A new computer software package, currently under development, will give the term “personal digital assistant” (PDA) a new meaning, helping users quickly and easily evaluate if they are operating at their mental best.
“Difficult tasks, such as an astronaut performing a space walk or a surgeon doing a complicated operation, require the utmost attention and vigilance. We’re developing a way for people to test themselves and make sure they are mentally up to the challenge,” said Dr. Stephen Kos
If your computer screen is covered with Web browser windows to let you monitor the news headlines, weather, traffic and stock market while you work, you might be suffering from information overload.
Computing researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology experienced this problem and have created a prototype software program to move such information from the center of your awareness to the periphery. Called InfoCanvas, the program creates an abstract pictorial representation of informat
’Hamlet’ algorithm answers the question: ’To buy, or not to buy?’
It’s a classic dilemma for air travelers in today’s world of wildly varying ticket prices – should you purchase now if the rate seems reasonable, or wait for a better deal and take the risk that the price will go up?
Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Southern California appear to have taken out some of the uncertainty with a new computer program tha
Intelligent environment learns and is technically interactive
VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, has developed technology which operates through people’s gestures. The new concept is currently being introduced for research purposes at Italdesign-Giugiaro S. p.a. the Italian car design firm. The same technology is used in wireless terminal equipment user interface research in the Netherlands at the Philips research centre HomeLab.
This VTT technology known as gesture inter
Telecoms systems contain an awkward mixture of optics and electronics. A purely optical system would permit the very high data rates needed by the Internet, but at the moment the switching and routing, as well as the “last mile” to the customer, still depend on slower electronic components. Speaking at the Institute of Physics Congress on Monday 24 March, Professor Robert Denning from Oxford University will explain how his novel holographic approach to making 3-dimensional photonics crystals could al
Computer experts at the University of Southampton have just released a new version of their hugely popular free-to-use email security system MailScanner, offering a high level of protection to companies and institutions wanting to safeguard their computer networks from viruses and the potential threat of cyberterrorism.
Developed by Julian Field of the University of Southampton’s world-renowned Department of Electronics and Computer Science, MailScanner processes over 500 million email mes
Information overload? It is becoming increasingly important for companies and developers to present complex coherences clearly and concisely. In order to structure the growing amount of information, new methods are being conceived at the man/machine interface. This is where GoVisual software, developed at the international caesar research center, comes into play. It automatically generates a clear layout for a number of different diagrams in a second; particularly for UML (Unified Modeling Language)
The way a person taps a number into a cash machine or mobile phone, could, according to scientists at the University of Southampton, be used as a means of identification, and prove useful in the battle against fraud.
Professor Neil White of the University of Southampton’s Department of Electronics and Computer Science has developed an inexpensive sensor, which can be integrated into objects of various shapes and sizes, including smart cards and hand-held devices such as mobile phones.
In the years after the American Revolution, U.S. presidents were talking about the British a lot, and then about militias, France and Spain. In the mid-19th century, words like “emancipation,” “slaves” and “rebellion” popped up in their speeches. In the early 20th century, presidents started using a lot of business-expansion words, soon to be replaced by “depression.”
A couple of decades later they spoke of atoms and communism. By the 1990s, buzzwords prevailed.
Jon Kleinberg, a p
Can sentient machines evolve?
It’s coming, but when? From Garry Kasparov to Michael Crichton, both fact and fiction are converging on a showdown between man and machine. But what does a leading artificial intelligence expert–the world’s first computer science PhD–think about the future of machine intelligence? Will computers ever gain consciousness and take over the world?
“Computer sentience is possible,” said John Holland, professor of electrical engineering an
A team of network security experts in California has determined that the computer worm that attacked and hobbled the global Internet eleven days ago was the fastest computer worm ever recorded. In a technical paper released today, the experts report that the speed and nature of the Sapphire worm (also called Slammer) represent significant and worrisome milestones in the evolution of computer worms.
Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego and its San Diego Supercompute
A simpler and more reliable manufacturing method has allowed two materials researchers to produce nanoscale magnetic sensors that could increase the storage capacity of hard disk drives by a factor of a thousand. Building on results reported last summer, the new sensors are up to 100 times more sensitive than any current alternative technology.
Susan Hua and Harsh Deep Chopra, both professors at the State University of New York at Buffalo, report in the February issue of Physical Rev
“The computing world is moving from the desktop and workstation to an arena of embedded and wearable computers,” remarked Sandeep Shukla, who recently received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help solve one of the major problems in this transition.
Shukla, who joined the Virginia Tech electrical and computer engineering faculty in August 2002, will use his Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award to devise a strategy for achieving the optimal balance
Recording and classifying the behaviour of laboratory rodents is a vital part of a wide range of studies ranging from the discovery of new drugs and detection of harmful side-effects to the biological control of agricultural pests. Until now, it has been a lengthy and painstaking task, requiring human observers to judge, count and record. But a new computerised system developed with EUREKA’s help has done away with the need for human observers, revolutionising the way labs work around the world.
Scientists at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UCSD analyzing traffic to one of the 13 Domain Name System (DNS) “root” servers at the heart of the Internet found that the server spends the majority of its time dealing with unnecessary queries. DNS root servers provide a critical link between users and the Internet’s routing infrastructure by mapping text host names to numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Researchers at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at
Video cameras are used to keep an eye on many indoor and outdoor locations, but to pinpoint suspicious activity, human security guards or intelligence analysts have the unenviable task of watching dozens of video monitors or many hours of recorded video.
Supported by an NSF award, Jezekiel Ben-Arie and his students at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a technique, much faster and more reliable than previous methods, that allows a computer to recognize a human action contai
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