Stories about: Inference

We chat with Luca Cardelli, a member of the Modula-3 design committee. Cardelli is a Principal Researcher and Head of the Programming Principles and Tools and Security groups at Microsoft Research in Cambridge,UK, and is an ACM Fellow. Here he chats to Computerworld about the origins of Modula-3, including how the most exciting Modula-3 design meeting ever, was abruptly interrupted by the San Francisco 7.1 earthquake.

Artificial intelligence promised us great technology. But has it delivered?

Web sites that automatically customize themselves for each visitor so they come across as more appealing or simply less annoying can boost sales for online businesses by close to 20 per cent, MIT research says.

Consider this: In the week following September 11, 2001, your users were glued to their television sets tracking breaking news. If an event of similar proportions happened today, they would expect the enterprise network to be able to handle not only real-time video feeds but also high-definition videoconferences and surveillance, as well as instant access to social-networking tools.

Microsoft plans to integrate F#, a functional programming language developed by the Microsoft Research group, into its Visual Studio application development platform, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog.

Power consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development investigated by some of the IT world's largest companies.

For years, the name of the game in supercomputing has been raw speed, with hardware and software designers striving to boost the number of instructions per second -- FLOPS -- that could be crunched. Gigaflops computers gave way to teraflops machines, which are now yielding to petaflops models -- those able to execute 1 quadrillion computations per second.

Considering that a high-end BRMS (Business Rule Management System) costs about US$50,000 just to get started, and that annual maintenance, runtime fees, and professional services can drive the total toward a hefty half-million or more, organizations on a tight budget have incentive to seek alternatives. Thankfully, good options exist. Two of the better low-or-no-cost tools are Jess from Sandia National Laboratories, and JBoss Rules from JBoss, a division of Red Hat.

Is an ROI metric an essential tool for project management or merely smoke and mirrors?

The missing link in data security may have four wheels and a petrol tank.

Microsoft at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) next month will discuss a variety of upcoming technologies, including Visual Basic 9.0 and the .Net Language Integrated Query Framework.