Why Software Fails
UC Berkeley Taps Former ACM President, Expert on E-Voting, for Life Achievement Award
Former ACM President Barbara Simons has earned a 2005 Distinguished Engineering Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of California, Berkeley, for her professional, academic, and public service contributions. Simons was chosen by Open ...
[read more] to the top
Legislating Creativity
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) has proposed revisions to U.S. patent law that supporters say will reduce frivolous lawsuits by instituting a "first come, first served" policy for patent application submission. Others have a less positive view of the proposal: Many people foresee only modest gains in ...
[read more] to the top
Researchers Turn Keyboard Clicks Into Text
A University of California, Berkeley, research team led by computer science professor Doug Tygar has devised software that can translate the sound of someone typing on a keyboard into text that was 96 percent accurate in one test. Tygar says keys produce distinctive tones because the plate ...
[read more] to the top
Robotic Vehicles Race, But Innovation Wins
A horde of robotically operated vehicles will again compete against each other in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (Darpa) race through 142 miles of desert from California to Las Vegas. The Pentagon agency drew its inspiration for the Grand Challenge from a desire to build ...
[read more] to the top
Cornell Joins Project to Make the Power Grid More Secure
Researchers at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Washington State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will participate in a five-year, $7.5 million National Science Foundation project to design, construct, and legitimize a cyberinfrastructure for the ...
[read more] to the top
Open Internet, We Hardly Knew Ye
Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society executive director Jennifer Granick writes that the Internet's public accessibility could be lost if law enforcement officials and corporations are allowed to tightly control access to Internet servers. If that happens, Granick warns, then ...
[read more] to the top
Got Tech?
Corante New York blog editor Dominic Basulto cites the lower turnout of U.S.-born science and engineering graduates, the reduction of America's appeal to the world's best brains, and constant worries about job offshoring as reasons underlining the erosion of U.S. global tech ...
[read more] to the top
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Receives $52 Million, Five-Year Grant From NSF
The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $52 million grant to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) as part of a larger $150 million grant to support eight institutions acting as partners in the development of the TeraGrid, a national distributed cyberinfrastructure for ...
[read more] to the top
Creating a Working Vision of the Mobile Workforce
New technologies and trends are changing the face of working life, as more workers are telecommuting, and more employers are striving to make work more mobile. Some of the most influential factors in the mobile workforce are not technological, however, and the Information Society Technologies' ...
[read more] to the top
Free Software Foundation Forms Project to Revise GPL
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the creation of a development project designed to assist the revision of the General Public License (GPL) by offering a platform for receiving comments from developers of open-source software. This will allow developers to air their views on ...
[read more] to the top
African Software Gains Global Popularity
Having become the most popular Linux platform in the United States in less than six months after its introduction in October 2004, Ubuntu Linux is mounting an increasing challenge to Windows' dominance of the operating system market. Linux operating systems power only about 3.5 percent of ...
[read more] to the top
Computing Competition Winners Expand Technology at University's Siebel Center
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is incorporating technologies produced by the winning projects in the Intel-sponsored Computing Habitat programming contest into the Siebel Center for Computer Science. The products are designed to help people navigate throughout the ...
[read more] to the top
Imagining a Better World
After three months of research, four Malaysian students developed a software program that promises to help with the management of daily life. Their project, a handheld Object Identification Network (Odin) using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, qualified for the finals of the ...
[read more] to the top
Robot-Man Partners to Take the Stage in Washington DC
Robots to be exhibited at a Sept. 16 National Science Foundation event in Washington, D.C., will represent a new generation of machines that boast a functional partnership with human beings rather than a master-slave relationship. Bill Clancey with NASA Ames Research Center's ...
[read more] to the top
Panel: New Rules, Tech Needed for Data Privacy
Technology experts addressed the need for new privacy rules regarding the federal government's use of personal data from data brokers during a two-day public workshop hosted by the Department of Homeland Security. Some participants even suggested that the Privacy Act of 1974 may not take ...
[read more] to the top
Toward a Methodology for Rigorous Development of Generic Requirements Patterns
The authors detail work on a product-line methodology for engineering, validating, and confirming generic requirements for critical systems via object-oriented and formal techniques in domain and product-line engineering (PLE). Their concentration is on failure detection and ...
[read more] to the top
IBM Almaden Research Center's Intelligent Bricks and Kybos Software Supersmart Storage
IBM envisions an intelligent storage system architecture that boasts easier data management, reduced maintenance costs, and less environmental impact through the integration of Intelligent Bricks hardware and Kybos software. A team led by Moidin Mohiuddin at IBM's Almaden Research Center has ...
[read more] to the top
On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Bot
Controversy is brewing over the emergence of poker-playing software robots, which many people complain give the players who use them an unfair advantage. Poker Web sites publicly downplay the threat of poker bots while discretely scanning for and ejecting suspicious accounts, but Ray ...
[read more] to the top
Why Software Fails
The causes of software failures are well established, yet an end to such failures is not in sight, according to IEEE member and author Robert Charette. Preventing such failures is not a major priority among most organizations, despite the damage such failures can do to their prospects: ...
[read more] to the top
To submit feedback about ACM TechNews, contact:
technews@xxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe from the ACM TechNews Early Alert Service:
Please send a separate email to listserv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
with the line
signoff technews
in the body of your message.
Please note that replying directly to this message does not
automatically unsubscribe you from the TechNews list.
ACM may have a different email address on file for you,
so if you're unable to "unsubscribe" yourself, please direct
your request to: technews-request@xxxxxxx
We will remove your name from the TechNews list on
your behalf.
For help with technical problems, including problems with
leaving the list, please write to:
technews-request@xxxxxxx
to the top
© Copyright 2005 Information, Inc.
