Research
Exploring and Collecting History Online (Echo) is a project based at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media and is funded by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The project began in 2001 to experiment with new approaches to collecting history online, focusing specifically on the recent history of science, technology, and industry. Their goal is to realize the potential of the Internet to create a more democratic history, which "means including multiple voices and diverse perspectives in the historical record; making the historical record accessible to multiple audiences; and developing historical practices that many different people, not just 'certified' professionals, can conduct." Drawing upon "the most exacting standards and approaches of professional historians and archivist," the Research Center catalogues, annotates, and reviews online historical information which visitors can browse by topic, time period, publisher or content as well as search using online search forms. Historical practitioners interested in launching their own websites can explore the resources and featured archival projects in the Collecting Center, download free tools available in the Tools Center, browse the Practical Guide offered in the Resource Center, or contact the group to find out about free workshops and consultation services. [VF]
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~syrah/index.shtml
This website features Systems Research at Harvard University. Projects described on this website focus on distributed computing, sensor networks, file systems, and systems integration. Researchers from the System Group also develop educational resources, including a platform for teaching an Introduction to Computer Sciences course and an instructional operating system. The researchers provide overviews of their projects and related publications are available to download. Past projects include a project that explored methodologies for application-specific benchmarking and a project that proposed a framework for developing Web applications with client-side storage. [VF]
The Contextual Computing Group is a research organization at Georgia Tech College of Computing that focuses on the field of contextually-aware, wearable computing systems. The group is interested in "how the continued emergence of on-body computational resources will impact society." Topics addressed in its work include Wearable Computing, Augmented Reality, Lifelong Everyday Interfaces, Natural Gestural Interfaces, First-Person Perceptive Agents, Contextual Computing Devices, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Vision, Memory Prostheses, Embedded Computers, and Sensor Fusion. Projects related to Wearable Computing have yielded hardware products that are available to purchase. Resources that the group has found useful are available to download free of charge. [VF]
http://data.cs.washington.edu/
The University of Washington's Database Research Group “is focused on broadening the scope of database and data management techniques beyond their traditional scope.” Its work focuses on databases and the Web, XML, data management for ubiquitous computing, data integration, and data mining. For example, the Mangrove project seeks to facilitate the move to the semantic Web by creating “an environment in which users are motivated to create semantic content because of the existence of useful semantic services.” The various projects are described on this website along with related publications, which are available to download. [VF]
Zentralblatt MATH is an extensive database containing abstracts of reviewed articles in pure and applied mathematics. The database contains over two million entries drawn from more than 2,300 serials and journals. The publication dates for the articles begin in 1868 and continue into the present. The search function is flexible, allowing visitors to search the database by numerous criteria such as author, title, keyword, source, or classification code. The abstract entry includes links to abstracts of articles on related topics. Only abstracts and issue table of contents are available free of charge, and access to the full articles is only available by paid subscription. [VF]
http://www.ieor.columbia.edu/centers.html
This is the website for Columbia University’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, which is “concerned with the design, analysis, and control of production and service operations and systems.” The website describes two of the Department's research centers. The first, the Center for Applied Probability, supports interdisciplinary research on probability and its applications. The second, the Computational Optimization Research Center, specializes in "the design and implementation of state-of-the-art algorithms for the solution of large-scale optimization problems arising from a wide variety of industrial and commercial applications." Separate websites provide a description of research conducted at the Centers along with links to various publications. [VF]
The long-term goal of the Active Logic, Metacognitive Computation, and Mind project at University of Maryland, College Park, Computer Science Department is "to design and implement common sense in a computer." The website offers an explanation for what a project of this nature involves and the challenges of achieving "cognitive adequacy." A Primer section provides an introduction to active logic, which the project describes as a formal architecture that is more flexible than traditional artificial intelligence systems because it explicitly reasons in time and incorporates a history of its reasoning as it runs, making it most suitable for commonsense, real-world reasoning. Examples of logic interfaces are provided as one of the Primers. The website also discusses the project hypothesis regarding a limited and formalizable set of generic strategies of metareasoning and explain why its researchers focus on the study of conversations, particularly human-computer natural-language dialog, to better understand these metacognitive strategies. The Publications section posts forthcoming and previously published articles as well as dissertations. [VF]
http://www.eccc.uni-trier.de/eccc/
The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC), maintained by the University of Trier in Germany, offers resources on computational complexity, including research reports, surveys and books. The database includes over 700 articles and can be browsed by year or publication type. The website also provides information on how to submit articles, contribute to the discussion forum, and join the mailing list to receive periodical emails announcing new ECCC publications. The complexity scientists who collaborated to develop this resource, introduced in 1994, also offer some solutions to reducing the time between the submission of a paper and its publication as ECCC-report and still maintaining high scientific quality. They also provide some background how they are protecting copyright, guaranteeing long-term citability, safely archiving reports, and supporting communication among researchers. [VF]
