Information Technology

Managing large software development projects using existing management tools can be a little imprecise. An altogether softer approach has been developed as a commercial tool, enabling project managers to get inside the development process and optimise resources. The drawback with conventional software project management tools is that they are unforgiving. There isn’t a means of ascribing levels of confidence or uncertainty and, as a consequence, the resulting answers may or may not be believable. T

Dutch researcher Mirela Tanase has developed a new technique for finding images using search engines. Her technique is based on how the human eye recognises objects. It can increase the success rate of certain search operations for objects from 10 to 70 percent.

Tanase developed two methods for decomposing objects into parts, which are then used to search for similar objects. The first method decomposes the interior of the shape. Humans find this task easy, but a computer often

Many activities in our daily lives use products and devices based on silicon chips – from computers and televisions to medical equipment and defense systems. As these products and applications become increasingly complex and miniature, so must the chips.

Chips are manufactured on a silicon wafer. Each chip is surrounded by electrical contacts (‘plots’) through which data enters and exits. The plots are connected to each other through extremely fine wires. In 1994 the distance be

Today, the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG) project announced that the computing Grid it is operating now includes more than 100 sites in 31 countries. This makes it the world’s largest international scientific Grid. This Grid is being established in order to deal with the anticipated huge computing needs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently being built at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

The sites participating in the LCG project are primarily universities and r

UK experts develop super-realistic animation system

Computing experts at Cardiff University, UK, are developing a super-realistic animation system that simulates the movements of a face, based on speech. The team in the School of Computer Science has developed highly advanced software which is continually learning the facial dynamics associated with a speaker and applying this knowledge to synthesize realistic facial animations.

“Our aim is to create sophisticated facial a

A new method for navigation at sea, independent of GPS, is being put forward in a dissertation from Linköping University.

Today merchant marine, military, and recreational boat traffic all rely on the global satellite system GPS to determine their position at sea. But sometimes information from the system is incorrect. Poor visibility or lax attention can then spell disaster.

GPS can be jammed, either unintentionally or intentionally. Signals from the satellites can