High-Tech's New Day
U.S. Slips in Coding Contest
China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Moscow State University, and the Saint Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics took top honors at ACM's 2005 International Collegiate Programming Contest held in Shanghai this week. The University of Illinois ranked ...
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As Government Cap on Work Visas Rises, So Does Confusion
When U.S. businesses complained that the government's limit on H-1B visas for foreign workers had already been reached by the time fiscal year 2005 began, Congress passed a measure last November raising the 65,000 cap by an additional 20,000 visas for graduates who earned advanced degrees from U.S. ...
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View From the High Ground: Yale's Joan Feigenbaum
Yale University computer science professor and ACM Fellow Joan Feigenbaum lists the continuing decline of data storage costs and the increasing penetration of computers into everyday life as two of the most significant IT trends; the result is the increased creation, capture, and storage of ...
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Open-Source Referees Change the Rules
In an effort to curb the proliferation of open-source licenses, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board of directors instituted new open-source license approval criteria and a new system for classifying existing licenses at this week's Open Source Business Conference. The OSI declared ...
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Game for Learning
The incorporation of computer gaming into the classroom is being encouraged by efforts and studies indicating that games can engage students more personally in the learning process and significantly improve their creative thinking and test scores. A 2001 U.K. Home Office report concluded that ...
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A Long and Winding Road for IT Women
With the percentage of women in technology fields dropping to mid-1960s levels in Canada, attendees at a Canadian Information Processing Society gathering worried a greater "geek" stigma would be attached to the field and that the industry would not be able to meet future recruiting ...
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DNS System in Need of Upgrade
The Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) is crucial to the functionality of the Internet and therefore must be improved in order to handle threats from hackers and the continued growth of worldwide Web domains, warns a group of leading computer scientists in a report released by the National Academies ...
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Testing Time for Operators in a Brave New World
The telecommunications industry is eyeing IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) technology as way to unify disparate communications channels, ease deployment of new services, enable new capabilities, and reduce costs. The migration path to IMS from traditional circuit-switched networks, however, ...
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Designing a 'Bionic Eye'
Stanford University physicists and ophthalmologists disclosed the design of an artificial vision system that can stimulate a retina with sharp enough resolution to enable a visually impaired person to orient himself toward objects, identify faces, watch television, read large fonts, and live ...
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Magic Pen Writes New Computer Tech Chapter
Wang Jiang and colleagues at Microsoft Research Asia spent four years developing a pen interface that enables users to modify digital documents by scribbling text on printed versions of the documents and converting them to electronic text on the onscreen versions. Wang, who was an engineering ...
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Lessons in Cybersafety
The current Internet structure makes security breaches inevitable since it assumes reasonable behavior, warned Harvard Law School Internet and society executive director Jonathan Zittrain. Because attackers use the same information avenue machines receive legitimate input from, there is always ...
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Designing Science-Friendly Supercomputers
The PC era saw the relative decline of supercomputers as vendors invested more money in lucrative business and personal computing efforts. When the Japan Earth Simulator debuted in Spring 2000 with a speed five times that of the nearest competitor, it sparked new discussion about the direction of ...
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New Protocol Can Defuse Turf Wars Over Information Sharing Among Federal Agencies
Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government established 24 e-government programs designed to effect collaboration and the exchange of information between intelligence agencies with the aim of bolstering homeland security, but Penn State information science and technology ...
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Bigger Phishes Ready to Spawn
Security researchers say the growth of phishing attacks has slowed dramatically, but they warn that online criminals are crafting more sophisticated attacks that employ pharming, instant messaging platforms, cross-site scripting, and DNS poisoning. Phishing attacks are also ...
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A Trail of DNA and Data
Institute for the Future director Paul Saffo envisions a future scenario in which biometric identity systems are used by law enforcement to monitor citizens. However, Saffo dismisses the reliability and security of identity that advocates claim such systems would provide as "pure science ...
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E-Records Research in Jeopardy
The Office of Management and Budget has cut funding for the 70-year-old National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), endangering future electronic records research, according to field experts. The NHPRC is a relatively small grants program of the National Archives ...
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Linux Making Its Mark in Messaging
Linux is starting to gain ground as an application-layer option, particularly with clustering, IP, and virtualization upgrades in the most recent kernel; this trend is evidenced by the numerous Linux versions of popular email and collaboration servers now available as well as similar ...
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RoboGames: Battling Bots, But No Killer App
The RoboGames competition in San Francisco showcased the development of different robotic elements--such as electronics, sensors, electromechanics, and precision machining--but also reminded participants of the limits of robot technology. Robotics Society of America President David Calkins was ...
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High-Tech's New Day
New and veteran venture capitalists are on the move to turn the Internet into a cash cow using both innovative and traditional ideas in the wake of the dot-com bubble's collapse. Spurred by such factors as Google's meteoric success, the Internet's penetration into everyday life, and the ...
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