Reining in Unstructured Data
U.S. Losing Tech Lead, Lobby Warns
The U.S. needs major investments in education, research and development, and broadband technology deployment in order to maintain its global tech leadership, warned TechNet, a lobbying coalition representing roughly 200 high-tech leaders. TechNet CEO Rick White and other TechNet ...
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Doctors' Journal Says Computing Is No Panacea
Research papers and an editorial in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association refute the Bush administration's belief that the U.S. health care system's broad adoption of information technology will reduce medical errors, improve care, and cut costs. Principal author of ...
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Software Organizes Email By Task
University College Dublin and IBM researchers are developing email organization software that groups messages according to activity, such as arranging travel, reporting expenses, or managing online auctions. The goal is to allow nontechnical users to customize their computing ...
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Bringing the Past Back to Life
IST's LIFEPLUS project has yielded a prototype augmented reality (AR) system that reconstructs ancient Pompeiian frescos and enhances them with virtual 3D plants, animals, and people. Users immerse themselves in the recreation with a head-mounted display equipped with a small camera that ...
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New Software May Offer a Rainbow of Sound
Vision-impaired Cornell University graduate student Victor Wong has developed image-to-sound software that can communicate colors in a manner that blind people can understand. Such an invention is important to Wong's doctoral research, in which reading color-scaled weather maps is a ...
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RFID Invades the Capital
Some 40,000 new biometric ID cards equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) and Bluetooth technology will be distributed to Homeland Security Department personnel and contractors this year, beginning in May. The RFID and Bluetooth components will facilitate communication ...
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Fringes vs. Basics in Silicon Valley
Critics at Electronic Arts and other Silicon Valley companies complain that fringe benefits such as gyms, bonuses, and stock options belie a dearth of tangible benefits such as overtime pay. Stock options have lost much of their allure with the collapse of the tech boom and the advent of new ...
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A Quantum Leap for Computer Security
The principle behind quantum cryptography is that data transmitted in the form of photons cannot be observed without disrupting the photons' state, thus alerting both sender and recipient to an eavesdropper's presence. An average email or Web page currently uses an encryption key of about 40 ...
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Microsoft Notebook: Intelligent Software Aims to Give Users Peace of Mind
Microsoft Research's Adaptive Systems and Interaction group is developing software that perceives the surrounding environment and that can reason and adjust to situations in real time through experiential learning. Microsoft senior researcher and group manager Eric Horvitz foresees a time when ...
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Coming to Grips With Technology
Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft group will exhibit its Personal Environment Controller (PECo), an all-in-one remote control unit, at the CeBIT ICT fair in Hanover this month. PECo is designed to reduce the complexity of conferencing, mobile office, or intelligent household ...
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Camera Phones Recognize Their Owner
Japan-based Omron has developed software that can enable digital camera-equipped cell phones to recognize the face of their owners to help ensure that any sensitive information they carry is not compromised should the phones be lost or stolen. The OKAO Vision Face Recognition Sensor ...
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Will Social Databases Give Way to Social Protocols?
The XHTML Friends Network (XFN) microformat could eliminate the need for proprietary social networking services such as LinkedIn, Orkut, and Plaxo, if XFN was widely adopted among users and blog and Web presence authoring tools, writes ZDNet commentator David Berlind in his blog. Currently, the ...
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Machines Not Lost in Translation
The Phraselator is a handheld one-way translation device currently used by military personnel in the Middle East; the device is also being tested by U.S. law enforcement officials and corrections officers in 11 states and undergoing assessment in county health departments and hospital emergency ...
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Mapping the Internet: Towsley Reveals the Hidden Characteristics of a Vast and Complex Global Network
University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) computer science professor and ACM Fellow Don Towsley is developing techniques for Internet measurement and internal network data flow analysis. His network tomography technology, created in conjunction with AT&T Labs and the UMass mathematics ...
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Moving Toward Self-Awareness
As IT systems increase their network exposure and offer more on-demand resources, security and management systems are needed that use predictive modeling, opines MessagingGroup consultant Mark Willoughby. Services, infrastructure, storage, applications, content, compliance, devices, and ...
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Unleashing the Potential of Wireless Broadband
Former FCC Chairman Reed E. Hundt writes that the FCC and Congress should apply themselves to opening up the electromagnetic spectrum--which TV broadcasters jealously guard--to wireless broadband providers, which will trigger a cascade of new services that promise to revolutionize ...
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Q&A: The Secure Enterprise Interview
Former Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity director Amit Yoran says his mission while at the department was to create a cybersecurity division, recruit staff for the division, and implement programs and activities that will take the division closer to its goals. With that ...
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Identity Management, Access Specs Are Rolling Along
In an environment where federated identity capabilities are highly sought after, vendors are quickly realizing that sustaining their marketplace viability depends on making interoperable products. IBM's recent entry into the Liberty Alliance Project for developing an open federated network ...
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Reining in Unstructured Data
Managing unstructured data has become a top corporate priority as a result of the tech industry bubble's implosion and regulatory compliance, says META Group analyst Andrew Warzecha. Experts say that unstructured data accounts for over 80 percent of the information companies generate, a ...
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