Does Trusted Computing Remedy
Computer Security Problems?
House Signs Off on
Supercomputing
This week the U.S. House of Representatives approved the
High-Performance Computing Revitalization Act of 2005, which
calls on the Department of Energy and the National Science
Foundation to ensure the availability of supercomputers to
American engineers and scientists, and names the director ...
[read more]
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Adventures in the Skin
Trade
Nearly 10 years after MIT Media Lab researchers Thomas
Zimmerman and Neil Gershenfeld created a prototype intra-body
communication network that tapped the naturally-occurring
electrical fields of human skin to transfer data between
devices, NTT Labs in Japan has developed an application based
...
[read more]
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NCSA Allows Faster, Better,
Cheaper Engineering
Large construction projects such as highway improvements
involve high costs, traffic disruption, and worries over
quality, but civil engineering researchers at the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), have created software to
help optimize those projects. Faster, cheaper, and ...
[read more]
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Bringing the Internet to
the Whole World
Advanced Micro Devices intends to bridge the digital divide
between computing haves and have-nots by making computers with
Internet access available and affordable to half the world's
population by 2015 through the distribution of low-cost PCs.
AMD's Personal Internet Communicator (PIC), ...
[read more]
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License Proliferation: When
More Is Less
With more than 50 open source software licenses available,
developers are often at a loss when deciding on which license
to use. Nobel Laureate Herb Simon says an abundance of options
leads to people choose less optimal options for the sake of
minimizing risk; in the open source licensing ...
[read more]
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Mining
Reality
As a participant in MIT Media Lab's Reality Mining project,
graduate student Nathan Eagle has compiled about four decades'
worth of continuous data on human behavior using
communication, location, activity, and proximity information
taken from 100 cell phone users, and this data could ...
[read more]
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New Intelligent Dictionary
Searches Make Sense
The IST-funded BENEDICT project has yielded a semantic
context sensitive dictionary lookup that can facilitate more
intelligent online dictionary searches. The BENEDICT
dictionary does more than scan the text around the search word
and provide the proper base-form and syntactic category; it
...
[read more]
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IT Industry Seeks to Set
Parameters for Growth
Russian President Vladimir Putin has a vision to transform
Russia into an IT giant, and he recently disclosed that this
vision involves creating 10 Russian IT parks aided by tax
breaks by the end of the decade; Russian IT and communications
minister Leonid Reiman says the state is planning a ...
[read more]
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Just Like the Real
Thing
The National University of Singapore's (NUS) Mixed Reality
Lab (MRL) and Nanyang Technological University's Center for
Advanced Media Technology (CamTech) are engaged in research
into "mixed reality" technologies that enhance real-world
views with virtual object or data overlays. One project ...
[read more]
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Speech Recognition
Software Slowly Making Progress
The future of speech recognition is promising if not
spectacular, as the technology is experiencing gradual but
steady growth. "Because of the growing emphasis on customer
service recently, many companies have become interested in
speech recognition systems," says Datamonitor analyst Daniel
...
[read more]
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Florida Planning Son of
Matrix
Florida officials have put out a request for information on
a sequel to the controversial Multistate Anti-Terrorism
Information Exchange (Matrix) project, which combined
government and commercial personal data to help track down
terrorists and other criminals. The document outlines a more
...
[read more]
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A Crisis of
Prioritization
A new report from the President's Information Technology
Advisory Committee (Pitac) warns that the emphasis on
bolstering national security in the wake of the 2001 U.S.
terrorist attacks has left a critical element--cybersecurity
of civilian technological infrastructures--severely ...
[read more]
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What Does the Future of
Communications Hold?
Communications channels are merging with one another, as
well as with new search capabilities, says INBOX conference
chair Martin Hall, whose gathering features discussion and
exhibits about enterprise messaging. With email now a
mission-critical business application, companies need to ...
[read more]
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Software to Simulate Human
Heart
A cross-disciplinary team of university researchers has
created the first-ever computer simulation of the human
heart's fluid dynamics using algorithms developed at the
University of New York and computer software developed at the
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley computer ...
[read more]
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Biotech Data's Big
Bang
The automation of biochemistry is fueling an explosion in
biotech data worldwide, shrinking the time it takes for such
data to double in volume from 18 months a few years ago to six
to three months today. Organizations charged with biotech data
management are using a broad spectrum of new ...
[read more]
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Presidential Panel
Recommends Steps to Promote Computational
Science
The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee
recommended in an as-yet-unreleased report a restructuring of
universities and federal agencies to promote multidisciplinary
computational science, which plays an "integral role" in
solving a multitude of problems ranging from traditional ...
[read more]
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Satisfied But
Uncertain
The 2005 InformationWeek Salary Survey of 12,158 IT
professionals finds an overwhelming degree of job satisfaction
among respondents, although approximately two-thirds do not
think an IT career and the potential for salary advancement is
as promising today as it was five years ago. This is ...
[read more]
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Whatever Happened to
Machines That Think?
The excitement generated by the field of artificial
intelligence, and the support it garnered, waned dramatically
in the 1990s as AI projects that promised to deliver
convincing computer conversationalists, autonomous servants,
and even conscious machines failed to pan out because their
core ...
[read more]
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Does Trusted Computing
Remedy Computer Security Problems?
Rolf Oppliger and Ruedi Rytz with the Swiss Federal
Strategy Unit for Information Technology weigh the benefits
and drawbacks of trusted computing, and conclude that the
technology is unlikely to completely inoculate PCs against the
threat of malware. Trusted computing initiatives ...
[read more]
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