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ACM TechNews - Wednesday, May 18, 2005



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ACM TechNews
May 18, 2005

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • Personal Data for the Taking
  • EU Plans for Software Patents Hit Fresh Obstacle
  • Conference System Makes Shared Space
  • 'Real ID' Faces Reality
  • Researchers Speed, Optimize Code With New Open Source Tools
  • The New Curriculum: Getting a Diploma in 'Mortal Kombat'
  • Berkeley Lab Technology Dramatically Speeds Up Searches of Large Databases
  • 'Programmable Matter' One Day Could Transform Itself Into All Kinds of Look-Alikes
  • Designs on Less Complex Mobiles
  • Tele-Petting
  • Is It Finally Time for 3D Online?
  • Nation Failure Warning System
  • Scientists Developing 'Nurturing' Computers
  • DoD Awards $246,000 Grant for Advanced Wireless Networks Research
  • Developers' Growing Challenge
  • Budget Cuts at NSF May Signal a Crisis in Computing
  • Join the Evolution
  • Neuromorphic Microchips

     

    Personal Data for the Taking

    Dozens of Johns Hopkins University students enrolled in a computer security course last semester learned how painfully cheap and easy it is to acquire personal data online when they were grouped into teams assigned to aggregate, clean, and link entire databases of dossiers on Baltimore ...

    [read more]      to the top


    EU Plans for Software Patents Hit Fresh Obstacle

    The latest proposal from the European Parliament to amend the European Union's software patents directive has provoked complaints from software and technology groups claiming the revisions would violate the essentials of existing European patent law. The proposal contains 40 suggested ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Conference System Makes Shared Space

    Videoconferencing technology has made considerable strides, but cost and quality issues have hindered its mainstream penetration. University of California at Berkeley researchers have developed the MultiView videoconferencing system, a tool that creates a "shared space" feeling ...

    [read more]      to the top


    'Real ID' Faces Reality

    The Real ID Act is causing serious concern among state technology officials, who are unsure about what is required and their ability to implement necessary changes. Delaware CIO and NASCIO President Thomas Jarrett says that while exact technical requirements are unclear, Real ID ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Researchers Speed, Optimize Code With New Open Source Tools

    Open-source SPIRAL software tools developed by U.S. university researchers with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency could radically change the writing of computer code, especially when measured against the latest breakthroughs in ...

    [read more]      to the top


    The New Curriculum: Getting a Diploma in 'Mortal Kombat'

    Computer and video games are gaining credence in academic institutions as an area of study, despite skepticism from university administrators and traditional computer scientists. Seattle's DigiPen University was the first U.S. school to offer a four-year game development degree, while a few ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Berkeley Lab Technology Dramatically Speeds Up Searches of Large Databases

    Sifting through large volumes of data produced by high-energy physics experiments and other research projects for specific information just became easier thanks to the Word-Aligned Hybrid (WAH) compression technique developed and patented by researchers at the Energy Department's Lawrence ...

    [read more]      to the top


    'Programmable Matter' One Day Could Transform Itself Into All Kinds of Look-Alikes

    Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists Seth Goldstein and Todd Mowry have conceived of shape-changing robots that can assemble themselves into replicas of human beings or other objects that can sense, change color, and move in three dimensions. Each individual unit or claytronic ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Designs on Less Complex Mobiles

    Mobile phones risk becoming increasingly difficult to use as manufacturers and carriers promote devices with more and more functions, said mobile industry design consultant Scott Jenson at a Microsoft Research conference held in Cambridge, United Kingdom discussing simplifying computing. The ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Tele-Petting

    The Touchy Internet system developed by researchers at the University of Singapore's Mixed Reality Lab enables users to feel a chicken remotely by stroking a chicken-shaped doll that moves in concert with a real chicken monitored by a webcam. Tactile data captured by the replica's touch ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Is It Finally Time for 3D Online?

    Despite a number of false starts over the last decade, 3D interfaces for the Web are ready for widespread use, says Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) co-creator Tony Parisi. VRML was first deployed commercially 10 years ago, but for different reasons Web 3D technology ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Nation Failure Warning System

    The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is committing approximately $500,000 to BAE and three MIT professors to create software that could model the conditions under which a nation state fails and slips into chaos. Washington's interest in such a tool partly stems from ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Scientists Developing 'Nurturing' Computers

    University of Houston computer science professor Ioannis Pavlidis, with the help of his Infrared Imaging Group at the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, has developed the Automatic THErmal Monitoring System (ATHEMOS) that can physiologically monitor human users without touch. ...

    [read more]      to the top


    DoD Awards $246,000 Grant for Advanced Wireless Networks Research

    Researchers in Virginia Tech's Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will explore ways to meld mobile ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks by developing a testbed platform with a $246,000 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grant from the ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Developers' Growing Challenge

    As network and general infrastructure security improves, hackers will increasingly target line-of-business applications. Enterprise applications are increasingly vulnerable for three reasons: Growing demands for application integration between systems that were never designed to work ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Budget Cuts at NSF May Signal a Crisis in Computing

    The National Science Foundation's decision to withdraw funding for its three supercomputer centers is breeding uncertainty about the future of academic supercomputing in the United States. NSF supercomputers are critical to academic efforts because other federal supercomputing ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Join the Evolution

    The integration of relational database technologies with an iterative software development process is a critical element in many software projects, and achieving this task requires cooperation between developers and data professionals. "Agile Database Techniques" author Scott Ambler ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Neuromorphic Microchips

    The human brain is superior to the computer in terms of operational efficiency and functions such as vision, hearing, pattern recognition, and learning; the key to this superiority appears to lie in the organization of the brain's neural system, which engineers are attempting to duplicate ...

    [read more]      to the top


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