Software developers and tech-savvy individuals from around the world are organizing to help with the Haiti relief effort. For example, Noel Dickover co-founded CrisisCommons to provide non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and others in Haiti with better information and situational awareness. “If we can improve situational awareness and information sharing, we can help NGOs have better performance [...]

Researchers are developing technology that would enable people to control electronic devices using only their thoughts. The technology uses software that can analyze and interpret patterns in the brain’s electrical activity when people think about specific words or actions. “If we could access the global information network simply by using the power of our thoughts, [...]

The Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing has received a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue its Georgia Computes! program, which promotes computer science to both students and teachers across the state. The program’s initiatives include encouraging women, minorities, and people with disabilities to participate in computer science programs, doubling [...]

The National Science Foundation has awarded $2.5 million to the Georgia Tech College of Computing to implement Operation Reboot, a three-year program that will train 30 unemployed information technology (IT) workers to work as high school computing teachers. Current computing teachers will work with IT workers for one year, sharing their classroom responsibilities and training [...]

The recent ACM SIGGRAPH conference offered a video demonstration of Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces (CRISTAL), a multitouch tabletop display that acts as a universal remote. Australian researcher Christian Muller-Tomfelde, who is currently writing a book on research in tabletop displays, says CRISTAL is easy to use. “It is [...]

Raytheon recently presented an open source computer simulation and modeling program designed to improve science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education to the nonprofit Business-Higher Education Forum. The Raytheon model uses more than 200 variables to assess the effectiveness of policies and programs to encourage students to pursue STEM paths. “Our country is founded on [...]

A recent ACM study concluded that there is still a major gap between how teenage girls and boys view computers and careers in computer science. The nationwide ACM survey of college-bound high school students age 13 to 17 found that 45 percent of boys thought majoring in computer science would be “very good” while only [...]

A three-year project is exploring how people react and behave when information on their energy use and activity levels are presented to them through mobile phones, energy meters, and online social networks. Previous research found that the way people are told about poor lifestyle choices can influence how they react and respond. Instead of simply [...]

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton says that technology companies can play a significant role in solving the world’s most difficult challenges if they apply their innovative thinking to problems such as climate change and healthcare. Clinton says the technology community is well-suited to addressing questions about climate change, hunger, AIDS, and other problems. Technology groups [...]

Technology companies say that a consensus on technical standards is the key to the successful commercialization of the Internet of Things (IoT), a next-generation Web in which billions of digital-enabled objects are networked. “If you think about connecting billions or trillions of objects together on the Internet, you really need to have the right standards,” [...]