science wire

Calculating the total capacity of a data network is a notoriously difficult problem, but information theorists are beginning to make some headway. In its early years, information theory - which grew out of a landmark 1948 paper by MIT alumnus and future professor Claude Shannon - was dominated by research on error-correcting codes : How do you encode information so as to guarantee its faithful transmission, even in the presence of the corrupting influences engineers call "noise"?

$300,000 grant will support work on building new computational tools that exploit statistical inference Ryan Adams, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Ap

The University of Birmingham is one of four institutions leading on a £3.5 million supercomputing hub, which is set to power growth and innovation in the Midlands and London by opening up its vast number-crunching power to local firms.

Lev Manovich and a visiting researcher exploring a visualization of one million manga pages on HIPerSpace visualization system constructed by Gravity Lab at Calit2. Computers have changed the landscape of humanities research. Innovations continue to make it cheaper and easier to digitize and analyze ever larger volumes of data.

The decision to put Lawrence Landweber in the "Innovators" circle of the newly-created Internet Hall of Fame is not likely one that cost the nominating committee any sleep.

New phase of CERN openlab to tackle exascale IT challenges for science Geneva, 9 May 2012. The fourth phase of CERN openlab was officially launched during a meeting of its board of sponsors taking place at CERN 1 on 8 and 9 May.

Graduate student, Andrew Tinka, demonstrates the Floating Sensor Network water monitoring project in Walnut Grove, CA. Video by Roxanne Makasdjian. A fleet of 100 floating robots took a trip down the Sacramento River today (Wednesday, May 9) in a field test organized by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley.

When Cornell engineers developed a new type of robot hand that could pick up oddly shaped objects it presented a challenge: It was easy for a human operator to choose the best place to take hold of a

A team of researchers led by computer scientist Serge Belongie at the University of California, San Diego, has good news for birders: they have developed an iPad app that will identify most North American birds, with a little help from a human user.

Massive fair highlights hundreds of great ideas that emerged in courses at SEAS this year By Mureji Fatunde '12 and Caroline Perry Gye Hyun Baek '13 and Madalina Persu '13 exhibit their ES 50 project with course assistant Leonard Kogos '12, right.

University Park, Pa. Giving people the freedom - but not too much freedom - to express themselves may help designers build more interactive web portals and online communities, according to Penn State researchers.

AUSTIN, Texas — The much-anticipated University of Texas Data Repository (UTDR) named "Corral" is available to researchers at all 15 University of Texas System institutions, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin announced today.

Can a computer be taught to automatically label every song on the Internet using sets of examples provided by unpaid music fans? University of California, San Diego engineers have found that the answer is yes, and the results are as accurate as using paid music experts to provide the examples, saving considerable time and money.

: Revolutionary Technology Enables Objects To Know How They Are Being Touched-Carnegie Mellon News - Carnegie Mellon University Disney, CMU Researchers Envision 'Smart Doorknobs' and Gesture-controll

Online crowd-sourcing — in which a task is presented to the public, who respond, for free, with various solutions and suggestions — has been used to evaluate potential consumer products, develop software algorithms and solve vexing research-and-development challenges.

How antiquated is our nation's electric grid? It is so backward and inflexible that in order to integrate more sources of renewable energy, such as wind and solar, the current grid requires that we build more power plants.

A new supercomputer – faster and cleverer than all the others has been inaugurated and put to use at the Faculty of Engineering (LTH).

Savvy hackers can steal a computer's secrets by timing its data storage transactions or measuring its power use.

A groundbreaking $60 million award to the University of California, Berkeley, from the Simons Foundation will establish the campus as the worldwide center for theoretical computer science.

For generations, we have dreamed of machines with artificial intelligence with which we can have real conversations but, despite amazing technological advances, such devices seem some way off.

A pop-up exhibition and drop-in shop is to open in Coventry city centre throughout the month of May, focussing on the history of British pop music programming.

A tiny crystal that enables a computer to perform calculations that currently stump the world's most powerful supercomputers has been developed by an international team including the University of Sydney's Michael Biercuk. The ion-crystal used is poised to create one of the most powerful computers ever developed, with the results published in the journal Nature on 26 April 2012.

Scientists with federal and state agencies, academic researchers, environmental consultants, and watershed group volunteers have collected water-quality data for years as part of efforts to monitor the health of Pennsylvania's waterways.

As militaries develop autonomous robotic warriors to replace humans on the battlefield, new ethical questions emerge.

