U.S. President Barack Obama is expected on Monday to announce Educate to Innovate, a campaign to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to donate time and money to encourage students, particularly middle and high school students, to pursue degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Educate to Innovate will focus primarily on activities [...]

Intel is collaborating with three French research institutes to invest in an exascale research center in Europe. The new Exascale Computing Research Center would be able to perform calculations about 1,000 times faster–about 1 million trillion calculations per second–than the fastest supercomputers. Intel, which is partnering with the French Atomic Energy Commission, the Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines [...]

A consortium of 23 research and business partners, working on the European OpenTC project, have developed open source software and applications for trusted computing (TC) environments using openSUSE, a commercially available version of the Linux operating system. Building TC support in openSUSE involved compiling a trusted software stack for Linux, developing universal virtualization layers, and [...]

University of Arkansas researchers have developed a new method for preventing the cloning of passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. The method prevents the production of counterfeit tags by focusing on one or more unique physical attributes of individual tags, instead of the information stored on the tags. “It is easy to clone an RFID [...]

Recent advancements in supercomputer design coupled with falling prices are breaking down the barriers that have traditionally surrounded computing-intensive research, which could give ordinary users with a novel idea the opportunity to explore its potential using powerful computers. Ninety percent of the world’s 500 fastest computers use standard microprocessors, which enable supercomputers to be built [...]

The World Wide Web Consortium has published File API, an interface draft that Web browsers can use to better manipulate files and is part of a larger effort to provide a better foundation for interactive applications. File API defines ways browsers and Web sites can improve how they handle files, including selecting multiple files for [...]

Germany’s Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft has partnered with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to establish the first interactive digital media research institute in Asia. Fraunhofer Singapore, which will be located at NTU, will focus on promoting applied research and commercial opportunities for areas such as computer graphics, computer vision, virtual reality, and augmented reality. Researchers will work directly [...]

A new graphics processing units (GPUs) computer cluster will process CSIRO research data thousands of times faster and more efficiently than a desktop PC as a complementary system to the supercomputing resources available to CSIRO researchers. The new GPU cluster is the first of its kind in Australia, and is about the size of six [...]

BlindAid, a new device developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Touch Lab, enables visually impaired users to “feel” their way around a virtual model of a room or building, making it possible to familiarize themselves with the layout before going someplace new. Touch Lab director Mandayam Srinivasan is working with the Carroll Center for [...]

OWL 2, a new Internet language developed by an international team led by computer scientists from the University of Manchester and Oxford University, is designed to enable computers to understand and interpret the contents of its pages. “The World Wide Web as we see it today is rather like a collection of linked documents,” says [...]