Information Technology

Engineers at Purdue University are developing a system that will enable people to search huge industry databases by sketching a part from memory, penciling in modifications to an existing part or selecting a part that has a similar shape.

“It’s like a special kind of Google that lets you search for parts based on their three-dimensional shapes,” said Karthik Ramani, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Purdue Research and Education Center for Information Systems in

One of the key challenges to managing distributed projects is to keep track of the overall project execution ensuring that all parties are kept informed when, say, one partner makes a breakthrough. This communications and coordination challenge led to GENESIS’ open source solution.

“The idea was to develop a flexible and low intrusive environment for managing the distributed teams of people working on the same project,” says Pierluigi Ritrovato, Manager of the Centre for Research in Pure a

Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference
University of Warwick, 4-7 April, 2004

Developments in snap-shot MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), organic semiconductor technology, high temperature superconductivity, and progress towards quantum computers are some of the topics being presented at a major conference organised by the Institute of Physics next month. The four-day conference, CMMP 2004, will take place from Sunday 4th to Wednesday 7th April 200

Competitiveness in the chip design and fabrication sector depends on fast turn-arounds and ever shorter concept-to-product cycles. New hardware design tools based on object-oriented methods should help shorten the design cycle.

The design gap

The complexity of recently available products, such as new 3G mobile phones, camera and PDA combos, is staggering and requires a huge design effort. “There is no doubt that electronic systems of the future are going to be very complex,”

Researchers at Wright State University have developed a prototype device to help blind individuals “see.”

Nikolaos Bourbakis, Ph.D., Ohio Board of Regents Distinguished Professor of Information Technology at Wright State’s College of Engineering and Computer Science is the principal investigator. The project is a cooperative venture with Arizona State University (ASU).

“Our object is to develop intelligent assistants that can help blind and visually impaired individuals eff

The first computing resources of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) TeraGrid became fully available for scientific use in January, and some of the first applications will be tracking the formation of galaxies in the early universe and finding the most efficient and least expensive ways to clean up groundwater pollution.

Other early TeraGrid (www.teragrid.org) users will study seismic events and analyze biomolecular dynamics on the Linux clusters at the National Center for Supercomp