Internet2 has named Randy Frank as CTO, a job in which he'll help oversee the overall technology direction for the advanced networking consortium. Read more
Can't say we were familiar with this Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, but Ray Tomlinson gets to add it to his collection in honor of his creation of the first email system back in 1971. His other awards over the years have included the American Computer Museum's George R. Read more
The University of Delaware is seeking to grow the base of 6,000 volunteers worldwide who contribute CPU cycles to the Docking@Home project, which uses that computing power in an effort to fuel biomedical research in a less expensive way than could be done on a supercomputer. Read more
Every so often an acroynm comes along that just can't do the words behind it justice. Take Carnegie Mellon's new mineral-inspired acro Jadeite, one of two new tools designed to make Java programming easier (the other is dubbed Apatite). The gist of the tools is that they help developers more easily pinpoint APIs from the thousands of options at their disposal. Read more
Here's a summary of a brief email interview I conducted with Abhishek Chandra, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a program committee member/speaker for the HotCloud workshop taking place in San Diego next week (yesterday I took a spin through some of the interesting papers being presented there):
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Next week's HotCloud conference on cloud computing in San Diego will boast a slew of fresh research into this hottest of IT topics. Here's a glimpse at the work to be showcased at the event (PDFs of some research papers will not be available until the week of June 15 at the HotCloud site ):
Nebulas
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UC Berkeley researchers have updated their Opinion Space website for visualizing viewpoints on political, legal and other matters. Their latest question:
Legalization of Marijuana:
State budgets recently have been dramatically reduced. Some argue that now is the time to legalize marijuana and collect the tax benefits. Do you think legalizing marijuana is a good idea? What arguments or personal experiences inform your opinion?
You can join the discussion here .
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Georgia Tech researchers are looking to cut by up to 15% the
amount of electricity needed to cool data centers that are becoming
increasingly jammed with servers and other network gear boasting more powerful
processors.
I couldn't justify the time it would take to plow through all of the hundreds of words used in this week's Scripps National Spelling Bee to find out if any IT-related words made it in, but I did go through the words from the final 10 rounds and browsed the rest. I didn't find a lot, surprisingly (I'd figure tech would be a good place from which to find tricky words), but here's what I did find:
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A Kaiser Permanente Division of Research study has found that an e-mail intervention program ("good spam"?) can encourage people to eat healthier and become more physically active.
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In a blog post on Arbor Networks' Security to the Core site you can really see what a fail whale is (fail whale being the phrase commonly used to refer to Twitter outages, but on Thursday used to describe Google's outage). This graphic from Arbor's security research team shows average traffic on tier 1/2 ISPs in North America Wednesday morning and does indeed look like a whale.
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The National Science Foundation is looking to spend a good chunk of its proposed $7.045 billion budget for FY 2010 on advanced network technologies.
The overall budget would be an 8.5% increase over FY 2009's and would include $1.1 billion on Networking and Information Technology R&D, or NITRD in NSF-speak. NITRD coordinates network and IT investments across agencies, its proposed portion of the budget would represent a 10.6% increase vs. what it is in FY 2009.
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PC Pro reports on a recent Microsoft Research demo of Wayve, a digital picture frame-looking touchscreen device that can be stuck to a refrigerator via a magnetic backing and that can be used to communicate via email with other Wayves in other homes or offices. Wayve is also the name of a company in the U.K. being funded by Microsoft Research to sell the product.
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Ksplice, a Cambridge, Mass.,
startup whose software is designed to help computer users keep their operating systems
secure and updated without the hassle of frequent rebooting, has been named one
of six finalists in the annual MIT $100K Enterpreneurship Competition.
The company, launched last year by four MIT alumni, is the Read more
Web/IT category winner and will duke it out with five other category winners
for the overall prize to be announced on May 13.
Researchers from Toshiba and Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory are reporting a breakthrough they say could make quantum cryptography a reality in the near-term. The researchers outline their work in a paper called "Practical gigahertz quantum key distribution based on avalanche photodiodes" that's included in the April edition of the New Journal of Physics.
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University of Maryland researchers this past weekend showed off a new application, dubbed V911, designed to help cell phone and PDA users contact campus police at the push of a button and even stream GPS-enhanced video to them.
The new emergency alert technology is part of package of downloadable software that makes up the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies' MyeVyu project.
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University of Rhode Island researchers have created algorithms they say can detect subtle manipulations of online rating systems such as those used by eBay and Amazon.
“These reputation rating systems are used every day and they are Read more
highly valuable,” said Yan Sun, assistant professor of computer
engineering at URI, in a statement. “Our algorithm is designed to improve the quality
of the information in the rating systems to make them more reliable.”
Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have joined commercial USB-based ultrasound probes with smartphones to create portable devices that could play a key medical role in remote areas of the developing world as well as in the military field. The devices could be used to scan everthing from kidneys to prostates.
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Microsoft and University of California, San Diego researchers have developed a device they say can save on energy costs by enabling end users to put their computers into a "sleep talking" mode that falls somewhere in between awake and sleep modes. They say it could save 60% to 80% on energy usage.
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