Neuromorphic
Microchips
Personal Data for the
Taking
Dozens of Johns Hopkins University students enrolled in a
computer security course last semester learned how painfully
cheap and easy it is to acquire personal data online when they
were grouped into teams assigned to aggregate, clean, and link
entire databases of dossiers on Baltimore ...
[read more]
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EU Plans for Software
Patents Hit Fresh Obstacle
The latest proposal from the European Parliament to amend
the European Union's software patents directive has provoked
complaints from software and technology groups claiming the
revisions would violate the essentials of existing European
patent law. The proposal contains 40 suggested ...
[read more]
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Conference System Makes
Shared Space
Videoconferencing technology has made considerable strides,
but cost and quality issues have hindered its mainstream
penetration. University of California at Berkeley researchers
have developed the MultiView videoconferencing system, a tool
that creates a "shared space" feeling ...
[read more]
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'Real ID' Faces
Reality
The Real ID Act is causing serious concern among state
technology officials, who are unsure about what is required
and their ability to implement necessary changes. Delaware CIO
and NASCIO President Thomas Jarrett says that while exact
technical requirements are unclear, Real ID ...
[read more]
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Researchers Speed, Optimize
Code With New Open Source Tools
Open-source SPIRAL software tools developed by U.S.
university researchers with funding from the National Science
Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
could radically change the writing of computer code,
especially when measured against the latest breakthroughs in
...
[read more]
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The New Curriculum: Getting
a Diploma in 'Mortal Kombat'
Computer and video games are gaining credence in academic
institutions as an area of study, despite skepticism from
university administrators and traditional computer scientists.
Seattle's DigiPen University was the first U.S. school to
offer a four-year game development degree, while a few ...
[read more]
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Berkeley Lab Technology
Dramatically Speeds Up Searches of Large
Databases
Sifting through large volumes of data produced by
high-energy physics experiments and other research projects
for specific information just became easier thanks to the
Word-Aligned Hybrid (WAH) compression technique developed and
patented by researchers at the Energy Department's Lawrence
...
[read more]
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'Programmable Matter' One
Day Could Transform Itself Into All Kinds of
Look-Alikes
Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists Seth
Goldstein and Todd Mowry have conceived of shape-changing
robots that can assemble themselves into replicas of human
beings or other objects that can sense, change color, and move
in three dimensions. Each individual unit or claytronic ...
[read more]
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Designs on Less Complex
Mobiles
Mobile phones risk becoming increasingly difficult to use
as manufacturers and carriers promote devices with more and
more functions, said mobile industry design consultant Scott
Jenson at a Microsoft Research conference held in Cambridge,
United Kingdom discussing simplifying computing. The ...
[read more]
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Tele-Petting
The Touchy Internet system developed by researchers at the
University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab enables users to
feel a chicken remotely by stroking a chicken-shaped doll that
moves in concert with a real chicken monitored by a webcam.
Tactile data captured by the replica's touch ...
[read more]
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Is It Finally Time for 3D
Online?
Despite a number of false starts over the last decade, 3D
interfaces for the Web are ready for widespread use, says
Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) co-creator Tony
Parisi. VRML was first deployed commercially 10 years ago, but
for different reasons Web 3D technology ...
[read more]
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Nation Failure Warning
System
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is
committing approximately $500,000 to BAE and three MIT
professors to create software that could model the conditions
under which a nation state fails and slips into chaos.
Washington's interest in such a tool partly stems from ...
[read more]
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Scientists Developing
'Nurturing' Computers
University of Houston computer science professor Ioannis
Pavlidis, with the help of his Infrared Imaging Group at the
College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, has developed the
Automatic THErmal Monitoring System (ATHEMOS) that can
physiologically monitor human users without touch. ...
[read more]
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DoD Awards $246,000 Grant
for Advanced Wireless Networks Research
Researchers in Virginia Tech's Bradley Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering will explore ways to meld
mobile ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks by
developing a testbed platform with a $246,000 Defense
University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grant from
the ...
[read more]
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Developers' Growing
Challenge
As network and general infrastructure security improves,
hackers will increasingly target line-of-business
applications. Enterprise applications are increasingly
vulnerable for three reasons: Growing demands for application
integration between systems that were never designed to work
...
[read more]
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Budget Cuts at NSF May
Signal a Crisis in Computing
The National Science Foundation's decision to withdraw
funding for its three supercomputer centers is breeding
uncertainty about the future of academic supercomputing in the
United States. NSF supercomputers are critical to academic
efforts because other federal supercomputing ...
[read more]
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Join the
Evolution
The integration of relational database technologies with an
iterative software development process is a critical element
in many software projects, and achieving this task requires
cooperation between developers and data professionals. "Agile
Database Techniques" author Scott Ambler ...
[read more]
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Neuromorphic
Microchips
The human brain is superior to the computer in terms of
operational efficiency and functions such as vision, hearing,
pattern recognition, and learning; the key to this superiority
appears to lie in the organization of the brain's neural
system, which engineers are attempting to duplicate ...
[read more]
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