The Future of Presence
High Hopes for Unscrambling the Vote
Computer scientists have created secure voting systems that utilize printed receipts and encryption technology; inventor David Chaum presented his encrypted system at a Rutgers University voting conference in late May. The system prints out two small paper receipts that show the name of the ...
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UCSC Man's Work Earns Top Award
University of California-Santa Cruz computer science professor and Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering director David Haussler was co-recipient of ACM's Allen Newell Award presented in New York City on June 5 for his contributions to computational ...
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Subject: No More Spam From Fakes
Spammers, malware authors, and ID thieves' notorious practice of tagging bogus names to their emails in order to entice users into opening them as well as circumvent block lists could be stymied by a collaborative effort between Microsoft, Yahoo!, America Online, and others to devise standard ...
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Women Want Computers to Be Less 'Nerdy' and More Fun
More women will feel comfortable using computers if they are made less "nerdy," but more significant hurdles remain for getting more women working in the IT sector, according to a study sponsored by the European Union's Information Society Technology (IST) program. A team of researchers from ...
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Bye-Bye Boring Beige Box
Computer makers are figuring out ways to utilize the latest desktop gadgetry, making the PC a more useful and entertaining tool. Increasingly, PCs are competing with snazzy new smart phones, which come with integrated digital cameras, PDA operating systems, and Web access; new PCs are taking ...
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Brain-Mimicking Circuits to Run Navy Robot
A joint project between researchers at New York University Medical School and Nizhny Novgorod State University in Russia is developing electronic circuits modeled after the brain's olivocerebellar circuit, which coordinates balance and limb movement. This could lead to faster and more ...
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Worst-Case Worm Could Rack Up $50B in U.S. Damages
International Computer Science Institute security researchers Nicholas Weaver and Vern Paxson say that a worm attack could cost the United States as much as $50 billion in direct damages by attacking widely used services and carrying a highly destructive payload. The worst-case scenario ...
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Science Comes Alive in Portland
More than 1,000 schools from 38 countries were represented by 1,433 students at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Isef) 2004 held in Portland, Ore., in May. Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger made a presentation on how technology plays into research, advocating that "an ...
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A Ph.D. in Mortal Kombat
The University of Southern California's multidisciplinary Computer Games project, developed by the Annenberg School for Communication, is perhaps the largest and most variegated collection of students and educators taking a serious look at video game culture. German research associate Ute ...
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Recognition Keys Access
Researchers from Israel's Hebrew University presented their work on a new user authentication scheme at ACM's CHI 2004 conference in late April. The scheme enables people to use a special kind of password that does not need to be consciously recalled, a technique that ...
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Virtual Fences to Herd Wi-Fi Cattle
Dartmouth College roboticist Zack Butler told attendees at the MobiSys 2004 conference on June 6 that he envisions mobile, virtual "fences" that could be used to herd cattle using Wi-Fi. To enforce the fences, the cows would wear special head-collars running software that triggers a signal to scare ...
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Proceed With Caution
Sun Microsystems founder and computer architect Bill Joy predicts that reckless, unchecked pursuit of scientific innovation primarily driven by market forces has the makings of a catastrophic, "civilization-changing event" that he reckons has perhaps a 50 percent chance of happening. For ...
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Cybersecurity: a Job for the Feds?
Commentator and Chicago Tribune columnist Bill Press and Gartner research director Rich Mogull both believe that the nation's cybersecurity is too important to leave up to the free market, and said so during a panel discussion at the recent Gartner IT Security Summit. Other panelists ...
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High Density Interfaces: More Than Meets the Eye
High density displays provide the user with a contextual view of information and will influence how technology is used in business, according to researchers at Accenture Technology Labs who are looking into ways to make information more accessible and useful. Thin-client ...
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When Databases Think
Peter Coffee reports that innovation in database technology is proceeding apace, and highlights many of the breakthroughs and potential uses--not to mention the more controversial facets--of database advancements. He cites a recent report in Nature that details life sciences-oriented features of ...
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Rise of the Machines
Significant strides in robotics technology are being made by a quartet of visionary roboticists: MIT computer science graduate student James McLurkin, Ayanna Howard with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, biophysics engineer and computer researcher Mitsuo Kawato, and University of South ...
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Cognitive Personal Assistant
A computerized assistant that can schedule meetings, filter and prioritize email, and carry out other mundane administrative chores using artificial intelligence is under development by Carnegie Mellon University researchers. CMU's Reflective Agent with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning ...
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>From Headless to Rich UI
The Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) framework has evolved from a niche software for embedded gateway devices that lack a local user interface (UI) into a lightweight, generic component-based framework with a wide scope that is well suited for middleware applications. Java ...
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The Future of Presence
Nemertes Research believes the adoption of presence and real-time collaborative technologies is an inevitability, but the timeline for such rollouts depends on the technologies' acceptance by a work culture that is resistant to many of their implications. Many IT executives are concerned ...
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