A Conversation With Teresa Meng
Easier Internet Wiretaps Sought
An FCC petition recently filed by U.S. Justice Department lawyers asserts that Internet broadband and online telephone providers should be beholden to the same laws that require traditional telecom providers to allow the FBI to set up wiretaps and other surveillance measures to monitor communications. ...
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Tech Jobs: Linux on the Move
The market for Linux programmers, system administrators, and other experts is growing, but with threats of outsourcing and automation in the background. With Linux server sales up 42% for the year and major IT vendors IBM and Sun Microsystems planning Linux desktop initiatives, the ...
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If You Want to Protect a Security Secret, Make Sure It's Public
The U.S. government recently awarded two self-proclaimed "Linux hackers" for their publicly developed encryption scheme, and will soon begin using the Daemen-Rijmen Advanced Encryption Standard for all top-secret communication. The competition was an entirely open process with extensive ...
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Privacy Fears Erode Support For a Network to Fight Crime
The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (Matrix), envisioned as a law enforcement tool for tracking down terrorists and other criminals by integrating and mining information from public and private databases--vehicle registrations, driver's license data, real estate ...
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Search Tool Aids Browsing
With funding from the Palo Alto Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed prototype software that can help Web surfers find the data they want faster. ScentTrails shows how strongly the search results match the topics the user is querying by enlarging the font size of ...
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Robots to Get Boss Upgrades
Attendees at this week's Emerging Robotic Technologies and Applications Conference attested that next-generation robots will not just have military applications, but entertainment and caregiver applications as well. IRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks, whose company invented the Roomba robot vacuum ...
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Emotional About Design
Former Apple fellow and Northwestern University professor of computer science, psychology, and cognitive science Don Norman, whose book "The Psychology of Everyday Things" is regarded as a milestone in the way product designers perceive usability, is an advocate of emotional design, ...
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$2 Million NSF Grant Funds Grid Security Research and Builds Self-Defense Toolkits at USC
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $2 million grant to underwrite a joint project between University of Southern California computer scientists and international partners to develop an automated defense system for computer grids. Project leader Kai Hwang of the USC ...
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DARPA Aims for Machine Cognition
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to develop the first cognitive personal assistant--a computer that can learn from experience and anticipate its user's needs based on the data. "They need to be able to learn about their environment over time so that once they ...
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An Effort to Make Arabic Easier
Arabetics, a simplified Arabic alphabet that can be read right-to-left in the traditional Arabic manner or left-to-right in English fashion, is the result of a two-year effort by Saad D. Abulhab, director of technology at New York's Baruch College, to make Arabic less intimidating to ...
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Robot Designers Get in the Swim
Aqua, an underwater robot designed by Canadian researchers at McGill University, is equipped with six individually controlled rotating flippers that enable the machine to swim, dive, perambulate, and sit on the bottom of the sea floor. The robot is controlled by a laptop connected to a ...
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Watts Humphrey on Software Quality
The Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP) are designed to show individual developers and their teams how to apply the principles of the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in their work, according to Watts S. Humphrey in an interview ...
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The Path to Safety?
Some of the biggest U.S. companies are due this month to announce voluntary recommendations to secure cyber-infrastructure, in an effort to keep the federal government from enacting legislation to make it mandatory. Federal policymakers fear that industry-owned networks are vulnerable to terrorist ...
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The Many Forms of 'Rugged'
The U.S. Air Force Standard Systems Group recently awarded the Information Technology tool blanket purchase agreements (BPAs) to six providers of ruggedized computers, reflecting the increasing need for more reliable mobile computing technologies. There are several divisions of ruggedized ...
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Return of the Homebrew Coder
Henry Ford's assembly line and computerized supply chains squelched the lively trade of cobblers, tailors, and carpenters, but now a new type of artisan is reversing the trend--the homebrew coder. Programmers have long distributed their shareware via dial-up bulletin boards, computer disks ...
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America's Flimsy Fortress
Counterpane Internet Security CTO Bruce Schneier dismisses the tremendous effort to beef up homeland security in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy as largely ineffectual. He observes that security technologies that have become embedded in our daily lives--suspected terrorist databases, face ...
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Fighting a War of Words
The war on terrorism cannot be won unless effective and accurate translation software is provided, and government agencies are spearheading the development of next-generation multilingual text-based technologies to make this dream a reality. The U.S. Defense Department's Language and Speech ...
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A Conversation With Teresa Meng
Atheros Communications founder Teresa Meng, now Reid Dennis Professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, explains that she set up Atheros "to provide the technology to change [people's perception of wireless] so that when people think about wireless in the future, they ...
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