Recently in Computing Category

Google Sets can be used to provide external contextual information to automated object identifiers.

UCSD Researchers Give Computers Common Sense

San Diego, CA, October 17, 2007 -- Using a little-known Google Labs widget, computer scientists from UC San Diego and UCLA have brought common sense to an automated image labeling system. This common sense is the ability to use context to help identify objects in photographs.

For example, if a conventional automated object identifier has labeled a person, a tennis racket, a tennis court and a lemon in a photo, the new post-processing context check will re-label the lemon as a tennis ball.
http:///www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=698

Stanford, tech giants team up to enable software for parallel computers

Stanford and many of the biggest companies in computing will announce Friday, May 2, a joint effort to address a major missed opportunity in information technology: the dearth of software that can harness the parallelism of the multiple processors that are being built into virtually every new computer. The Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL) pools the efforts of many leading Stanford computer scientists and electrical engineers with support from Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, NVIDIA, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Intel.

Until recently, computers with multiple processors were too expensive for all but specialized uses (e.g. supercomputing) where the high performance of parallel processing was deemed essential. As a consequence, few programmers have learned how to design software that exploits parallelism. The problem has caused serious concern among computer scientists that the progress of computing overall could stall.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Peer-to-Peer Virtual Worlds
A new system is designed to handle sudden crowds.
By Erica Naone
Sudden crowds are part of the Internet: a blog post gets popular, and people flood in, sometimes straining servers to the breaking point. Online virtual worlds are subject to the same phenomenon, and unlike with a blog site, visitors to virtual worlds can't be spread across different servers arbitrarily, to balance the load. Friends need to be kept together, so that they can interact. Now VastPark, an Australian company that provides foundations for virtual worlds, is planning to use new technology from National ICT Australia (NICTA), a research institute, to solve this problem.

NICTA's system incorporates peer-to-peer networks, which help reduce the load of sudden crowds by getting bandwidth and processing resources from each new user who makes a demand on the network. Santosh Kulkarni, a senior researcher in the network information processing group at NICTA, says that the peer-to-peer networks will also reduce the cost of infrastructure for companies who use it in their virtual worlds, since the system allows more users to sign up for a world, without requiring the company to support them with more servers.

Analogue Logic For Quantum Computing
ScienceDaily (Feb. 26, 2008) — Digital logic, or bits, is the only paradigm for the IT world, and up to now researchers used it almost exclusively to study quantum information processing. But European scientists, in a series of firsts, have proved that an analogue approach is far easier in the quantum world

Cloud computing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cloud computing is a computing paradigm shift in which computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual application server to a "cloud" of computers. Users of the cloud only need to be concerned with the computing service being asked for, because the underlying details of how it is achieved are hidden. This method of distributed computing is done by pooling computer resources and managing them via software (rather than by a human).
The services requested of a cloud are not limited to web applications, but may also include IT management tasks, such as requesting of systems, a software stack, or a specific web appliance.
Cloud computing simplifies IT management as well as increases efficiencies of system resources.[citation needed] IT administrators no longer need to install software and manually set up all the systems, but may instead use management software do this. Resources are used more efficiently because computers can be consolidated to achieve more tasks. This ensures that underutilized systems do not sit idle.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing