Testing Darwin
How to Make the PC Beautiful
A key differentiator and selling point of consumer technology is its "sexiness," a quality that PC manufacturers are trying to instill within their products by enlisting industrial design specialists to transform generic office machines into sleek entertainment systems. Hewlett-Packard ...
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The Fight Over Cyber Oversight
Opinion was split at the recent RSA Conference on whether government regulation of corporate accountability for intrusions would improve corporate network security. Advocates such as former national cybersecurity czar Richard Clarke said such a measure would be beneficial, ...
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EU Parliament Approves Software Patent Restart
The way is now clear for the European Parliament to formally request the European Commission to restart the legislative process around IT patenting following the EP Conference of Presidents' decision to reject the European Union's proposed directive, which drew fierce criticism from EU member ...
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Engineering the Services of Tomorrow
Projects funded by Information Society Technologies have developed software engineering solutions to pave the way for new end-user service economies. The CAMELEON project was launched to give designers and software developers of interactive ubiquitous services techniques, tools, and models that would ...
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Software Firms Fault Colleges' Security Education
In a panel session at the Secure Software Forum on Feb. 14, software companies such as Oracle and Microsoft laid a lot of blame for flawed software on a lack of education in secure programming for computer science graduates. The software industry is a target of criticism for some ...
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A 3-D View of the City, Block by Block
Companies are building three-dimensional digital simulations of cities and other urban areas whose potential applications include virtual shopping, navigation, socializing, video games, tenant leasing, and urban planning. Tel Aviv-based GeoSim Systems is stitching together models of central ...
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Computer Program Matches Intelligence of Mankind, at Least in California
The IBM Almaden Research Center's Maisy 5 program has successfully passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence--at least by the standards of the California educational system, according to center director Dr. Mark Dean. The Turing test dictates that a computer is capable of thinking if ...
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Women Make Inroads Into IT
Statistics New Zealand estimated that women accounted for 27.5 percent of computer science graduates in 2001, but just 11 percent of technical IT professionals. The firm also reckoned that there are three male IT professionals for every female across all IT careers. Meanwhile, a 2004 ...
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Geeks to the Corps
Founded as an altruistic organization for bridging the digital divide between the world's technology haves and have-nots, the International Executive Service Corps/Geekcorps recruits volunteer programmers, network designers, and other tech-savvy individuals to help set up sustainable tech ...
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A Little of Everything at Demo
Edward C. Baig was impressed by numerous offerings at the 15th annual Demo conference, where some 73 companies showcased their latest wares. Notable products exhibited at the conference included AutoXray's CodeScout, an automotive plug-in that scans cars for malfunctions and identifies them in ...
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Rambling Robots Show Human Efficiency
Three robots that stride like human beings made their debut at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Feb. 17. The machines, which were produced by researchers at the University of Michigan, MIT, Cornell University, and Delft University in the Netherlands, ...
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Inside the Future
British Telecom's resident futurist Ian Pearson predicts that computers synthesized from biological cultures will appear within a generation, and raises the possibility that computer intelligence will equal human intelligence after 2015. He theorizes that in 15 years' time a bacterium ...
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Building Open Blocks for Composite Web Services
The IST's ADAPT program is developing open-source middleware for building adaptable, scalable, and composite Web services. "The problem has been that although distributed applications are being used on an increasingly wide scale there has not been much work on advancing the provision of ...
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Making Your IM Secure--and Deniable
University of California at Berkeley researchers Nikita Borisov and Ian Goldberg have devised a plug-in for the Gaim instant-messaging clients that can be used to keep IM conversations confidential and unverifiable by encrypting the messages without a key. Their off-the-record (OTR) ...
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Malware 101: University Offers Course on Spyware
The University of Calgary's computer science department next fall will offer a class on spyware and spam that will lead to each student writing their own spyware program. The class is not the department's first controversial offering; two years ago the department began a course on ...
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Spring Comes to AI Winter
Artificial intelligence research is starting to bounce back after a long fallow period with a resurgence of interest in neurobiology and a concentration on practical medical, educational, manufacturing, and customer service applications. Redwood Neuroscience Institute founder Jeff ...
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Mind Over Machines
Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology is still in an infant stage of development, but promises to enable severely disabled patients to live fuller, more independent lives. There are two leading interface models: Implantable interfaces that tap brainwaves through a direct neural ...
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Rugged Computers Get Flexible to Fit Any Application
Rugged computers can now be adapted for almost any military application through modular design that allows on-the-fly assembly and repair. The pervasiveness of rugged computers in the military carries design challenges if they are to support almost all tasks. Kontrol America's Embedded ...
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Testing Darwin
Scientists at Michigan State University's Digital Evolution Laboratory are using digital organisms to explore and test Darwin's theories. These organisms consist of command strings that can replicate themselves into tens of thousands of copies within minutes, and they can also mutate and ...
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