TraSer, developed by researchers in Hungary, Romania, the Netherlands and Finland, is a track-and-trace open source program that enables small companies to share commercially sensitive information and monitor the movement of materials and products from suppliers to customers. TraSer also allows companies along the supply chain to share data, instead of having the information owned or controlled by a central authority. The program creates a unique product identifier by combining a product identification code with a company Web address, which does not depend on registration with a centralized authority. “TraSer is designed as an entry-level solution platform,” says Elisabeth Ilie-Zudor, coordinator of the TraSer project and a researcher at the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. “We strove to keep it as simple as possible in operation. Still, it remains vital to understand what is actually done in a track-and-trace network to make it work.” By eliminating the need for a centralized service, the network is less vulnerable to malfunction or abuse. A TraSer network has a core of connected company servers, surrounded by an ‘envelope’ of clients. Those clients can access information from bar codes, radio frequency identification tags, or other carriers of a product’s unique identifier. TraSer also can adapt to a wide range of input types because the interface between client and server is uniform. Ilie-Zudor says that “companies need to view shared data as an investment where the creation of a better picture for everyone leads to a payback in cost reductions, better working methods, and greater coordination.”

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

ACM and its partners have launched the first-ever Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) to bring greater attention to the need to improve computer science (CS) education at the K-12 level. “The conversation about computer science education speaks directly to the issues of innovation, competitiveness, and a healthy future,” says ACM CEO John White. Computers are becoming more ingrained in everyday life, but the percentage of high schools offering rigorous computing courses fell from 40 percent to 27 percent from 2005 to 2009. Created by a U.S. House of Representatives resolution, CSEdWeek views CS education as a critical element of the national science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) movement, and not as an add-on or an optional course. Best practices for CS education are highlighted on the Web site www.csedweek.org, which serves as the central hub for CSEdWeek. The site offers computer science curriculum guides, data, research, posters, and brochures, and provides a platform for sharing ideas on improving CS education. CSEdWeek is the second week in December, and was chosen in honor of computer science pioneer Grace Murray Hopper, who was born on Dec. 9, 1906. ACM is leading the joint effort of the Computer Science Teachers Association, the Computing Research Association, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, the Anita Borg Institute, the National Science Foundation, Google, Intel, and Microsoft.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

New modeling software called Qlucore is being used by researchers at King’s College to study how genes react to toxins. The gene-modeling software can sort through thousands of entries in a spreadsheet very quickly and produce results in hours rather than days or weeks, as was the standard with earlier techniques. One gene test can generate 100,000 or more data points, but Qlucore has significantly reduced the time it takes to analyze that data. “We moved within one year from getting one gene a week to getting information on thousands of genes in a matter of hours. That put a lot of challenges to us,” says King’s College’s Thoas Fioretos, Qlucore’s developer. “If you do not have this type of software, it’s like sitting in front of an Excel spreadsheet with 6,000 pages. You cannot find patterns in that, you cannot ask if this gene is expressed with another.” Despite the success of the modeling technique, researchers say their understanding of how genes work together, or even individually, is not yet complete, says King’s College’s Stephen Sturzenbaum.

View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com