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
The Finnish company Deltabit Oy is creating awareness of access-control systems that are replacing traditional keys. A fingerprint already opens the door to keep-fit rooms at Tampere, Finland.
Deltabit Oy has been developing systems and applications based on fingerprint recognition for more than six years. The basic idea is the keyless concept. Fingerprint recognition can be used in access control for opening doors, controlling burglar alarms and supervising working hours. The only
The art of communication becomes a science when dealing with computers. Laying the foundations for future research in human-computer interactions, PF-STAR’s speech and gesture databases, and virtual agents open up new approaches to machine-based communications.
Completed in September 2004, the IST project PF-STAR aimed to lay the foundations for future research efforts in Multilingual and Multisensorial Communication, or MMC for short. Over the project’s two-year term, research
To make it easier to measure the security of an information technology product or system, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have developed a common specification language–Extensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (XCCDF)–for writing security checklists and related documents.
Increasingly, computers and other information technology products are vulnerable to multiple threats including viruse
Three-Part Solution Leads to Better Web Services Performance
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published three new Web Services Recommendations: XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP), SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM), and Resource Representation SOAP Header Block (RRSHB). These recommendations provides ways to efficiently package and transmit binary data included or referenced in a SOAP 1.2 message.
Web Services Applications Need Effective,
Kinniya Hospital on the east coast of Sri Lanka was destroyed by the Dec. 26 tsunami, and its 40 patients and hospital staff are missing. It was just one of many buildings poorly prepared for actual disaster. In the weeks and months ahead, scientists and engineers will be studying damage sites all over the island to evaluate the power of the tidal wave and recommend new construction standards to help such buildings withstand the expected stresses.
A new Web site at Cornell Universit
‘Evil Twin’ hotspots: the latest security threat to web users, according to wireless internet and cyber crime experts at Cranfield University, academic partner of the Defence Academy of the UK.
Dr Phil Nobles, wireless internet and cyber crime expert at the university, will be speaking at the wireless crime event at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre – the UK’s only venue for adults to discuss controversial science – on Thursday 20 January 2005 from19.00-20.30. He will explain t
Paving the way for much more intuitive, interactive, and user-friendly ‘spoken dialogue technology’, DUMAS developed a multilingual speech-based system that creates new ways to communicate.
DUMAS, a three-year IST-funded project, began by developing the Athos platform, a generic and modular framework for multilingual speech-based systems. A consortium of eight partners from Sweden, Finland, Germany and the UK, its researchers built on basic speech technology, such as speech synt
An Internet-based system to help revive flagging areas hit by the decline of traditional heavy industry, such as steel and mining, has been developed with the help of 850,000 euros from the EU’s Framework Programme.
VISION was launched to create an Internet-based system to promote rapid industrial reconversion. This is a major issue for large parts of Europe where the loss of traditional industries left areas of high unemployment and social deprivation, despite many being populated
Improving how decision-makers respond in the minutes and hours that follow the first reports of a natural disaster like the recent tsunami or a manmade incident, such as a chemical accident or a terrorist attack, is the focus of a research project at the University at Buffalo’s Center for Multisource Information Fusion.
“Responders immediately begin knitting together a picture that makes sense of what is happening based on the flow of reports they receive from the field,” said
Software behind the technology already finding its way into photo editing
Researchers are developing new technologies that may give robots the visual-sensing edge they need to monitor dimly lit airports, pilot vehicles in extreme weather and direct unmanned combat vehicles.
The researchers intend to create an imaging chip that defeats the harmful effects of arbitrary illumination, allowing robotic vision to leave the controlled lighting of a laboratory and enter the erra
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