The War Room
Activists Find More E-Vote Flaws
Prominent e-voting critic and activist Bev Harris and a computer scientist claim to have uncovered even more flaws in a Diebold e-voting system that could potentially allow hackers to manipulate votes in the upcoming presidential election. In a demonstration to officials in the California ...
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NSF Announces Two Cybersecurity Centers to Study Internet Epidemiology and 'Ecology'
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded funding to 33 new cybersecurity projects, including two cybersecurity research centers that will model IT security threats in terms of ecology and epidemiology. The $30 million Cyber Trust program is the NSF's main cybersecurity effort and ...
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Fixing a Busted IT Research System
Computing Research Association Chairman James Foley says U.S. national competitiveness is threatened by the lack of federal funding in computer science, difficulties in nurturing new computer scientists, and the increasing numbers of engineers in other countries. The number of computer ...
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Reports on Spam Levels Paint Differing Views of the Problem
Accurately measuring the extent of the spam problem and the effectiveness of strategies to combat it is complicated by inconsistent statistical reports on the volume of junk email, and the fact that the most oft-cited reports are furnished by antispam software vendors. An August estimate by ...
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Agent Model Yields Leadership
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and two universities have developed a software model for studying economic markets, quantitative sociology, or optimizing communications among robot collectives. The model is based on the classic minority game, where multiple agents compete to be ...
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Second Thoughts for a Designer of Software That Aids Conservation
In the six years since its development, the Marxan computer program created by Dr. Hugh Possingham of the University of Queensland, Australia, and grad student Ian Ball has been employed to structure many environmental conservation and biodiversity plans around the world, but Possingham now ...
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Scientists Help Needy Regions
Richard Newton, engineering dean of UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, says that a prototype "peace corps for technology" initiative has been organized through a joint effort between the Haas School of Business and the Engineering College's Management of Technology (MOT) program. The ...
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Congress Tackles Taxing Issues
Technology lobbying groups are upping their pressure on Congress to vote on some significant bills relating to Internet taxation and copyright, among other things. Some 40 organizations, including the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) and the Association for Competitive ...
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Getting Computer Vision Systems to Recognize Reality
The IST program's VAMPIRE project involves the testing of the theory that Visual Active Memory (VAM) plays an essential role in the cognition and learning processes of computer vision systems. Without VAM processes, objects and behaviors cannot be learned and categorized against a ...
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Policy, Not Technology Creates Barriers to Info Sharing
In a Sept. 17 interview, Karen Evans of the White House's Office of Management and Budget said that policy and practice, rather than technology, were the root cause of federal agencies' inability to share information, which the Sept. 11 Commission cited as a major obstacle to the ...
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Alice Chatbot Wins for Third Time
American programmer Richard Wallace's chatbot, Alice, won the Loebner Prize for the most convincing computer program to display human-like conversation for the third time on Sept. 19 in New York. The annual international contest rates entrants according to a modified version of the Turning Test, ...
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USC Computer Scientist Receives Presidential Early Career Award
Cyrus Shahabi, research director of information management in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Integrated Media Systems Center, has won the 2004 Presidential Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his work in multidimensional databases and related methods for storing ...
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Ready or Not (and Maybe Not), Electronic Voting Goes National
Almost one-third of the 150 million-plus registered U.S. voters will use electronic voting systems in the upcoming presidential election, regardless of whether the machines are truly ready for such a wide-scale deployment. The controversy that has erupted over e-voting machines is between ...
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Internet Governance Under Spotlight in Geneva
The International Telecommunications Union kicks off a two-day meeting on the United Nations' Working Group of Internet Governance (WGIG) on Sept. 20, and in attendance will be representatives from governments, organizational bodies, and businesses. The meeting will focus on creating ...
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When Will These Tech Wishes Come True?
At a recent meeting of the Media Entertainment Technology Alliance, moderator and kenradio.com host Ken Rutkowski had participants put together a wish list of currently unavailable technologies. Among the desirable products is an instant-on PC, which InterVideo's Mike Ling says is likely ...
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Taking Stock of E-Paper
Several companies are pursuing the commercialization of electronic paper (e-paper), a flexible polymer sheet that combines the reflectivity of real paper with low power requirements and lightweight batteries thanks to its bi-stable characteristics, which allow images displayed on the sheet to be ...
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Values of Community Source Development
Stanford University director of academic computing Lois Brooks notes that open source is becoming increasingly pronounced in higher education, and points out a movement toward initiatives in which institutions combine their resources and expertise to develop products that the education ...
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The War Room
The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California is a convergence point for military experts, visual effects artists, research scientists, and videogame developers, who are busy creating artificial environments that replicate battle conditions with ...
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