The Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at California Institute of Technology publishes its technical reports electronically. CACR is concerned with "the practice of computer-based modeling for the study of scientific phenomena and engineering designs, and typically involves a multidisciplinary investigation of interactions among the application, solution algorithms, computer...

Mendeley is a research management tool for the desktop and the web, and it's an easy way to organize, share, and discover new and compelling research papers. Mendeley helps users automatically generate bibliographies, import papers from other research software, and also access papers of note from anywhere online. The program is fully integrated with use with Microsoft Word, Open Office, and other...

In the April-June 2002 special issue of the IEEE Pervasive Computing journal, a team from Carnegie Mellon University contributed with a discussion of their Project Aura. The project's goal is to increase computing efficiency, particularly in wireless environments, so that "distractions such as poor performance and failures" are minimized. With greater system reliability and fewer distractions,...

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...

Appearing in the August 2002 issue of IEEE Spectrum, this article considers the potential advantages of adding processing power to computer hard drives. By shifting the burden of such common tasks "as searching and encryption" from the CPU to the hard drive, the author argues that significant performance improvements would be realized. Using a hard drive for more than just data storage would...