Information Technology

Experimenting with the idea of municipal provision of sophisticated Internet services, European researchers have come up with some very promising results that were positively received by all municipalities involved in the trials.

When it concludes at the end of the year, the IST-funded VisionAIR project will have successfully completed over six months of trials of Internet services provided by European municipalities. Although the idea of public Internet services might sound

DEISA, the European supercomputing grid infrastructure, and TeraGrid, the US supercomputing cyberinfrastructure, and have been linked, for the purposes of a technology demonstration, by a common, scalable, wide-area global file system spanning two continents.

The bridging of communities in the old and the new world were showcased during the Supercomputing Conference SC05 at Seattle. It was shown that any scientist, accessing TeraGrid from any of the participating sites in the U

New Version of SSML to include Internationalization features; VoiceXML 3.0 to incorporate Speaker verification

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced new work on extensions to components of the Speech Interface Framework which will both extend Speech Synthesis Markup Language functionality to Asian and other languages, and include speaker verification features into the next version of VoiceXML, version 3.0. Addressing both areas expands both the reach and functionality

In his PhD thesis the Pamplona engineer, Francisco Falcone Lanas, has put forward various structures based on what are known as left-handed metamaterials, materials that can be used to make smaller mobile phones, aerials or GPS and which have better specifications and performance. This is the first PhD defended in the world on applications of left-handed metamaterials.

Photonic crystal devices

The research undertaken by Francisco Falcone in his PhD involved analysing t

Despite millions of dollars spent by IT companies, digital security still contains more holes than a Swiss cheese. One European project plans to plug those holes by creating a virtual security framework independent of both devices and the networks they are trying to access.

SEINIT, the Security Experts Initiative, offers the promise of seamless security regardless of hardware, software or access protocol, whether it’s mobile phones, bluetooth, WiFi, ethernet or broadban

Design of smart homes takes into consideration technology as well as the wishes, needs and fears of residents.

The research results of Research Director Frans Mäyrä’s Morphome project confirm that test subject perceptions of computer technology are often critical or negative. The idea of computers playing a central role in the home is anathema to many. Computers are seen as being complicated and unreliable, so no one would readily submit key household functions to their control.