The Mind of an Inventor
"E-Voting Hobbled by Security Concerns"
No outside techniques exist for confirming that the votes recorded by most electronic voting systems have not been tampered with, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology has organized a Oct. 7 conference to investigate technological safeguards. The obvious solution would be to ...
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"PITAC Returns as Part of PCAST"
A recent executive order from President Bush has revived the erstwhile President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) as part of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). "The whole multidisciplinary nature of science and technology these days ...
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"University Computer Buffs Plus in to Conference"
Over 400 students, 25 companies, and 21 speakers will attend the 11th annual ACM student computing contest at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this weekend. The event will feature a job fair with representatives from such companies ...
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"Patents: Agreeing to Disagree?"
Sweeping patent reforms are being stymied by differing views concerning the ownership of rights to ideas and artistic works. Many intellectual property experts conclude that long-cherished approaches to producing innovations, such as patent systems, will be retained, with many of the ...
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"Korea's High-Tech Utopia, Where Everything Is Observed"
Under construction in South Korea is New Songdo, a "ubiquitous city" where data is shared by all key information systems, and where residences, office buildings, and streets have built-in computers. Although South Korea is home to several U-city initiatives, Mike An of the Incheon Free Economic ...
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"Racers, Start Your Software, and May the Best Robot Win"
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director Anthony Tether says qualifying trials for this year's Grand Challenge contest have exceeded his hopes, especially compared to how poorly the contestants fared in last year's competition. The Grand Challenge is a DARPA-sponsored race ...
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"Waging Battle on Foreign Labor"
The concern that many employers are exploiting the H-1B visa program to replace U.S. tech workers with lower-wage foreigners is rearing its head again with a recent study from the Programmers Guild. The report says many employers in companies seeking a minimum of 100 H-1B visas in 2004 intended ...
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"Nematodes: The Making of 'Beneficial' Network Worms"
At the recent Hack In the Box event in Malaysia, security researcher Dave Aitel showed off a demo of a "Nematode" framework for creating a benign computer worm that he believes organizations will employ to reduce the costs of network security. "With this [Nematode] concept, you can take ...
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"Developing 'Broadband for All'"
The IST-sponsored NOBEL project set out to achieve widespread broadband implementation throughout Europe at a moderate cost. Broadband adoption has been slowed by concerns about sinking large investments in relatively new technologies, such as networking through optical fiber; the project, ...
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"Jeff Hawkins, Computing Pioneer, Endows New Center to Develop Model of Brain"
UC Berkeley alumnus and computing pioneer Jeff Hawkins, whose innovations include the PalmPilot, has endowed a new research center to devise mathematical and computational models of the human brain with a $4 million gift from him and his wife, Janet Strauss. The Redwood Center for ...
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"Speak Up for the IT Career"
IT careers still hold much promise despite globalization, outsourcing, and other trends that have discouraged people from becoming IT professionals. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, computer scientists, database administrators, and computer-system analysts will experience some of the ...
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"Wireless Usage Expands to Machines"
As wireless providers look to expand their industry beyond cell phones, machines are becoming a more appealing target. Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication holds vast potential to automate everyday tasks performed by service technicians, and, ultimately, to improve customer service; for ...
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"Social Computing Drives Emerging Applications"
Experts at MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference expect a new era of intrapersonal communications to arise from the advent of social networks and applications that assess personal behavior and gauge basic human traits such as honesty and likeability. MIT Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and ...
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"Cognitive Radio Brings Artificial Intelligence as Solution"
Researchers at Virginia Tech's Center for Wireless Telecommunications are developing a cognitive radio solution that could enable more effective communication for first responders and safety officials in the event of a disaster by significantly cutting Wi-Fi interference and lowering the ...
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"Net Governance Concern Wider Industry, Observers Say"
The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) is calling for more participation from businesses and the technology industry in the development of Internet policies and structures. Markus Kummer, executive coordinator of the WGIG, recently explained the areas covered by the term ...
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"Researchers Reinvent Tech"
Researchers at MIT, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), IBM Research, and other major research facilities offer observations about various technological developments that are likely to be of interest to enterprise IT adopters. Microsoft is working to improve the reliability of ...
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"Sun Evangelist, Social Activist"
Among Sun's research and development initiatives, chief researcher John Gage counts the work on Opteron architectures as the most interesting, which includes a streaming device and an improvement on RAID arrays that could, in theory, lead to perfect, permanent storage. In the processor ...
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"The Sky Really Is Falling"
Co-chairman of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) Ed Lazowska says inaction is the order of the day among government, CIOs, and vendors as far as cybersecurity is concerned. He accuses the Bush administration of undervaluing science, engineering, education, and ...
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"The Mind of an Inventor"
Developing futuristic but practical technologies is the motivation behind Applied Minds, a company whose gadgets are a testament to the childlike imagination of its co-founder, inventor Danny Hillis. Applied Minds' first commercialized product, developed in collaboration with the Herman Miller ...
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