http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2003/tech_paper_alpha.html

The fifteenth annual Supercomputing Conference (SC2003) is taking place between November 15th and 21st. This page of the conference's website contains about 200 research papers and technical reports that are being presented at the event. Written by experts from academia, corporate research laboratories, and government institutions, the papers offer a glimpse into current and future innovations. Supercomputer applications, networking optimizations, and parallel architectures are just a sampling of the many themes represented in the documents. Other areas of the conference homepage describe awards, industry efforts and challenges, and related events. [CL]

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ahri/

The Aware Home Research Initiative (AHRI) is a project at the Georgia Institute of Technology that seeks to "create a home environment that is aware of its occupants' whereabouts and activities." One of the main focuses of AHRI is the design of specialized technologies to assist older adults or help keep them in closer contact with relatives. This site describes the motivation for the initiative and outlines the goals of intelligent, context-aware systems. A large collection of research papers is presented, highlighting AHRI insights into privacy issues, design challenges, and software engineering for such technology. [CL]

http://nanoweb.mit.edu/annual-report03/index.html

The NanoStructures Laboratory (NSL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology "develops techniques for fabricating surface structures with feature sizes in the range from nanometers to micrometers, and uses these structures in a variety of research projects." This annual report describes many of the research projects undertaken at the lab in 2003. It is composed of nearly 30 short summaries of work in areas such as self-organizing systems, magnetic random access memories, and many forms of lithography and nanofabrication. Unfortunately, links to the homepages of project staff are not given in the report or on the main page of the NSL website, but they can easily be found with a quick search of the main MIT directory. [CL]

1. Welcome to IBPvo
http://promise.sinrg.cs.utk.edu/ibpvo/login.html
2. Logistical Networking for Digital Video on Internet2 [pdf]
http://loci.cs.utk.edu/ibp/files/IBPvo_final1.pdf

Researchers at the University of Tennessee have developed "an Internet2-enabled personal video recorder (PVR) service" that is freely available at the first site. The service is based upon Logistical Networking, which is a new kind of data management that transfers and stores data through a distributed network environment. Users can download the software and register for free; however, only users connected to the Internet2 backbone will be able to use the service. The second online resource provides a detailed explanation of how the technology works and how it can be used. It illustrates the network operations that allow a user to program her or his computer to record a television show and then view it at any time from any Internet-connected computer. [CL]

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/Security/seminars/economics/

A biweekly seminar series on Economics, Networks, and Security is being held at the University of Cambridge during fall 2003. This website maintains abstracts of the speakers' presentations and research papers about their topics of discussion. Of the five seminars scheduled, papers for three have been posted online and the remaining two will likely be available in the near future. The first paper outlines the concept of trusted computing and discusses the implications for public policy. The second paper is based on economical aspects of intellectual property, but a less technical resource is also given and is titled Digital Goods in the New Economy. Lastly, the facets of e-commerce and its relation to security is the basis for the third paper. [CL]

http://www.cae.wisc.edu/~canoe/

This website is the online home of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Concrete Canoe Team, which placed first in the 2003 National Concrete Canoe Championships. The site provides a step-by-step look at the planning, design, and construction of the winning canoe. Short descriptions and pictures of the cross section cutting, mold construction, and concrete pouring are given, as well as photo galleries of past championships. For a more technical insight into the process of creating a concrete canoe, visitors can view the design reports of the top five teams from 2000 to 2003. While illustrating the complex analyses that were performed, the papers also convey the creativity and occasional brashness held by each team. [CL]

http://avocet.cs.umanitoba.ca/publications/pdf/baltes03_learn_orien_infor_robot_soccer.pdf

Many robotic soccer events are held internationally each year as an assessment of the growth and advancement of the robotics industry. This paper points out that current practices in robotic soccer involve using "a set of pre-determined markers (e.g., a group of small colored circles mounted on the top surface of the robot) to provide easy targets for visual analysis in order to determine the team membership, identity, and orientation of robots in the visual field." Since lighting variations can easily confuse robots' vision systems, the authors propose using a neural net-based vision system to analyze the position and movements of other robots for more effective real-time visual tracking. This would eliminate the need for special markers. Using a back propagation algorithm to implement the neural network, the authors report on the ability of the system to learn and generalize to untrained patterns. The accuracy of the vision system is evaluated and shown to be promising for future work. [CL]