In the Very Near Future
"Three Technology Companies Join to Finance Research"
In the face of declining federal funding for university research in the sciences, Google, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems are contributing $7.5 million to establish the Reliable, Adaptive, and Distributed Systems Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The resulting ...
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"New Tests Fuel Doubts About Vote Machines"
Security experts demonstrated vulnerabilities in Diebold's e-voting machines to election officials in Florida, claiming that a politically motivated hacker could alter election results. The Leon County commission responded by scrapping the Diebold machines in favor of ones made by ...
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"Senate Panel Approves More Net-Policing Powers"
The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday approved the Undertaking Spam, Spyware, and Fraud Enforcement with Enforcers Beyond Borders Act of 2005, a proposal that would broaden the Federal Trade Commission's policing powers over the Internet and allow the FTC to share with foreign law ...
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"Technology's Just Getting Started"
Researchers across the country are developing technologies that will translate into new devices with human-like capabilities, such as Stanford's Morning After Bot that cleans up after a party by taking a picture of what a room looked like before, and working to restore it to that condition by ...
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"Yahoo Snags DARPA AI Guru for NYC Research"
Yahoo has formally announced its new think tank in New York City to focus on social media, with artificial intelligence expert and ACM Fellow Ron Brachman as its head. Brachman was hired away from DARPA, where he led the Information Processing Technology Office's cognitive systems project. ...
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"Understanding Grid Semantics for Virtual Collaboration"
The EU's InteliGrid project seeks to advance grid computing to the point where an intelligent network is aware of its domain and each of its components, realizing the long-anticipated potential of networked computers. The project hopes to produce a grid that would be suited for ...
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"High Performance Computing in the UK"
English and German researchers have collaborated on a review of the state of high performance computing in the United Kingdom. The two groups, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the English Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), addressed issues such as accessibility, ...
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"Women Desert IT in Droves"
Hudson UK reports that nearly two-thirds of women working in IT have left or are about to leave the field, with about 88 percent of women saying they disliked the nine-to-five routine, and 43 percent saying they did not expect to be working a full time nine-to-five routine by 2010. More than ...
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"Trying to Take Ownership"
Although many are quick to blame the lack of regulation for the Internet's current ills, much of its meteoric development has been due to the free-wheeling nature of an ownerless environment. The structure of the Internet has traditionally been steered by its vast community of users, but ...
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"Where Sensors Make Sense"
Researchers developing networks of miniature, intelligent, and wireless sensors envision a host of applications, from endowing pill bottles with the ability to alert caretakers when patients do not take their medicine to implanting a battlefield with the devices to warn of an advancing enemy. ...
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"Online Bonding"
CSIRO's Floyd Mueller is developing technologies that enable Internet users to play real sports with each other over network connections. "I am researching how sports and technology can bring people together over distance," Mueller said of his human-computer interaction research that ...
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"Robot Friends for Autistic Kids"
Yale University computer science researcher Brian Scassellati believes a robot that has the ability to interact more naturally could serve as a friend for autistic children. Scassellati has been building a humanoid robot that is able to mirror the size, speed, and range of motion of a ...
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"Humanoid Robot Gets Job as Receptionist"
Honda plans to introduce its Asimo robot in its Wako office, north of Tokyo, in the capacity of a receptionist in April 2006. Unveiled as the first walking humanoid robot in the world in 2000, Asimo is now capable of guiding guests to a meeting room, serving coffee on a tray, and pushing a ...
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"Clemson University Computer Science Research Aids Computer Users With Color-Deficient Vision"
Computer science researchers at Clemson University have developed a program that will make it easier for people with color-deficient vision to read a computer screen. The program automatically detects contrasts of colors and re-colors images to produce a greater amount of contrast, offering some ...
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"Java? It's So Nineties"
The portion of programmers who use Java as their principal language has dipped to 47.9 percent, compared to 51.4 percent in 2002, according to a recent survey from Evans Data, while .Net has actually surpassed Java in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, PHP, one of the central languages in the LAMP ...
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"Quality Is Now Development Job One"
Embedding quality assurance (QA) deeply into the software development life cycle makes sound business sense, as it would help reduce the cost of correcting defects and satisfy regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley. A roundtable discussion convened by eWeek Labs focused on the breadth and ...
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"Battling to Give Web Access to Visually Impaired Users"
IBM Japan computer specialist Chieko Asakawa continues to work toward making the Web more accessible for visually-impaired people. Asakawa, who works at the Tokyo Research Laboratory, scored a breakthrough when her Home Page Reader Web browser, which reads Web site text for Web surfers, was ...
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"In the Very Near Future"
More popular wireless standards may have near-field communication (NFC) technology beat with their wider coverage radius and faster data transfer speeds, but NFC's ambition to harmonize heterogeneous contactless-card standards could give mobile phones the usability that comes with a ...
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