Information Technology

Mobile phones could one day have the memory capacity of a desktop computer thanks to a microchip that mimics the functioning of the brain, scientists report today (9 September) in the journal Science.

Researchers from Imperial College London, Durham University and the University of Sheffield say their new computer chip design will enable large amounts of data to be stored in small volumes by using a complex interconnected network of nanowires, with computing functions and decisions

Concerns over the privacy of patients could be hampering efforts to spot disease clusters and monitor the health effects of environmental pollution, according to researchers in the latest edition of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

Data made available to research groups investigating everything from cancer clusters to the risk of living near to hazardous waste sites is often restricted, altered or aggregated in order to protect the identity of individual patients.

eDevice of France has developed IDeMS, a completely new gateway for M2M fleet management that is accessible via a standard internet browser. It uses eDevice M2M modules to manage a fleet of systems connected via TCP/IP. IDeMS (Intelligent Device Management System) network and fleet-management services provide an immediately operational turnkey solution to maintain, supervise and run a complete M2M fleet.

The IDeMS fleet-management service can be used to recover, consolidate, archive and

EXPWAY of France has launched FastEPG™ v1.5, an enhanced multi-media Electronic Program Guide (EPG). It is an application that can be used with digital video recorders, set-top boxes, and the latest TV sets. Viewers can use EPG to find, book, view and review content; it will also be an essential differentiator element for operators, helping them to strengthen their brand. EXPWAY will be showcasing its technology at the IBC trade show in Amsterdam in early September 2005.

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The vision of global applications is a step closer with the development of tools to create software that can work on any device.

The DEGAS project initially defined the key elements of a software program that are common to all devices, like security, and then separated those device-specific functions.

“Essentially, we wanted to address the problem caused by heterogeneous networks, because currently content and software cannot be used on any device or operating system,”

Cornell University and Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences.

The development — which has a patent pending — has implications for