Designers on Quest to Build $12 Computer

A group of computer designers at MIT’s International Development Design Summit are trying to develop a $12 computer. Derek Lomas is basing the computer on a device he saw people using in Bangalore, India, in which a cheap keyboard was combined with a Nintendo-like device and connected to a home TV. Lomas and others at [...]

Seven “Grand Challenges” Face IT in Next Quarter-Century

Gartner has identified seven technologies that will “completely transform” the business world over the next 25 years. The technologies include parallel programming, wireless power sources for mobile devices, automated speech translation, and computing interfaces that detect human gestures. “Many of the emerging technologies that will be entering the market in 2033 are already known in [...]

Industry Giants Try to Break Computing’s Dead End

 
Intel and Microsoft yesterday announced that they will provide $20 million over five years to two groups of university researchers that will work to design a new generation of computing systems. The goal is to prevent the industry from coming to a dead end that would halt decades of performance increases in computers. The researchers’ [...]

MIT Names Its Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2008

Graphene sheets are not entirely flat, © A Geim, U. Manchester
Graphene transistors will be one of the top emerging technologies of 2008, according to researchers at MIT. Microchips built with graphene have the potential to work faster than silicon-based circuits, produce less heat, and conduct it away more rapidly. The MIT researchers are high on [...]

New Super-Efficient Chip Could Run on Body Heat

MIT researchers, working with researchers at Texas Instruments, have developed a chip that uses 70 percent less voltage than current chip technologies, which could lead to an order-of-magnitude increase in energy efficiency for electronics in the next five years. “It will extend the battery lifetime of portable devices in areas like medical electronics,” says MIT [...]

Wireless Bridge Sensors Without Batteries

Wireless monitoring of civil engineering structures such as bridges and overpasses has gained a lot of interest in the recent years. Bridge collapses happen suddenly and unpredictably and often lead to tragic loss of human lives. Many will remain in service for many years, they need monitoring and rehabilitation.
Wireless battery-powered sensors that monitor bridges and report [...]

Intelligent Clothing

Virginia Tech professors Tom Martin and Mark Jones have spent the past six years developing electronic textiles and clothing with embedded wires and sensors. One such piece of clothing is a suit that can monitor the movement of the person wearing it, including whether the person is walking, running, standing, or sitting. “One student could [...]

Technology Could Enable Computers to ‘Read the Minds’ of Users

Computers capable of responding to users’ emotional states could be facilitated by methods developed by Tufts University researchers through the novel application of non-invasive and easily portable imaging technology. “Measuring mental workload, frustration and distraction is typically limited to qualitatively observing computer users or to administering surveys after completion of a task, potentially missing valuable [...]

The Future of Computing, According to Intel

Although Intel recently demonstrated a low-power, eight-core chip, Intel Research director Andrew Chien is already looking beyond eight-core processing to terascale computing, and is working with computer scientists at Intel and universities around the world to find the best uses for these machines. Some of the major projects at Intel include the idea of inference [...]

‘Pulp-Based Computing’ Makes Normal Paper Smart

MIT researchers are developing technology that could be used to make paper embedded with wires, sensors, and computer chips, creating “pulp-based” computing. MIT researchers, working with colleagues at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, are blending traditional paper-making techniques with electronic components. MIT researcher Marcelo Coelho says paper-making is an ancient process, but the ability to [...]

‘Smart Homes’ Could Track Your Electrical Noise

Instead of a house embedded with sensors, smart homes of the future may track a homeowner’s movements by monitoring the electrical noise made by different devices throughout the house as they are turned on and off. “The problem I see with a lot of ubiquitous computing research is that it requires the creation of new [...]

A Supercomputer for the Rest of Us

University of Maryland researchers have built a prototype of a desktop supercomputer, and now plan to shrink the license-plate-size board running at 75 MHz to a version that is about the size of a fingernail and runs between 1 GHz and 2 GHz. The Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) computer makes use of parallel computing algorithms and [...]

Sensor Rise Powers Life Recorders

Hewlett-Packard’s Trusted Systems Lab director Martin Sadler predicts that by 2057 there could be at least 1 million devices for every resident in the United Kingdom, and that a person’s entire life could be recorded on a network of intelligent sensors. However, Sadler warns that such massive amounts of collectable personal data could lead to [...]

Networking the Hudson River

IBM and the Beacon Institute will work with several other research institutions to develop an environmental-monitoring system for all 315 miles of the Hudson River. The project entails deploying a network of sensors that will collect biological, physical, and chemical information and transmitting it to a central location. Some sensors will be suspended from buoys [...]

Point, Click … Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates

Documents recently declassified under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the FBI has constructed a point-and-click surveillance system capable of instantaneously tapping into almost any communications device. The Digital Collection System Network (DCSNet) links FBI wiretapping stations to switches run by landline operators, Internet-telephony providers, and cellular companies. The system consists of software that [...]