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News

  • Researcher teaches computers to detect spam more accurately

    Without spam detection many of us would spend hours managing the daily load of e-mails. Nina Balcan develops machine learning methods that could be used to develop personalized automatic programs for deciding whether an e-mail is spam or not. For her efforts, the computer scientist from the Georgia Institute of Technology has just been awarded with a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship.

  • Computer scientist predicts your next Facebook friends

    Half of the friends you will add on Facebook in the future can be predicted, said Stanford University's Jure Leskovec. He has been elected as one of this year's recipients of the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowships.

  • SETI to turn telescopes back on in coming days

    The Allen Telescope Array, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and used by the SETI Institute to search for extraterrestrial life, should be back up and running in a few days.

  • CalTech, UCSD bring photonics to silicon

    Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego have developed a silicon-based optical waveguide that could prove to be an instrumental component in building low-cost, all-optical networks in the future.

  • Microsoft debuts software for homebrew gadget builds

    Hardware hackers building their own gadgets may want to take a look at a new offering from Microsoft that promises to save time in prototyping new devices: a software development platform for home-built gadgets, called .Net Gadgeteer.

  • Researchers propose 'skinning' bridges for fault detection

    Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Potsdam in Germany have pioneered a new way to continually monitor the physical condition of bridges, aircraft, buildings and other large structures. They have produced a material, or skin, that varies its electrical charge whenever it experiences a change in pressure.

  • 'Dead media' never really die

    The history of technological media is littered with platforms we no longer use. Often called "dead media," many of them actually live on in technologies that are widely used today, and can teach us much about how to design platforms for the future, according to New York University postdoctoral researcher Finn Brunton.

  • IBM pioneers graphene-based integrated circuits

    IBM has made what it claims is the first graphene-based integrated circuit, using many of the same techniques now used to produce silicon circuits. The technique could one day be used to produce superior wireless communication devices and less-expensive displays.

  • Caltech researchers scale up DNA computing

    Researchers from the California Institute of Technology have built what they claim is the world's largest computational circuit based on DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), using a technology that they said could easily scale to even greater complexity.

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