E-Commerce Gets Smarter
UC Berkeley to Lead $19 Million NSF Center on Cybersecurity Research
The National Science Foundation has selected the University of California, Berkeley, to head its eight-university Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) center, and the facility is expected to receive a five-year grant of about $19 million, with the possibility of a $20 million ...
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Russia Looks to Make IT Its Next Natural Resource
Russia has committed $650 million to invest in the development of IT as the "flagship industry of its modernized economy," according to Russian Minister of Information Technology and Communications Leonid Reiman at the Russian Economic Forum on April 12. The money will be channeled into ...
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Why Robots Are Scary--And Cool
St. Bonaventure University professor Anne Foerst, a former MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory researcher and author of the new book, "God in the Machine: What Robots Teach Us About God and Humanity," explains in an interview that people's motivation for designing and building robots is ...
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Copyright Reform to Free Orphans?
The U.S. Copyright Office is attempting to rectify the problem of "orphan works," or copyrighted properties whose owners are unidentified or impossible to find, which makes securing permission for their use a costly, time-consuming, and often fruitless endeavor that could carry the ...
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Diffie: Infrastructure a Disaster in the Making
Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems' chief security officer and co-creator of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, says in an interview that his biggest concern is the proliferation of Windows systems into critical infrastructure, which could result in major failures in the event of an ...
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'Minority Report' Inspires Technology Aimed at Military
Raytheon, inspired by a gesture-controlled digital display interface in the 2002 sci-fi movie "Minority Report," has developed a similar device for military use by tapping the knowledge of John Underkoffler, a scientist who consulted on the film. The user wears reflective gloves to manipulate ...
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Brooks Forecasts Future of Robotics Technology
Roboticist and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Rod Brooks discussed how intelligent robots could impact society over the next half century in an April 12 lecture. He said humans and robots exhibit greater similarities to each other than ...
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Benching the Benchmarks: Measuring Performance in HPC
High-performance computing (HPC) researchers are developing a suite of codes that will measure HPC systems in a meaningful way, not just according to teraflops and LINPACK loops, writes Shodor Education Foundation executive director Dr. Robert Panoff. Computer speed is only one ...
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Helping Human and Robot Firefighters Work as a Team
The IST-funded PELOTE project's goal was to design the operational foundation for systems in which firefighters and semi-automated robots work as a team to get people to safety in highly dangerous or low-visibility situations. "We wanted to see how robots with a certain amount of ...
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Wi-Max's Future: Boom or Bust?
As standards-compliant Wi-Max products continue to appear on the market, analysts are still split about the future of the technology, with some seeing it as the wireless alternative to wired WAN technologies and others relegating Wi-Max to only niche applications. The IEEE 802.16 standard ...
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Using Automatic Speech Recognition to Assist Communications and Learning
Mike Wald of the University of Southampton and Keith Bain of Saint Mary's University detail how communication and learning can be improved through automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology under investigation by the Liberated Learning Consortium. They describe an idealized ASR system as a ...
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For High-Tech Control, the Eyes (and Hands) Have It
Computer interfaces that use eye-tracking and gesture recognition technologies were demonstrated last week at ACM's CHI 2005 conference, whose overriding theme was "Technology, Safety, and Community," according to Vrije University Amsterdam professor and conference Chair Gerrit van der ...
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Touching Molecules With Your Bare Hands
Molecular biology researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have created a new augmented reality program for testing interactions between molecules and understanding how they work. The system uses plastic models of molecules that are created using 3D printers, then tracks those models ...
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U.N. Must Earn Net Role
Information technology vendors and users should submit comments to the United Nations' working group on Internet Governance during its upcoming public-comment period on the issue of Internet development and management. Comments would address whether the UN should be heavily involved in ...
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Will Machines Ever Understand Us?
Some business analysts expect voice-recognition software to drive the rapid incorporation of human-machine conversation into everyday life, but the vagueness of the software's progress has led to many diverging predictions. Some experts think voice recognition will soon be advanced enough to make ...
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'Tactical Language' Training
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) researcher Ralph Chatham has developed a video game, "Tactical Iraqi," that trains soldiers to speak rudimentary Arabic in order to facilitate effective and respectful communication with locals. Tactical Iraqi uses the Unreal Tournament 2003 ...
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Is Two-Factor Authentication Too Little, Too Late?
Counterpane Internet Security CTO Bruce Schneier and RSA Security CTO Joe Uniejewski offer differing opinions on the importance of two-factor authentication in twin essays. Schneier says two-factor authentication is useful for some situations, such as enforcing internal controls, but does ...
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How Women in IT Make It to the Top
Women who hold high-ranking positions in the federal information technology sector do not perceive a glass ceiling, which Office of Management and Budget e-government and IT administrator Karen Evans disparages as an outmoded concept. Success stories such as Evans are marked by an ...
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E-Commerce Gets Smarter
Online and in-store retail are being fused together through "multichanneling," which carries benefits for both retailers and consumers: For retailers, multichanneling technologies allow them to simplify and derive more value from the collection of customer data; for consumers, they ...
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