Seeking Better Web Searches
New U.S. Legislation Would Require E-Voting Paper Trail
The Voting Integrity and Verification Act (VIVA) introduced by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) on Feb. 9 calls for voter-verifiable paper trails that will allow people who use touch-screen systems to confirm their choices as well as permit accurate recounts, which critics say are impossible with ...
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Is Your TV Virus-Proof?
Computer viruses are likely to appear in people's home appliances, media gadgets, cars, phones, and PDAs as those devices increase their electronic sophistication and are wirelessly enabled. Wireless connectivity is relatively cheap nowadays, and protocols such as Bluetooth make it easy for ...
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You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention
The computer age has given the modern workplace a wealth of technologies that drive workers to distraction, and computer scientists and psychologists are examining this trend in the hope of counteracting it. "We're trying to come up with simple ideas of how computer interfaces get ...
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Virtual Jihad
Radical Islamic Web sites are urging readers to launch a cyber-jihad against their enemies; this calls attention to the potential for cyberterrorism, which national-security experts have identified as a major threat that could damage the United States far more seriously than the ...
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Ambient Intelligence Could Transform Embedded World, Researcher Says
Hugo De Man of Belgium's Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC) announced at the International Solid State Circuits Conference that the next IT wave will be ambient intelligence, driven by software and both facilitated and restricted by nanoscale physics. The advent of ambient ...
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ECS Team Launches New Semantic Web Interface for Smarter Searches
A team of researchers led by Dr. Monica Schraefel at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) this week launched the mSpace software framework, a semantic Web interface designed to enhance Web searches and pull related sources of information into a ...
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MSU Researchers Build a World and Watch It Grow
Michigan State University (MSU) is leading development of the "evolutionary computation" field with little replicating programs called Avidians, named for the application in which they are birthed and live for many hundreds of thousands of generations. MSU's Digital Evolution Laboratory has published ...
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Creating Linguistic Resources for Automated Translation
The LC-STAR project has developed linguistic databases comprised of vocabularies and writings from 13 languages that will be used to train systems for automated language translation. Information Society Technologies is funding the initiative, which finished developing the large ...
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Brainwave Interface Goes 2D
MIT and New York State Department of Health researchers have demonstrated a technique to control the movement of a cursor on a 2D computer screen by brainwaves monitored through the scalp by electrodes, using funding from the National Institutes of Health and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. ...
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Linux: The Fork in the Road
The Linux Standard Base (LSB) is meant to protect against the type of standard forking that happened with Unix, and which Microsoft officials have ominously predicted for the competing open-source software. LSB provides Linux vendors and ISVs with a set of core standards that will ...
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Warming Up to Open Source
Open-source developers have made incremental gains with the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards' (OASIS) amended patent policy, which was issued on Feb. 7. The update accommodates royalty-free (RF) licenses without making them a requirement, but ...
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Cellphones Get a New Job Description: Portable Scanner
Xerox Research Center Europe scientists are expected to roll out a commercial version of their mobile document imaging software later this year, enabling camera-equipped cell phones to function as document scanners. The software allows digital images captured by cameras with at ...
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Hold the Phone, VOIP Isn't Safe
Experts warn it is only a matter of time before voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is faced with spam messages, denial-of-service attacks, phishing, and other security threats. The VOIP Security Alliance is a new industry group formed of 22 security research organizations, service ...
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Of MRIs and iPods
Dr. Osman Ratib and Dr. Antoine Rosset of UCLA Medical Center have developed OsiriX, software that enables radiologists to use Apple iPods as portable storage devices for medical images, thus sparing them the frustration of not always being within easy reach of more expensive ...
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Unexpected Attack Vectors
Security professionals must constantly be on the lookout for new attack vectors because the most dangerous threats are often overlooked until it is too late. Recently, security researchers discovered some viruses had been slipping past anti-virus software packages because they were hidden inside ...
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Safer Coin Tosses Point to Better Way for Enemies to Swap Messages
National Institute of Standards and Technology physicist Alipasha Vaziri and colleagues have carried out an experiment that uses the quantum-mechanical property of entanglement to facilitate a fair electronic coin flip in which two parties that do not trust each other attempt to ...
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The Business of Nanotech
Nanotechnology has finally begun its migration from the laboratory to consumer markets, with big and small companies rolling out a slew of nano-based products this year. These products, which include rugged trims for Hummer vehicles, peel-resistant paint, and enhanced sporting goods, may ...
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BAM Keeps a Finger on the Pulse
Business-activity monitoring (BAM) can contextually interpret real-time business operations data and help speed up response times and improve decision making, if companies determine at the outset the most critical events to monitor, the factors to be considered, the best people to be ...
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Seeking Better Web Searches
Though the precision of search engines has improved significantly, a great portion of online content--the so-called "Hidden Web"--remains inaccessible. New search engines are under development to address this discrepancy in myriad ways by mining online materials deeper, better ...
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