Information Technology

To present at AAAS meeting in St. Louis

Consumers who shop online may be risking their privacy with every purchase, contends University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientist Kevin Fu. His research suggests that a confluence of factors, including the widespread use of cookies and demand for quick and easy transactions, results in Web sites that are often insecure.

“Much Web security rests on illusion and hope,” says Fu, who will discuss how Web sites leak private

The historic city of Bath in England will become the scene of a city-wide wireless computing network as part of a research project that could influence the future of mobile phone technology across the globe.

The £1.6 million Cityware project, based at the University of Bath, will turn the city centre into a ‘pervasive’ computing zone where users have access to computer services wherever they are and at all times, without disrupting Bath’s famous 18th century Georgian architec

Face recognition technology that could revolutionise security systems worldwide has been developed by computer scientists at Sheffield Hallam University. The new specialist software can produce an exact 3D image of a face within 40 milliseconds.

Other 3D systems that have been trialled have proved unworkable because of the time it takes to construct a picture and an inaccurate result.

The ground-breaking invention, by experts in the University’s Materials and Engineer

Unique views of Earth afforded by a pioneering twin ESA radar satellite flight has brought an extra dimension to maps of Canada’s newest territory, the results winning praise from the Canadian government.

Nunavut is the latest and also largest territory of Canada: located up in the frozen northeast, Nunavut has a population of only around 29 300 but an area the size of Western Europe. The Canadian government is currently refining and updating its geographic information for the

Food poisoning may become a thing of the past, if commercial kitchens link their appliances to the Internet. Unique technology developed recently in Europe for this environment also promises to reduce the risk of fire and to slash maintenance costs.

“The idea of remotely monitoring and controlling catering equipment over the Internet isn’t new,” says Stephen Read, coordinator of the IST project I’MOK. “But nobody succeeded in doing it. Our plug-and-play software and hardware is a ma

Teaching a machine to sense its environment is one of the most intractable problems of computer science, but one European project is looking to nature for help in cracking the conundrum. It combined streams of sensory data to produce an adaptive, composite impression of surroundings in near real-time.

The team brought together electronic engineers, computer scientists, neuroscientists, physicists, and biologists. It looked at basic neural models for perception and then sought t