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ACM TechNews - Friday, April 29, 2005



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ACM TechNews
April 29, 2005

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • House Signs Off on Supercomputing
  • Adventures in the Skin Trade
  • NCSA Allows Faster, Better, Cheaper Engineering
  • Bringing the Internet to the Whole World
  • License Proliferation: When More Is Less
  • Mining Reality
  • New Intelligent Dictionary Searches Make Sense
  • IT Industry Seeks to Set Parameters for Growth
  • Just Like the Real Thing
  • Speech Recognition Software Slowly Making Progress
  • Florida Planning Son of Matrix
  • A Crisis of Prioritization
  • What Does the Future of Communications Hold?
  • Software to Simulate Human Heart
  • Biotech Data's Big Bang
  • Presidential Panel Recommends Steps to Promote Computational Science
  • Satisfied But Uncertain
  • Whatever Happened to Machines That Think?
  • Does Trusted Computing Remedy Computer Security Problems?

     

    House Signs Off on Supercomputing

    This week the U.S. House of Representatives approved the High-Performance Computing Revitalization Act of 2005, which calls on the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to ensure the availability of supercomputers to American engineers and scientists, and names the director ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Adventures in the Skin Trade

    Nearly 10 years after MIT Media Lab researchers Thomas Zimmerman and Neil Gershenfeld created a prototype intra-body communication network that tapped the naturally-occurring electrical fields of human skin to transfer data between devices, NTT Labs in Japan has developed an application based ...

    [read more]      to the top


    NCSA Allows Faster, Better, Cheaper Engineering

    Large construction projects such as highway improvements involve high costs, traffic disruption, and worries over quality, but civil engineering researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), have created software to help optimize those projects. Faster, cheaper, and ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Bringing the Internet to the Whole World

    Advanced Micro Devices intends to bridge the digital divide between computing haves and have-nots by making computers with Internet access available and affordable to half the world's population by 2015 through the distribution of low-cost PCs. AMD's Personal Internet Communicator (PIC), ...

    [read more]      to the top


    License Proliferation: When More Is Less

    With more than 50 open source software licenses available, developers are often at a loss when deciding on which license to use. Nobel Laureate Herb Simon says an abundance of options leads to people choose less optimal options for the sake of minimizing risk; in the open source licensing ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Mining Reality

    As a participant in MIT Media Lab's Reality Mining project, graduate student Nathan Eagle has compiled about four decades' worth of continuous data on human behavior using communication, location, activity, and proximity information taken from 100 cell phone users, and this data could ...

    [read more]      to the top


    New Intelligent Dictionary Searches Make Sense

    The IST-funded BENEDICT project has yielded a semantic context sensitive dictionary lookup that can facilitate more intelligent online dictionary searches. The BENEDICT dictionary does more than scan the text around the search word and provide the proper base-form and syntactic category; it ...

    [read more]      to the top


    IT Industry Seeks to Set Parameters for Growth

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has a vision to transform Russia into an IT giant, and he recently disclosed that this vision involves creating 10 Russian IT parks aided by tax breaks by the end of the decade; Russian IT and communications minister Leonid Reiman says the state is planning a ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Just Like the Real Thing

    The National University of Singapore's (NUS) Mixed Reality Lab (MRL) and Nanyang Technological University's Center for Advanced Media Technology (CamTech) are engaged in research into "mixed reality" technologies that enhance real-world views with virtual object or data overlays. One project ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Speech Recognition Software Slowly Making Progress

    The future of speech recognition is promising if not spectacular, as the technology is experiencing gradual but steady growth. "Because of the growing emphasis on customer service recently, many companies have become interested in speech recognition systems," says Datamonitor analyst Daniel ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Florida Planning Son of Matrix

    Florida officials have put out a request for information on a sequel to the controversial Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (Matrix) project, which combined government and commercial personal data to help track down terrorists and other criminals. The document outlines a more ...

    [read more]      to the top


    A Crisis of Prioritization

    A new report from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (Pitac) warns that the emphasis on bolstering national security in the wake of the 2001 U.S. terrorist attacks has left a critical element--cybersecurity of civilian technological infrastructures--severely ...

    [read more]      to the top


    What Does the Future of Communications Hold?

    Communications channels are merging with one another, as well as with new search capabilities, says INBOX conference chair Martin Hall, whose gathering features discussion and exhibits about enterprise messaging. With email now a mission-critical business application, companies need to ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Software to Simulate Human Heart

    A cross-disciplinary team of university researchers has created the first-ever computer simulation of the human heart's fluid dynamics using algorithms developed at the University of New York and computer software developed at the University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley computer ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Biotech Data's Big Bang

    The automation of biochemistry is fueling an explosion in biotech data worldwide, shrinking the time it takes for such data to double in volume from 18 months a few years ago to six to three months today. Organizations charged with biotech data management are using a broad spectrum of new ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Presidential Panel Recommends Steps to Promote Computational Science

    The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee recommended in an as-yet-unreleased report a restructuring of universities and federal agencies to promote multidisciplinary computational science, which plays an "integral role" in solving a multitude of problems ranging from traditional ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Satisfied But Uncertain

    The 2005 InformationWeek Salary Survey of 12,158 IT professionals finds an overwhelming degree of job satisfaction among respondents, although approximately two-thirds do not think an IT career and the potential for salary advancement is as promising today as it was five years ago. This is ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Whatever Happened to Machines That Think?

    The excitement generated by the field of artificial intelligence, and the support it garnered, waned dramatically in the 1990s as AI projects that promised to deliver convincing computer conversationalists, autonomous servants, and even conscious machines failed to pan out because their core ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Does Trusted Computing Remedy Computer Security Problems?

    Rolf Oppliger and Ruedi Rytz with the Swiss Federal Strategy Unit for Information Technology weigh the benefits and drawbacks of trusted computing, and conclude that the technology is unlikely to completely inoculate PCs against the threat of malware. Trusted computing initiatives ...

    [read more]      to the top


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