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ACM TechNews - Monday, August 15, 2005



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ACM TechNews
August 15, 2005

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HEADLINES AT A GLANCE:

  • In Silicon Valley, a Debate Over the Size of the Web
  • Searching for Skills
  • Fewer Women Find Their Way Into Tech
  • H-1B Visa Limits Reached for '06
  • NIST Creates Online Treasure Trove of Security Woes
  • Long Live AI
  • IQ Test for AI Devices Gets Experts Thinking
  • Exploring the Life Robotic
  • Kept Alive by Open Source
  • Speech Verification Secures More Enterprise Apps
  • A Conversation with David Anderson
  • Driving IT Initiatives and Network Innovation
  • Extra-Preneurship
  • From Conception to Adolescence, the Speech Industry Is Developing a New Breed of Designers/Developers
  • Reinventing the Smart Phone
  • Social Machines
  • Instant Messaging: A New Target For Hackers

     

    In Silicon Valley, a Debate Over the Size of the Web

    Debate erupted over how big the World Wide Web is last week when Yahoo! declared at an Internet search engine conference that there were upwards of 19.2 billion documents in its search engine index, more than double the 8.1 billion currently reported by Google; this led to Google raising questions ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Searching for Skills

    The H-1B visa program was founded, ostensibly, so that U.S. industry could import skilled foreign workers to address a shortage of cutting-edge tech, science, and engineering positions. NexGen Infosys owner Manoj Prasad, who came to the United States 10 years ago on an H-1B visa and is now an ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Fewer Women Find Their Way Into Tech

    With the number of women venturing into technology careers at its lowest point since the 1970s, nonprofits such as the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) at the University of Colorado's Boulder campus are endeavoring to find out why. A recent survey found that one ...

    [read more]      to the top


    H-1B Visa Limits Reached for '06

    The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service announced on Aug. 12 that all 65,000 H-1B visas for fiscal year 2006 have been depleted in record time, whereas the H-1B cap was not reached in fiscal 2005 until October. The announcement spurred business interests to push for expansions to the H-1B ...

    [read more]      to the top


    NIST Creates Online Treasure Trove of Security Woes

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is a comprehensive repository of cybersecurity data culled from all publicly available vulnerability resources that also supplies references to industry resources. NVD creator and NIST computer ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Long Live AI

    Ray Kurzweil, author of the forthcoming book, "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology," envisions advancements in artificial intelligence that will lead to better health, a cleaner environment, and other innovations that promise to radically change commerce, business, and ...

    [read more]      to the top


    IQ Test for AI Devices Gets Experts Thinking

    Researchers Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter with the Swiss Institute for Artificial Intelligence have devised a concept for an IQ test for artificially intelligent machines. The test is envisioned as an alternative to traditional measures of human intelligence, which would ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Exploring the Life Robotic

    Wellesley College physics professor Robbie Berg combines learning and excitement in initiatives such as his Math and Science Camp for Girls and the 16th Annual Young Science Program sponsored by the Committee for the Branch Libraries. Berg discussed and demonstrated robotics before an ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Kept Alive by Open Source

    Although the continuous influx of new software often renders older programs commercially obsolete, the open-source movement has extended the lifespan of many otherwise archaic applications, such as Gopher and DecNet. Software developers look to breathe new life into old programs for a ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Speech Verification Secures More Enterprise Apps

    Voice prints are quickly replacing typed passwords and PIN numbers for user-friendly and more effective user authentication, according to a recent panel at SpeechTEK 2005. However, Diaphonics CEO Andy Osburn explains that voice prints are suitable for only certain situations. The technology is ...

    [read more]      to the top


    A Conversation with David Anderson

    David Anderson of the U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory directs grassroots supercomputing efforts such as SETI@home and the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), in which volunteers donate their PCs' unused computing cycles for scientific research. "Volunteer ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Driving IT Initiatives and Network Innovation

    Duke University CIO and National LambdaRail Chairman (NLR) Tracy Futhey reports that the campus networked environment is expanding in terms of access as well as the kinds of users exploring new avenues of application. "The more you've got broad access and experimentation through this ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Extra-Preneurship

    Traditional hierarchical business-management systems are being transformed by information technologies into extra-preneurships, or integrated virtual networks based on collaboration and self-actualization. Outsourcing is forcing organizational changes on the large enterprise so it can sustain ...

    [read more]      to the top


    >From Conception to Adolescence, the Speech Industry Is Developing a New Breed of Designers/Developers

    Speech technology standards such as VoiceXML and SALT are allowing skills to be transferred between the previously separate fields of design and development, and individuals who combine such expertise will become increasingly desirable in the speech industry as market innovation and ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Reinventing the Smart Phone

    In a roundtable discussion, members of Forum Nokia PRO concur that the personal digital assistant (PDA) has been or will be supplanted by the smart phone in their local markets; but the majority foresee the emergence of a converged device. Consilient director of product management Steve ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Social Machines

    Technologies that deliver uninterrupted connectivity are evolving into an infrastructure that supports continuous computing. Continuous-computing technologies follow us throughout our lives because they are more readily adaptable to our locations, schedules, and preferences, and they enable us ...

    [read more]      to the top


    Instant Messaging: A New Target For Hackers

    The growing popularity of instant messaging (IM), especially among businesses, has made it an increasingly attractive target to phishers, malware authors, and other attackers. IMlogic CTO Jon Sakoda says IM attacks can propagate rapidly thanks to IM's real-time capabilities. Other ...

    [read more]      to the top


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