New Scientist (05/10/10) Thomson, Rebecca
Web Science: Exploring the Network Without Guesswork. Shadbolt will co-direct, with Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a new Institute of Web Science at Southampton in collaboration with the University of Oxford. Web science needs researchers from a wide range of backgrounds to assess the technical, social, legal, and political forces that [...]
New Scientist (05/04/10) Marks, Paul
University of Manchester computer scientist Steve Furber wants to build a silicon-based brain that contains one billion neurons. “We’re using bog-standard, off-the-shelf processors of fairly modest performance,” Furber says. The silicon brain, called Spiking Neural Network Architecture (Spinnaker), is based on a processor Furber helped design in 1987. Spinnaker’s chips contain [...]
MIT News (04/28/10) Hardesty, Larry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Alexey Radul is developing a conceptual framework for computing that could impact artificial intelligence research, parallel computing, and the design of computer hardware. In Radul’s system, multiple logic circuits and memory cells are arranged in a large network. Any logic circuit can exchange data with different [...]
(04/23/10) Lomas, Natasha
Robert Harle, assistant director of research at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, says the closed philosophy of devices such as the iPhone discourages the kind of tinkering that encouraged generations of computer scientists in the past. “People can use their iPhone…but they don’t want to delve into it, they don’t want to [...]
Technology Review (04/21/10) Naone, Erica
In a test of Google’s privacy protections, European researchers were able to hijack Google’s personalized search suggestions to reconstruct users’ Web search histories. “The goal of this project was to show that personalized services are very dangerous in terms of privacy because they can leak information,” says Claude Casteluccia, a senior [...]
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