Dell and Apple are phasing out PCMCIA card slots (sometimes called PC cards, or cardbus cards) in favour a new format that is not backwards-compatible. Whilst most modern laptops feature the sort of things that you once needed to buy cards for (eg: modems, firewire interfaces, etc). there are quite a few people continuing to…
KMi is hosting the 9th Computational Linguistics UK Research Colloquium (CLUK 06). It is being attended by 40 delegates: Research Students from UK universities and senior academics in the field. Anne De Roeck gave an invited talk on Wednesday 9th and Jon Oberlander on Thursday the 9th March. Dileep Damle and Gaston Burek of KMi…
A flock of pigeons fitted with mobile phone backpacks is to be used to monitor air pollution, New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday. The 20 pigeons will be released into the skies over San Jose, California, in August. Each bird will carry a GPS satellite tracking receiver, air pollution sensors and a basic mobile phone….
Nearly half of those affected in America's gulf coast region by last year's devastating hurricane “Katrina” turned to the Internet to make their claims for financial help. At a conference in Las Vegas, a senior executive from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose local director quit soon after the hurricane hit, said 45% of…
Nearly half of those affected in America's gulf coast region by last year's devastating hurricane “Katrina” turned to the Internet to make their claims for financial help. At a conference in Las Vegas, a senior executive from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose local director quit soon after the hurricane hit, said 45% of…
The development of a new thin and flexible battery by NEC, based on an organic gel like compound, has great potential for making active RFID tags more viable. Most RFID tags are passive, and are powered by the radio signal transmitted by the reader. This means that read ranges are very limited and for any…
KMi's “Instant Messenger with maps and attitude”, BuddySpace, was made available in version 2.6 today. The latest version, which includes Chris Denham's extensions to Jiri Komzak's core client, boasts three main extensions: 1. Simlink, a tool that allows creation of 'shared plugins' for use in group chat, yielding in effect 'bandwidth-friendly screen-sharing'. 2. BuddyFinder, a…
Seen as the best attempt yet at bridging the “digital divide” is a laptop set to cost just $100 each. Currently only at the prototype stage, the first production units, which use Flash RAM instead of a hard disk and a different kind of display technology to lower power consumption, will hopefully become available in…
London saw a gathering of the world's freenetworkers, open source gurus and civic society thinkers for a week of discussion about free information infrastructures this week, culminating in a weekend conference. Mark Gaved attended the weekend events on behalf of KMi and his PhD research into the grassroots networking community. Many of the world's key…
Our latest member of staff, Dr Dawei Song, has joined KMi as a Senior Lecturer on September 12th, 2005. Dr Song's research interests include information retrieval, text and data mining, applied logic, and the applications of these techniques to organizational knowledge discovery and management. The appointment of Dr Song takes place in the context of…
