The Infinite Library
Student Engineers Develop Program for Online Class Discussions
A team of engineering students in the ACM'sUCLA chapter is developing a virtual communication system for classmates using the open source Jabber instant messaging protocol. The CourseChat service is being created in response to the School of Engineering's request ...
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Berners-Lee Sees Killer App for Semantic Web
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee told attendees at the Fourth Annual Bio-IT World Conference and Expo on May 17 that the Semantic Web could enable researchers and other users to uncover scientific data concealed within dissimilar applications' formats and organizational ...
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NSF Researchers Test Genetic Storage Technique
University researchers have developed a new method for efficiently accepting large amounts of incoming data by borrowing from genetic algorithms. University of Southern California computer science professor Leana Golubchik says government agencies face a serious technical problem ...
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Battle of the Coders
Shanghai Jiao Tong University's last-minute, first-place win of the ACM's International Collegiate Programming Contest in April demonstrates how computer-programming students in developing nations are acquiring superior skills thanks to the rapid ...
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Beyond the Barriers: What Women Want in IT
The Australian government has failed to increase the number of women in the IT field because it focused on barriers to recruitment instead of the qualities of the IT industry that are off-putting for women, says Australian Computer Society (ACS) Women board program director Su Spencer. ...
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'Machine Learning' Is Beal's Focus
University at Buffalo computer scientist Matthew J. Beal's forte is Bayesian machine learning, a field of study that seeks to build models that computers can use to become more knowledgeable through probability inference. Beal, who joined the Department of Computer Science and ...
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Give Your DVD Player Protection
UCLA engineering professor Rajit Gadh is developing a DVD-protection scheme that taps the ability to write data to radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Upon the purchase of a DVD, the buyer would be required to provide a password or some kind of biometric data that would be written to ...
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Butlers to Facilitate Human-to-Human Interaction
The IST-funded FAME information butler is an intelligent agent designed to help groups of people overcome linguistic, cultural, communication, and information challenges while collaborating on common tasks. "The information butler facilitates human to human interaction, eliminating the ...
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Move Over, Herbie
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Grand Challenge is a race between autonomous vehicles that must navigate a 175-mile Mojave Desert course without human assistance; the team that develops the first vehicle to cross the finish line in less than 10 hours will win $2 million. ...
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COBOL Skills Needed in the Future
COBOL is not necessarily a thing of the past, considering that use of the mainframe has been growing and the enormous amount of the COBOL code currently running. In fact, programmers who are skilled in the legacy language are likely to be in high demand over the next decade when many ...
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The Web: Video Search Engines Come of Age
Experts expect new video search engines to significantly enhance corporate intelligence gathering and help spawn new applications and products such as phonetic-based Web searches and Internet-specific entertainment from Hollywood, among other things. Clew partner David Carpe is particularly ...
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Repairs Underway for Server Speed Tests
The Transaction Processing Performance Council is set to replace a number of server benchmarking tests, including the 13-year-old TPC-C test that measures large database servers. TPC-C will be replaced by TPC-E in 2006, enabling prospective server buyers to more accurately gauge the real-world ...
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SourceForge.net Surpasses 100,000 Open Source Projects
Upwards of 100,000 open source projects have been collaboratively developed and stored on SourceForge.net, whose registered users numbered a record 1,074,424 as of May 15, 2005. Among the companies and organizations posting successful projects to SourceForge.net is NASA, whose Java ...
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Failure Must Be a Part of the Plan
Improving the overall cybersecurity situation means preparing for failure by strengthening internal security and business continuity planning, not just focusing on perimeter security. Former White House advisor Richard Clarke says software vulnerabilities are the main threat to cybersecurity ...
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Building Bridges
Portland State University attempts to stimulate an interest in math, engineering, science, and computer science among underrepresented high school students through the 35-year-old Math, Engineering, and Science Achievement (MESA) program. Oregon MESA director Carla Faini says the ...
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Flag Ruling Doesn't Signal End to Copyright Issues
The U.S. Circuit Court in Washington recently determined that the FCC exceeded its bounds by trying to require TVs or other devices to read
broadcast flag" coding designed to block the copying of digital TV signals, but Chris Nolan writes that the copyright controversy will ...
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Making It on Their Own
An organization can benefit enormously from end user software development, which is becoming increasingly necessary as untrained employees grow impatient with IT for the tools they require to access and manipulate data. National Council on Compensation Insurance CIO Shawn O'Rourke calls not ...
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Flight of the Creative Class
In "Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent," George Mason University public policy professor Richard Florida writes that the global economy's increasing reliance on knowledge industries requires the cultivation of a creative class by nation-states; he warns that the ...
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The Infinite Library
Many librarians and archivists have welcomed Google's announcement that it will digitize millions of library books, although some are worried that such an venture could lead to the privatization of literary knowledge. There is another concern that digital libraries will drive traditional ...
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