E-Passports Debut, and Not Everyone Is Cheering
"In Challenge to Google, Yahoo Will Scan Books"
The goal of the Yahoo-led Open Content Alliance (OCA) is to digitize hundreds of thousands of books and technical papers and put them online for anyone to access. The project stands to rival Google's effort to create a searchable archive of library collections, but without running the risk of ...
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"Pointers to an Era of Easy Computing"
The recent Demo conference showcased technologies designed to ease information access and manipulation, a sign that tech innovators are striving to satisfy users' demands for more usability. One such technology was the latest version of ActiveWord Systems' InkPad software, which lets ...
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"AJAX Gives Software a Fresh Look"
Several companies are working to send ripples throughout the PC software market with AJAX (Asynchronous _javascript_+XML), a suite of standardized development methods that promises to bring Web pages experientially closer to desktop applications in terms of interactivity and functionality. ...
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"Microsoft Woos Hobbyist, Child Programmers"
Microsoft's Coding4Fun Web site was started by product manager Daniel Fernandez and another engineer "to rejuvenate the hobbyist market," which Fernandez feels became underserved in recent years as the company concentrated on enterprise software. The site, along with the upcoming ...
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"Grant Allows IU to Process Larger Data"
Indiana University has been awarded a $1.72 million National Science Foundation grant to build a data capacitor as a temporary storage receptacle for massive amounts of data awaiting analysis by supercomputers. The size of data sets analyzed by the IU supercomputer is limited by the ...
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"Microrobots Show Promise in IT, Security"
Dartmouth researchers have developed the smallest mobile, untethered robot in the world after seven years of effort. The microrobot is a mere one-tenth the thickness of a single human hair, and can crawl like an inchworm and be steered without being connected to a power source. The ...
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"Global R&D to Reach $1 Trillion in 2006"
Worldwide research and development spending will reach $1 trillion next year, according to a new survey from Batelle and R&D Magazine, with the Asian region responsible for much of that growth. The survey credits increased offshore outsourcing, particularly in the United States, as a key ...
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"Grid Project Lends a Hand to Katrina Victims"
Local police and fire departments, hospitals, schools, and relief organizations in areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina are using portable networking technology from the World Wide Consortium for the Grid (W2COG) for communications. W2COG can create a mobile network where there is no ...
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"Location System for Wireless Sensor Networks"
A new algorithm for determining the position of each node of a wireless sensor network is the subject of a thesis by Jagoba Arias Perez, who is in the department of electronics and telecommunications at the University of the Basque Country. Wireless sensor networks offer the benefit of having a ...
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"Cornell Researchers Receive $2 Million Federal Grant for Computational Social Sciences Project Using Web Archive"
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $2 million grant to a team of Cornell University researchers to develop "cybertools" that can distill and analyze information from massive data repositories for computational social science research. The project ultimately aims to aid statistical and ...
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"With Friends Like These, Who Needs Actual People?"
Japanese companies are investigating the possibilities of robotic companions for Japan's growing elderly population, concurrent with young people's declining willingness or ability to care for the aged. Honda and Toyota, for example, are developing a humanoid robot that can walk, talk, ...
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"Ubuntu Carves Niche in Linux Landscape"
In the competitive Linux marketplace, the Ubuntu project has managed to attract a sizable following since its inception two years ago, thanks almost entirely to Mark Shuttleworth's funding of Canonical and the Ubuntu Foundation. The third version of Ubuntu, known to developers as Breezy ...
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"Development Study: Haste Makes Waste"
A recent study has found that increased funding has little impact on the overall quality of a project. Qualitative Software Management's estimation product, known as SLIM, provides an empirical analysis of a variety of projects addressing IT, real time embedded systems, and engineering. ...
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"Cornell Vehicle Will Try to Drive 175 Miles of Rough Terrain Without Human Control for a Prize of $2 Million"
Cornell University's entry into the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) 2005 Challenge is "Titan," a Spider Light Strike Vehicle equipped with a GPS system, inertial and attitude sensors, light detection and ranging sensors, stereoscopic vision, and an artificial intelligence ...
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"'The Time of Robotics Has Arrived'"
Defense Department-funded initiatives are underway to develop unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to reduce casualties on the battlefield and guard facilities, and the key to realizing this vision is developing sensors, software, and networking methodologies that permit autonomous operation. ...
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"The Global State of Information Security 2005"
Even as preventative security measures grow more sophisticated, the security industry remains loosely coordinated and decentralized, and struggles continually to keep up with the steady proliferation of threats. A recent study found that many security administrators are indifferent to ...
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"Open Source Goes Corporate"
The adoption of Linux and other kinds of open-source software is rapidly expanding in major companies, although not all the issues associated with using free software have been addressed. UPS is migrating its Tivoli servers to Intel-based Red Hat servers running Enterprise Linux, and moving ...
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"Wireless Broadband: The Long and Winding Road"
Truly ubiquitous high-speed mobile data services are a long time in the offing. Early deployments of third-generation cellular data technologies are largely delivering on their promise with their combination of near-universal connectivity, reasonable network speeds, and implementation ...
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"E-Passports Debut, and Not Everyone Is Cheering"
The global deployment of electronic passports that use contactless smart card technology to carry biometric identifiers has provoked concern about security, interoperability, and cost. The ACLU pointed out e-passports' vulnerability to data skimming, which prompted the U.S. government to ...
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