Building a Technology Portfolio
Pentagon Drops Plan to Test Internet Voting
Deep-rooted security issues have pressured the Pentagon to scrap a $22 million pilot initiative to test Internet voting for Americans stationed overseas, according to officials. An audit of the Internet voting system conducted by academics in late January concluded that the integrity of an ...
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A Better Way to Squelch Spam?
Recently proposed anti-spam sender authentication measures such as Yahoo!'s DomainKeys and Microsoft's Caller ID are unlikely to be effective spam deterrents because they are centralized solutions that chiefly benefit major ISPs and advertisers. The Camram (Campaign for real mail) project is ...
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U of C Takes First Victory at ACM Tournament
On the eve of the Association of Computing Machinery's 2004 World Finals in Prague, a team of students from the University of Calgary won an international programming competition, the Java Challenge, which pitted them against 67 other participating teams. Teams had to write components ...
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How E-Voting Threatens Democracy
Much of the voting community's drive to address flaws in touch-screen voting systems has been fueled by the crusading efforts of Bev Harris. Harris was intrigued when an online article she read raised the concern that e-voting systems cannot verify the accurate recording of votes, making ...
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Purdue Engineers Design 'Shape-Search' for Industry Databases
Purdue University engineers are working on a system that will allow people to mine industry databases for engineered parts by basing searches on the components' three-dimensional shapes. Karthik Ramani of the Purdue Research and Education Center for Information Systems in Engineering ...
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CMI Launches 'Pervasive Computing' Initiative
The Cambridge-MIT Institute, a cross-Atlantic collaboration meant to boost academic and industry partnership, is launching a Pervasive Computing Community that will find ways to make computers more responsive to human needs. The proliferation and commoditization of computers over the last 40 ...
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Black Scholars Tackle Digital Divide Problem
Bridging the gap between those who have computer access and those who do not is one of the goals of the nonprofit Institute for African American E-Culture, which was founded in 2001 to establish a robust online black community. "There's a need in the context of the digital divide to create ...
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Open Solution to Managing Distributed Software Developments
Information Society Technologies' open source GENESIS software platform was designed to tackle the challenge of coordinating distributed teams of people working on the same project so that they are kept apprised of any developments, according to Pierluigi Ritrovato of the Center for Research ...
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Passport Safety, Privacy Face Off
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is developing new worldwide passport standards that include digitized photos and may also feature radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips for storing and transmitting information about travelers, which a computer could compare to ...
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Future Search Efforts Will Make Google Look Like 8-Tracks
Kevin Maney forecasts that within 10 years--if not sooner--the popular Google search engine in its current iteration will be as archaic as eight-track tapes, as the building blocks of far more intuitive searches start to take shape. Most search engines query the visible Web, which ...
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Researchers Question I.T. Subcultural Values
Over three-quarters of IT projects are doomed to failure not because of complexity, usability, and new technology's unpredictability, as many people assume, but because an IT occupational subculture often clashes with users and managers, according to Jeffrey Stanton of Syracuse University. ...
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Advanced Speech Research Sounding Sweet to IBM
Increasing the power of speech applications and interactive voice response systems is the goal of advanced speech-technology research efforts at IBM, declared general manager of IBM's Pervasive Computing Group Gary Cohen during his keynote speech at the AVIOS SpeechTEK 2004 conference. The ...
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InfiniBand Ambivalence
InfiniBand could be seriously undermined by an alternative technology should one emerge fast enough, according to industry experts. Startup Precision I/O does not yet sell products, but claims to have a more cost-effective solution that uses standard Ethernet instead of requiring ...
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ICANN Chief Meets Annan
ICANN President Paul Twomey met for the first time with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on March 26. Though Twomey declined to discuss the nature of the talks, the meeting was held at a time when the global Internet community has become increasingly vocal about having a say ...
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Federated Identity Standards: Confused?
Real-time business relationship management is becoming more important as business itself is decentralizing and becoming more virtual, making access to distributed resources and identity management a top concern. Federated identity technology lets companies share identity information between ...
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Time to Enlist a 'National Guard' for IT?
Military emergency management officials, speaking at the recent Norwich University e-ProtectIT conference, said the United States is not prepared to recover quickly should a major cyberterrorism attack take place. They also say that such an attack might require government mobilization of IT ...
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Computer, Heal Thyself
Computers that can self-configure, self-repair, and self-optimize are highly desirable for organizations that implement information grids and other highly distributed computing models, while autonomic computing's promised benefits to others include more reliable and resilient machines ...
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The Gentle Rise of the Machines
A recent report from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe concludes that the growth of the domestic robot market is poised to overtake the industrial robot market within the next several years. The projected domestic robot explosion is attributed to the falling cost of ...
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Building a Technology Portfolio
A core component of the U.S. Defense Department's push toward network-centric warfare is horizontal fusion technologies that integrate data from a wide array of sources for rapid decision-making among warfighters. John Osterholz of the office of the DoD CIO says the ...
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