Information Technology

Sweden’s new supercomputer for weather forecasting will greatly improve prediction reliability. An enhanced and powerful computational package, tailored especially for the needs of the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, SMHI, is now installed at the National Supercomputer Center, NSC, sited at Linköping University.

The new computer system, called Blixt in honor of its lightning-fast processing, employs new computational methods to forecast land and sea weather cond

A major difficulty in developing automated language translation is that you need a system with a fairly extensive vocabulary from which it can learn, before any degree of reliability or accuracy is possible. The LC-STAR project developed just such a vocabulary.

“First, we created large lexica for several language databases,” explains project coordinator Ute Ziegenhain of Siemens in Germany. “Secondly, we developed a demonstrator that could automatically translate speech to speec

W3C Technologies Critical to Mobile Web Success

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is staffing a booth at the 3GSM Congress from 14 to 17 February 2005, at the Palais des Festivals et des Congres in Cannes, France. All attendees now have the opportunity to learn about W3C’s mobile Web efforts in Hall 1, stand A24.

“W3C’s Recommendations have provided the Web with standard technologies that better serve the full range of Web citizens,” explained Tim Berners-Lee,

Whether dealing with high-power particle accelerators, astronomical observatories or Earth-watching spacecraft, modern science involves vast volumes of information, and researchers require powerful Grid computing techniques to manage this data deluge.

And at a time when the research teams working on the biggest scientific problems of our time – from climate modelling to molecular biology or high energy physics – are larger and more diffuse than ever before, Grid computing offe

A pioneering new way of creating computer programs could be used in the future to design and build robots with minds that function like that of a human being, according to a leading researcher at The University of Reading.

Dr James Anderson, of the University’s Department of Computer Science, has developed for the first time the ‘perspective simplex’, or Perspex, which is a way of writing a computer program as a geometrical structure, rather than as a series of instructions.

If you are touring in Finnish Lapland, you no longer need to shiver outside when watching the heavens in order to see the Northern Lights. Information about the Northern Lights can now be received directly into a mobile phone via the world’s first Aurora Borealis Alarm System.

“This is a service in which local beliefs, the natural surroundings, and technology are combined in an interesting way. Asian tourists in particular are interested in the system,” says Miikka Raulo, the managi