Information Technology

Information Technology

Networking Computers to Combat Subtropical Diseases

Subtropical diseases lay waste to millions of people each year. In the quest to find a cure scientists are using Grid computing, the major driving force for new approaches towards collaborative large-scale science, to discover new drugs and better understand the diseases.

Last year there were about 350-500 million infections and approximately 1.3 million deaths due to malaria, mainly in the tropics. Malaria is spread by female mosquitoes, which carry protozoan parasites called Pla

Information Technology

Future Directions for Agent-Based Computing: A Strategic Roadmap

What is the future direction for agent-based systems, one of the most important software R&D areas in recent years? Drawing from a body of some 200 industry and academic organisations, a European project has released a strategic roadmap that hopes to guide evolution of the field over the next decade.

AgentLink III, as its name suggests, was the third project in the series and author of the roadmap. Funded by the IST programme, it addressed the current state-of-the-art and postul

Information Technology

Empowering Small Firms to Manage Large Supply Chains

Big manufacturing jobs, especially those in the defense industry that involve management of extensive supply chains, often require resources and expertise that many believe are beyond the capacity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Recent work by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and colleagues at Pittsburgh’s Doyle Center for Manufacturing Technology, however, demonstrates the capabilities of simulation and visualization technologies for

Information Technology

New Simulation Program Enhances Nanodevice Resistivity Predictions

As nanoscale circuits continue to shrink, electrical resistivity increases in the wiring and limits the maximum circuit speed. A new simulation program developed by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and George Washington University (GWU) can be used to predict such increases with greater input flexibility and model accuracy than other methods. The software program is expected to help the semiconductor industry design and test devices more efficiently and wi

Information Technology

Galileo GIOVE-A Launches with Marotta Propulsion Systems

Marotta UK Ltd is pleased to announce that it has designed, developed and qualified equipment for the cold gas propulsion systems on board the Galileo GIOVE-A, part of Europe’s Galileo navigation program, successfully launched by Surrey Satellite Technology, Ltd (SSTL).

The launch of the Galileo GIOVE-A, the first in a constellation of 30 satellites, marks Europe’s maiden entry into civilian-owned global positioning systems. The complete Galileo constellation (27 operational and 3 acti

Information Technology

Image Processing Innovations for Enhanced Artificial Vision

For a robot to identify objects in a particular image, it is first necessary that it can “see” them. With this aim, in artificial vision, edge detectors are normally used, i.e. computer programmes that delimit the objects in an image and define the limits between them and the background, and between the different objects themselves. Edurne Barrenechea Tartas from Pamplona has designed one of these edge detectors and, after trials with a wide-ranging set of photographs, she has shown that the re

Information Technology

Quality Management in Communication Services: A New Approach

Traditionally, research works related to quality in telecommunication services have consisted of a series of analysis over a set of critical-to-quality technical parameters and a resulting enhancement proposal. However, in this Phd. Thesis we aim to face the quality issue from an overall point of view: Not only analysing the objective performance of those agents involved in service provision but also by trying to assess which is their effect in final users’ satisfaction, since this must be the fi

Information Technology

How Information Technologies Are Transforming Real Estate

Computers and the Internet have been billed as enabling new ways of doing business, but in the residential real estate industry, people’s expanded access to information hasn’t rendered the real estate agent a relic, says a Penn State researcher. “The expectation was that real estate agents would go away once consumers could see all the home listing information, but the number of real estate agents has increased, not decreased, in the last 10 years,” says Steve Sawyer, associate pro

Information Technology

’Play’ model of information system design makes teammates of users and designers

“Play” or back-and-forth dialogue between users and designers can lead to IT systems that are more responsive to the subtleties and ambiguities of users’ different perspectives, say Penn State researchers.

And because it makes users and designers teammates during the development process, the “play” model also can reduce the multiple upgrades and updates that plague enterprise-wide or “Newspeak” solutions, says Frederico Fonseca, assistant professor in the School of Informati

Information Technology

ICT-LEAP: Connecting Global Universities Through E-Education

The European Commission, Directorate General for Education and Culture, congratulates Umeå University on the award of ICT-LEAP project, coordinated by Dr. Adi Anani. The project assists MEDA partners in accessing EU e-education technologies and opportunities.

The European Commission Head of Unit, Tempus – Erasmus Mundus, Mr. Augusto González, has warmly congratulated the successful application ICT-LEAP, Information and Communication Technologies Learning Pentagram. Apart from

Information Technology

Innovative Distribution Models for Digital Content Online

The digitalising of information has opened up a great number of possibilities for many economic sectors which, using new technologies, have managed to considerably bring down costs of the various processes involved in their economic activity. Likewise, the spread and development of Internet has provided them with the possibility of making use of new schema for the faster and more economic distribution of materials than before, as well as immediate access to a potentially worldwide market. Never

Information Technology

Semantic Web Travel Services Unlock Tourism Data Potential

A secure, semantic-based interoperability framework for exploiting Web service platforms across peer-to-peer networks in the tourism industry hopes to set free the valuable Web-based tourism information that is currently trapped in isolated silos of incompatible databases.

“The tourism industry today is the second largest economic sector, after manufacturing, in the world,” says Professor Asuman Dogac, Director of the Software Research & Development Center in Turkey, and coordinator

Information Technology

Improving Healthcare Interoperability for Better Patient Care

Modern health information systems today are proprietary and often only serve one department making it impossible to easily share data across one facility, never mind across different facilities or countries. A big problem, it makes it difficult for doctors to capture a complete clinical history of a patient. But one project hopes to overcome this.

“The healthcare interoperability problem can be investigated in two categories: Interoperability of the healthcare messages exchanged

Information Technology

EUREKA-ITEA Boosts Europe’s Automated Software Testing

The EUREKA ITEA Cluster TT-Medal project has achieved a major breakthrough for the European electronics industry by developing a generic solution to enable automated testing of software systems. The methodologies and tools developed in the project were validated in industrial-scale demonstrators for automotive, railway, financial and telecommunications applications, proving the feasibility of a significant improvement in test efficiency, effectiveness and product quality, leading to significan

Information Technology

Delft Mathematician Streamlines Oil Search with New Method

Mathematical research at Delft University of Technology is making it easier to look for oil. Yogi Ahmad Erlangga, who receives his doctorate on Thursday 22 December, has developed a method of calculation which enables computers to solve a crucial equation much faster. In the past, this stumped oil company computers.

Funded by Shell and SenterNovem, Erlangga’s research is pure mathematics. It all centres on the so-called Helmholtz equation. Solving this is important in interpreting the

Information Technology

Europe’s newest Meteosat launches on Solstice Night

The second member of Europe’s new generation of weather satellites has successfully been lifted onto orbit, continuing an uninterrupted series of launch successes since 1977.

This ninth Meteosat satellite, developed on behalf of EUMETSAT under the aegis of the European Space Agency, will reinforce EUMETSAT’s capacity to monitor the Earth atmosphere above Europe, Africa, the Middle-East and the Atlantic Ocean.

MSG-2 (2nd flight model of Meteosat Second Generation) was o

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