Kryder's Law
How High-Tech Is Coming to
the Rescue
Catastrophes, such as Hurricane Katrina, are raising the
profile of new search-and-rescue technologies. The researchers
developing the technologies say they are not trying to
supplant emergency-response workers: "It's us getting the
technology to the people who will use it to save people," ...
[read more]
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Open-Source Projects
Intertwine for Integration
In a direct challenge to IBM and other commercial vendors,
three open-source initiatives--ServiceMix, Apache Synapse, and
Celtix--have joined forces with the goal of producing more
fluid and integrated middleware. The partnership aims to
address the growing demand of businesses for linking software
that ...
[read more]
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TechScape: Vint Cerf on the
InterPlanet
Vint Cerf envisions an interplanetary Internet, or
InterPlaNet, as a communications network for people or devices
in space or on other planets. Key challenges for realizing
this vision include reducing or minimizing "flow control," or
the delay in communications across space; the ...
[read more]
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Time-Saving Tool: Google
Galvanizes Invention by UCSD Student During Summer of
Code
The University of California, San Diego's James Anderson
has invented a technique that allows a file to be transferred
automatically from one computer to other devices. The graduate
student's invention, known as transparent synchronization, or
Tsync, has drawn the attention of Google, ...
[read more]
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Spotlight on Copyright
Piracy
The U.S. Commerce Department estimates that American
companies lose $250 billion in annual sales globally due to
copyright piracy, and China is considered one of the worst
offenders due to its slipshod enforcement and undependable
judicial system. Pressuring China to correct these
deficiencies ...
[read more]
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Computer Program Learns
Language Rules and Composes Sentences, All Without Outside
Help
Cornell University psychology professor and computer
scientist Shimon Edelman and Tel Aviv University researchers
have developed Automatic Distillation of Structure (ADIOS), a
technique enabling a computer program to scan text, then
autonomously extract language rules and compose new ...
[read more]
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The Internet: What Lies
Ahead?
ICANN Chairman Vinton Cerf, who is often credited as one of
the Internet's founding fathers, anticipates that the Net of
the future will allow users to operate and manage other
Internet-enabled equipment with mobile devices, while further
out he envisions an interplanetary network connecting ...
[read more]
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AIMing for Business
Innovation
The IST-funded AIM project has developed a software
platform designed to facilitate business innovation by
encouraging the exchange of knowledge among an organization's
various employees and departments. AIM coordinating partner
Alvaro Gorostiza says employees are typically discouraged from
...
[read more]
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U.S. Tests $3.5m
Computerized Lie Detector
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will apportion
$3.5 million to Rutgers University researchers to develop
next-generation computerized lie detectors that can analyze
the veracity of statements by studying subtle facial
expressions, hand gestures, and other body language cues.
Rutgers ...
[read more]
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Predicting How You're
Going to Shop Online
IBM Haifa Laboratories researcher Amit Fisher has combined
data mining, operations research, artificial intelligence, and
economics to take a more sophisticated approach to predicting
the long-term behavior of online shoppers so the most valuable
customers can be identified and given ...
[read more]
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Chair Shines in World Wide
Web Consortium
Wayne Dick, chair of Computer Science and Computer
Engineering at California State University, Long Beach, is
involved in the World Wide Web Consortium's Educational
Outreach Working Group. The group is a component of the W3C's
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), and Dick, who is visually
handicapped, ...
[read more]
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Microsoft Claims Secure
Development Success
Microsoft says its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL),
created to ensure that developers are writing secure code, is
showing early indications of success. The program was
developed in the wake of a series of publicized
vulnerabilities, and Microsoft's Rick Samona notes that each
of the ...
[read more]
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Starting a New Digital
Chapter for Historical Documents
The IST program-funded MEMORIAL project has developed a
method for processing digital images of paper documents to the
degree where portions of text can be identified by special
software and rendered as electronic text by commercial optical
character recognition (OCR). The software component of ...
[read more]
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The Technology Dream
Deferred
America's increasing dependency on "temporary" guest-worker
programs and the export of technology-related jobs to
countries where labor is cheaper constitute a serious blow to
African-American tech professionals, particularly those in
rural communities and central cities. The Bureau of ...
[read more]
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Foreign Workers
First?
The U.S. Department of Labor's refusal to disclose job
openings submitted by U.S. employers seeking to hire workers
on H-1B visas so domestic workers might have a fair shot at
them is a sign of disrespect to American labor, according to
University of California, Davis, computer science professor
...
[read more]
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BLAST
Since it was first developed 15 years ago, the Basic Local
Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) has revolutionized
bioinformatics by providing a way to clarify gene sequence
data to uncover sequence homology. BLAST has no direct
applications, but sequence homology informs gene function,
which ...
[read more]
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The Invasion of the
Chinese Cyberspies (And the Man Who Tried to Stop
Them)
The revelation that a ring of Chinese hackers, collectively
known as Titan Rain, has been launching coordinated attacks on
sensitive and seemingly secure U.S. networks to steal data for
some time has unsettling implications for U.S. security. The
Department of Defense issued a warning that Titan ...
[read more]
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The Threats Get
Nastier
Business technology and security professionals are
confident their IT systems are adequately protected against
cyberthreats, according to InformationWeek Research's U.S.
Information Security Survey 2005, but this attitude belies the
fact that worms, viruses, and other forms of malware are ...
[read more]
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Kryder's
Law
Seagate Technology CTO Mark Kryder, who founded and
directed Carnegie Mellon University's Data Storage Systems
Center (DSSC), believes new products and applications have
made the increasing information storage capacity of hard
drives even more important than the expanding power and ...
[read more]
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