, not just according to teraflops and LINPACK loops, writes
Shodor Education Foundation executive director Dr. Robert
Panoff. Computer speed is only one ...
[read more]
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Helping Human and Robot
Firefighters Work as a Team
The IST-funded PELOTE project's goal was to design the
operational foundation for systems in which firefighters and
semi-automated robots work as a team to get people to safety
in highly dangerous or low-visibility situations. "We wanted
to see how robots with a certain amount of ...
[read more]
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Wi-Max's Future: Boom or
Bust?
As standards-compliant Wi-Max products continue to appear
on the market, analysts are still split about the future of
the technology, with some seeing it as the wireless
alternative to wired WAN technologies and others relegating
Wi-Max to only niche applications. The IEEE 802.16 standard
...
[read more]
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Using Automatic Speech
Recognition to Assist Communications and
Learning
Mike Wald of the University of Southampton and Keith Bain
of Saint Mary's University detail how communication and
learning can be improved through automatic speech recognition
(ASR) technology under investigation by the Liberated Learning
Consortium. They describe an idealized ASR system as a ...
[read more]
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For High-Tech Control, the
Eyes (and Hands) Have It
Computer interfaces that use eye-tracking and gesture
recognition technologies were demonstrated last week at ACM's
CHI 2005 conference, whose overriding theme was "Technology,
Safety, and Community," according to Vrije University
Amsterdam professor and conference Chair Gerrit van der ...
[read more]
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Touching Molecules With
Your Bare Hands
Molecular biology researchers at The Scripps Research
Institute have created a new augmented reality program for
testing interactions between molecules and understanding how
they work. The system uses plastic models of molecules that
are created using 3D printers, then tracks those models ...
[read more]
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U.N. Must Earn Net
Role
Information technology vendors and users should submit
comments to the United Nations' working group on Internet
Governance during its upcoming public-comment period on the
issue of Internet development and management. Comments would
address whether the UN should be heavily involved in ...
[read more]
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Will Machines Ever
Understand Us?
Some business analysts expect voice-recognition software to
drive the rapid incorporation of human-machine conversation
into everyday life, but the vagueness of the software's
progress has led to many diverging predictions. Some experts
think voice recognition will soon be advanced enough to make
...
[read more]
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'Tactical Language'
Training
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
researcher Ralph Chatham has developed a video game, "Tactical
Iraqi," that trains soldiers to speak rudimentary Arabic in
order to facilitate effective and respectful communication
with locals. Tactical Iraqi uses the Unreal Tournament 2003
...
[read more]
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Is Two-Factor
Authentication Too Little, Too Late?
Counterpane Internet Security CTO Bruce Schneier and RSA
Security CTO Joe Uniejewski offer differing opinions on the
importance of two-factor authentication in twin essays.
Schneier says two-factor authentication is useful for some
situations, such as enforcing internal controls, but does ...
[read more]
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How Women in IT Make It to
the Top
Women who hold high-ranking positions in the federal
information technology sector do not perceive a glass ceiling,
which Office of Management and Budget e-government and IT
administrator Karen Evans disparages as an outmoded concept.
Success stories such as Evans are marked by an ...
[read more]
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E-Commerce Gets
Smarter
Online and in-store retail are being fused together through
"multichanneling," which carries benefits for both retailers
and consumers: For retailers, multichanneling technologies
allow them to simplify and derive more value from the
collection of customer data; for consumers, they ...
[read more]
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