http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/center/index.html

Carnegie Mellon University's Privacy Technology Center was established to create "technologies and related policies with provable guarantees of privacy protection while allowing society to collect and share person-specific information for many worthy purposes." Besides making many of the center's publications available for download, this Web site provides a general discussion of the issues surrounding data privacy. The online introduction defines many common terms and relates privacy to computer science. Some of the center's research thrusts include positioning technology, human recognition, and ubiquitous video and data sharing. [CL]

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/

In an effort to create and archive three dimensional computer representations of some of history's most important cultural artifacts, researchers from Stanford University and the University of Washington have employed laser rangefinder technologies to scan items and preserve them digitally. The project has mainly focused on some of Michelangelo's sculptures, including the famous David statue, but has also "scanned 1,163 fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant marble map of ancient Rome." Visitors to the project's homepage can download the ScanView software, which lets users virtually fly around the models of the statues. Research papers about the technologies used in the project and the algorithms developed by its members are also available. [CL]

http://www.medialabeurope.org/research/anthropos/publications/pubs/DIW03-LanguageOfMachines.pdf

The European branch of MIT's Media Lab hosts this paper that describes a system for speech-based human-machine interaction. The authors outline an approach to efficient "social interaction between man and socially capable machines, particularly with regards to a communication language suitable for both machines and people to support communication in the new, shared human-machine environment." Based upon this approach, an Agent Communication Language was developed and implemented in Joe, the social robot of Media Lab Europe. When combined with speech recognition technology, the robot is able to successfully interpret and respond to a human despite having a limited vocabulary. [CL]

http://fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/fire03/PDF/f03006.pdf

The Next Generation Fire Suppression Technology Program (NGP) was initiated in 1997 and this paper presents the progress and results of its sixth year of research. The goal of the NGP is "to develop and demonstrate technology for economically feasible, environmentally acceptable and user-safe processes, techniques, and fluids" with a focus on military aircraft, land vehicles, and ships. Since the main fire suppression system used by the U.S. military is halon 1301, which has been phased out and replaced in many commercial operations, the paper states that continued research in this area is justified. Various chemical compounds used in NGP research are discussed and compared in this paper, as well as delivery methods and technology viability. [CL]

http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~ains/rubin/papers/04_0692.pdf

Wireless communications between a mobile node and a fixed base station are adversely affected when the node moves out of range of the base station or into an area where direct transmission is fully or partially blocked; but what if the base station was also mobile? This is the question posed by two researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles. Their solution involves positioning unmanned ground or airborne vehicles in locations that maximize coverage and network connectivity. This paper formulates the Mobile Backbone Network and its underlying protocol, and shows simulation results for the system. [CL]

http://www.pmg.lcs.mit.edu/~rodrigo/robust-agenda.pdf

One of the biggest problems facing modern scientific computing is data storage; large-scale experiments can generate unbelievable amounts of data in a very short time, and it is necessary to find some place to store it for subsequent analysis. This paper "proposes a novel decentralized infrastructure based on distributed hash tables (...) that will enable a new generation of large-scale distributed applications." The author notes the characteristics of peer-to-peer networks for managing large data sets across a distributed environment, and discusses the implementation concerns associated with locating objects within the system. [CL]

ftp://ftp.dcs.shef.ac.uk/home/sjr/pubs/2003/msdr03.pdf

This interesting paper outlines a framework for automatic summarization of voicemail messages and delivery as compact text messages. The proposed system, developed at the University of Sheffield, incorporates speech recognition technology and summary word extraction. An overview of the feature selection process is especially interesting, as it briefly describes how pitch, word duration, and pauses in the voicemail message are used to obtain a compressed subset of the most important features. A number of experiments were performed to determine the system's accuracy and usability, and the results are presented in the paper. [CL]

http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~edemaine/papers/Tetris_COCOON2003/

Although the Tetris video game may not seem like a normal topic of study for three MIT researchers, it served as the basis for an interesting paper that the group submitted to two conferences, as well as attracting the attention of news publications like Science News and Scientific American. The paper, which mathematically proves the computational complexity of the game, can be downloaded from this Web site. The authors used over 50 pages, including appendices, to formulate the problem and derive several necessary theorems. Links to the online news articles that discuss this unusual work are also provided on this site. [CL]