The Clean Energy Project team at Harvard University. From left to right: Roberto Olivares-Amaya, Suleyman Er, Johannes Hachmann, and Alán Aspuru-Guzik.

The paper Plenoptic Spherical Sampling has been accepted for presentation at 19th International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) The paper presents a novel sampling scheme that permits an efficient representation of the 4D light field in free space.

Computer scientist applies inspirations from biological multi-agent systems to computer and robotic systems Harvard President Drew Faust has approved Radhika Nagpal for promotion to the role of full professor with tenure at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Engineers from the University of Bristol have developed illuminating 'magic wands' that work by picking up radio signals from mobile devices.

Celebrity tweeters have taken part in a Twitter contest that seeks to help pupils hone their IT and ethical skills.

The advancement of science and technology depends upon the publication and open exchange of knowledge and materials, a backbone that has always been obligatory with regards to publicly funded research.

Cover was a man of remarkable breadth in his research interests, making landmark contributions in fields ranging from information theory and mathematical statistics to data compression, pattern recognition and stock market investment strategies.

Researchers at The Australian National University have developed the fastest random number generator in the world by listening to the 'sounds of silence'. The researchers - Professor Ping Koy Lam, Thomas Symul and Syed Assad from the ANU ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology - have tuned their very sensitive light detectors to listen to vacuum - a region of space that is empty.

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has certified Chronopolis, a large-scale data preservation network, as a "trustworthy digital repository" that meets accepted best practices in the management of digital repositories.

Cornell robotics researcher Hadas Kress-Gazit is part of a five-year, $10 million National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing project to make computer programming faster, easier and more intuitive.

Network of Spotters Tracks Suspects through Social Media in Simulated Jewel Heist in Five Cities across North America and Europe An international team of researchers, including computer scientist Man

Robot nannies could diminish child care worries for parents of young children. Equipped with alarms and monitoring capabilities to guard children from harm, a robot nanny would let parents leave youngsters at home without a babysitter. Sign us up, parents might say. Human-like robot babysitters are in the works, but it's unclear at this early stage what children's relationships with these humanoids will be like and what dangers lurk in this convenient-sounding technology.

Computing and medicine are among the many fields which could be revolutionised by a new form of ultra-small laser. The innovation was created by an international team of scientists, including David Moss , from the University of Sydney's School of Physics. Featured on the front cover of the prestigious journal Nature on 4 April, it is the first laser to be mode-locked making it highly precise, ultra-fast and ultra-small.

A Yale-led research team will spend the next five years developing a new breed of sophisticated "socially assistive" robots for helping young children learn to read, appreciate physical fitness, overcome cognitive disabilities, and perform physical exercises.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Making computer programming faster, easier and more intuitive is the goal of a new $10 million National Science Foundation project that involves a University of Michigan researcher and is based at the University of Pennsylvania.

NSF grant funds team of researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Penn to create design and print-your-own robot technology April 3, 2012 - An ambitious new project to reinvent how robots are designed and produced is being funded by a $10-million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

New algorithms could enable heaps of 'smart sand' that can assume any shape, allowing spontaneous formation of new tools or duplication of broken mechanical parts.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (04/02/2012) —A collaboration between the University of Minnesota and Ancestry.com will create the largest database of detailed information about people and their households ever made available for scientific research.

The University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University are taking part in an ambitious new project, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to reinvent how robots are designed and produced.

As scientists around the world address some of society's biggest challenges, they increasingly rely on tools ranging from powerful supercomputers to one-of-a-kind experimental facilities to dedicated high-bandwidth research networks.

University researchers have helped use supercomputers to shed light on the behaviour of key sub-atomic particles. The development could help explain why there is almost no anti-matter in the universe. Scientists including physicists from the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton have reported a landmark calculation of the decay of an elementary particle called a kaon, using breakthrough techniques on some of the world's fastest supercomputers.

The quest to capture the massive amounts of data being produced in our world - and in so doing unveil answers to some of society's most vexing problems - has gotten a $10 million boost from a National Science Foundation award to the University of California, Berkeley.

The University of Pennsylvania will lead a $10 Million National Science Foundation project to make computer programming faster, easier and more intuitive.

(L-R) UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering professors David Kriegman, computer science and engineering; Rene Cruz, electrical and computer engineering; Sujit Dey, electrical and computer enginee

The first stars in the universe were massive and burned intensely bright before they died in supernova explosions. (Photo: Courtesy of KIPAC) Dramatic 3-D videos, created from actual data, show the origins of the universe. Now playing on screens at SLAC, as well as museums in San Francisco and New York.