08/04/2010 - Every day—every minute, every second—the world’s computers are amassing visual information at an extraordinary rate. Aspiring Tarantinos are sending their two-minute videos to Youtube in the hopes of going viral. Mom and Dad are uploading their Napa Valley vacation photos to Flickr. Doctors are sending patient MRIs to medical databases, and satellites are scanning the earth for evidence of sinister activity. Read more
10/16/2009 - With so much information being shared online these days, it’s critical that much of it remains private and anonymous. We trust, for example, that social networking sites such as Facebook remove personally identifiable information when they share our preferences and desires with advertisers. Read more
10/16/2009 - As information such as passwords and account numbers moves from computer to computer across the Internet, it is encrypted—jumbled into a non-comprehensible form. Encryption occurs when two parties—your personal computer and Amazon.com, for example—connect and exchange a “key.” Your browser then encrypts the information you want to send (like a credit card number), it flows in a jumble to Amazon, and then Amazon decrypts it based on the key that the two computers exchanged. Read more
07/03/2009 - Texas Computer Science students are programming robots to play soccer... and winning. Current robots are only 2-feet high, but the goal is to develop robotic players large and skillful enough to beat a real-live World Cup team by 2050. Read more
Subscribe to Topic: Innovation Series