State of the Art: How We
Measure Up
Plan by 13 Nations Urges
Open Technology Standards
A group of government officials from 13 nations will
present a 33-page report at the World Bank calling for the
international adoption of open-information technology
standards, which are seen as critical to the expansion of
economic growth, innovation, and efficiency. Several ...
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High-Tech Goes Into Action
in Disaster Zone
Rescue and relief operations in the region devastated by
Hurricane Katrina are getting a boost from robots, interactive
maps, meta-search engines, and other experimental high-tech
tools. Lois Clark McCoy of the National Institute for Urban
Search and Rescue says the response to the catastrophe ...
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Vint Cerf: Google's New
Idea Man
Google has scored a major coup with its hiring of Internet
pioneer Vinton Cerf as its "chief Internet evangelist." Cerf,
who will continue to serve as chairman of ICANN and as a
visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is
considered one of the Internet's founding fathers because of
...
[read more]
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Grammar Lost Translation
Machine in Researchers Fix Will
The effectiveness of a computer translation system created
by the University of Southern California's Information
Sciences Institute (ISI) hinges on the brute force correlation
of massive volumes of pre-translated text from media that are
published in multiple languages, but ISI machine ...
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Women Are 'Put Off' Hi-Tech
Jobs
An Intellect report finds that the British technology
industry must make a better effort to recruit, persuade, and
retain women in the high-tech work force, which is
characterized by a bias toward males and a lack of female role
models. The Office of National Statistics estimates that the
...
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New Search Engine
'Revolutionary'
University of New South Wales Ph.D. student Ori Allon has
developed a new search engine designed to enhance searches
carried out on Yahoo!, Google, or other popular services.
Search engines retrieve Web pages where specific keywords are
found, but these pages are not always relevant to the ...
[read more]
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Coming to Grips With Robot
Learning
The IST-funded ArteSImit project has yielded a visual-motor
system that controls an artificial hand via learning through
mimicry. The project's goal was to uncover the
neurophysiological underpinnings of finger and hand movements
in humans and primates, and apply them to the design of a ...
[read more]
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IU Researchers Develop
Technology to Better Predict Storms
Indiana University is one of nine academic institutions
participating in the National Science Foundation-funded Linked
Environments Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) project, whose goal
is to develop a high-speed computing and network
infrastructure for more accurately predicting and tracking ...
[read more]
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Academics, Industry Launch
Internet Innovation Symposium
The upcoming Seattle Innovation Symposium will focus on how
academic researchers and private-sector IT leaders can
collaborate to identify important emerging technologies and
rapidly develop them into the Internet's next billion-dollar
market segments. The University of ...
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Report: IT Blueprints
Should Address Privacy Issues
The academic Task Force on Protecting the Homeland and
Preserving Freedom has released a report recommending the
employment of IT tools such as data mining, link analysis,
biometrics, and data integration for homeland security,
provided they address privacy issues in advance. "This paper
is ...
[read more]
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Free Access Service Allows
Remote Networking
Washington University has unveiled its Open Network
Laboratory (ONL), providing its students with a free and
remote networking service that will hopefully spur innovation
and enhance the capability of the Internet for its users. The
computer scientists who developed ONL created their own ...
[read more]
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Early in the Game: RPI
Creates Video Game Major
Starting next fall, a video game development major will be
available to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students, who
will be required to take courses not only in computer
programming and simulation, but in psychology, calculus, and
Shakespeare as well. Director of RPI's Social and Behavioral
...
[read more]
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Women in IT: How Are We
Doing?
In her book, "Doing IT: Women Working in Information
Technology," Krista Scott-Dixon describes IT as a blend of
both positive and negative that is alternately stifling,
liberating, limiting, and vitalizing for women. "The mundane
minutiae of people's daily experiences with information ...
[read more]
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Automated Code Inspection
at Early Stages Can Reduce Software
Failures
The market for static testing tools stands to grow
considerably as a result of the focus on testing free software
at the coding stage in India. The Indian software industry
views static testing as a way to save costs by improving
productivity as compensation expenses continue to escalate. In
...
[read more]
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The Changing User
Interface
The importance of improved user interfaces becomes clear as
the Web grows more diffuse, and users try to organize a
burgeoning number of digital files and companies attempt
Web-based brand promotion. Perhaps the most dramatic changes
to the desktop look and experience will come from ...
[read more]
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Science
Fiction?
As businesses are slow to return to pre-dot-com bust
spending levels, electronics manufacturers are targeting the
individual consumer, though their vision of the digital home
fails to resonate with many; a number of technology companies
are placing their bets on that sector, though, and ...
[read more]
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Lab Steps Up to Challenges
of RFID Tech
The RFID Lab at the University of Wisconsin is working to
resolve a litany of challenges standing in the way of the
commercialization of RFID (radio- frequency identification)
technology. Difficulties involving logistics, signal strength
and consistency, and everything in between are preventing ...
[read more]
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Digital-Divide Efforts Are
Getting More Attention
Excitement is building over large-scale and small-scale
efforts to bridge the digital divide between technology haves
and have-nots around the world, although these initiatives
have their share of skeptics. Perhaps the most ambitious
project is the MIT Media Lab's program to fabricate and ...
[read more]
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State of the Art: How We
Measure Up
High-tech luminaries such as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates
have called attention to an apparent decline in the
performance of U.S. students in math and science that could
threaten America's competitive edge in the global economy. Yet
there is no assurance that the standard measures of ...
[read more]
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