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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Computer


A computer is a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions - a program.

Computers can be extremely versatile.

In fact, they are universal information processing machines.

Originally, the term "computer" referred to a person who performed numerical calculations under the direction of a mathematician..

For more information about the topic Computer, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics and computational biology involve the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, chemistry and biochemistry to solve biological problems usually on the molecular level.

Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology.

Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution..

For more information about the topic Bioinformatics, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Quantum entanglement

Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated.

This leads to correlations between observable physical properties of the systems.

For example, it is possible to prepare two particles in a single quantum state such that when one is observed to be spin-up, the other one will always be observed to be spin-down and vice versa, this despite the fact that it is impossible to predict, according to quantum mechanics, which set of measurements will be observed.

As a result, measurements performed on one system seem to be instantaneously influencing other systems entangled with it.

But quantum entanglement does not enable the transmission of classical information faster than the speed of light. Quantum entanglement has applications in the emerging technologies of quantum computing and quantum cryptography, and has been used to realize quantum teleportation experimentally.

At the same time, it prompts some of the more philosophically oriented discussions concerning quantum theory.

The correlations predicted by quantum mechanics, and observed in experiment, reject the principle of local realism, which is that information about the state of a system should only be mediated by interactions in its immediate surroundings.

Different views of what is actually occurring in the process of quantum entanglement can be related to different interpretations of quantum mechanics..

For more information about the topic Quantum entanglement, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Security engineering

Security engineering is the field of engineering dealing with the security and integrity of real-world systems.

It is similar to systems engineering in that its motivation is to make a system meet requirements, but with the added dimension of enforcing a security policy.

It has existed as an informal field for centuries, in the fields of locksmithing and security printing. Technological advances, principally in the field of computers, have now allowed the creation of far more complex systems, with new and complex security problems.

Because modern systems cut across many areas of human endeavor, security engineers not only need consider the mathematical and physical properties of systems; they also need to consider attacks on the people who use and form parts of those systems using social engineering attacks.

Secure systems have to resist not only technical attacks, but also coercion, fraud, and deception by confidence tricksters. For this reason it involves aspects of social science, psychology and economics, as well as physics, chemistry and mathematics.

Some of the techniques used, such as fault tree analysis, are derived from safety engineering..

For more information about the topic Security engineering, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Robotic surgery

Robotic surgery is the use of robots in performing surgery.

Three major advances aided by surgical robots have been remote surgery, minimally invasive surgery, and unmanned surgery.

Major potential advantages of robotic surgery are precision and miniaturization.

Further advantages are articulation beyond normal manipulation and three-dimensional magnification.

Some surgical robots are autonomous, and they are not always under the control of a surgeon.

They are only sometimes used as tools to extend the surgical skills of a trained surgeon..

For more information about the topic Robotic surgery, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Quantum computer


A quantum computer is any device for computation that makes direct use of distinctively quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data.

In a classical (or conventional) computer, information is stored as bits; in a quantum computer, it is stored as qubits (quantum bits).

The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties can be used to represent and structure data, and that quantum mechanisms can be devised and built to perform operations with this data. Although quantum computing is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits.

Research in both theoretical and practical areas continues at a frantic pace, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis. If large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems exponentially faster than any of our current classical computers (for example Shor's algorithm).

Quantum computers are different from other computers such as DNA computers and traditional computers based on transistors.

Some computing architectures such as optical computers may use classical superposition of electromagnetic waves, but without some specifically quantum mechanical resources such as entanglement, they have less potential for computational speed-up than quantum computers. The power of quantum computers Integer factorization is believed to be computationally infeasible with an ordinary computer for large integers that are the product of only a few prime numbers (e.g., products of two 300-digit primes).

By comparison, a quantum computer could solve this problem more efficiently than a classical computer using Shor's algorithm to find its factors.

This ability would allow a quantum computer to "break" many of the cryptographic systems in use today, in the sense that there would be a polynomial time (in the number of bits of the integer) algorithm for solving the problem.

In particular, most of the popular public key ciphers are based on the difficulty of factoring integers, including forms of RSA.

These are used to protect secure Web pages, encrypted email, and many other types of data.

Breaking these would have significant ramifications for electronic privacy and security.

The only way to increase the security of an algorithm like RSA would be to increase the key size and hope that an adversary does not have the resources to build and use a powerful enough quantum computer.

It seems plausible that it will always be possible to build classical computers that have more bits than the number of qubits in the largest quantum computer..

For more information about the topic Quantum computer, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Scientific visualization

Scientific and Information visualization are branches of computer graphics and user interface design that are concerned with presenting data to users, by means of images.

The goal of this area is usually to improve understanding of the data being presented.

For example, scientists interpret potentially huge quantities of laboratory or simulation data or the results from sensors out in the field to aid reasoning, hypothesis building and cognition.

The field of data mining offers many abstract visualizations related to these visualization types.

They are active research areas, drawing on theory in information graphics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction and cognitive science.

Desktop programs capable of presenting interactive models of molecules and microbiological entities are becoming relatively common (Molecular graphics).

The field of Bioinformatics and the field of Cheminformatics make a heavy use of these visualization engines for interpreting lab data and for training purposes.

Medical imaging is a huge application domain for scientific visualization with an emphasis on enhancing imaging results graphically, e.g.

using pseudo-coloring or overlaying of plots.

Real-time visualization can serve to simultaneously image analysis results within or beside an analyzed (e.g.

segmented) scan..

For more information about the topic Scientific visualization, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Computing power everywhere

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) integrates computation into the environment, rather than having computers which are distinct objects.

Other terms for ubiquitous computing include pervasive computing, calm technology, things that think and everyware.

Promoters of this idea hope that embedding computation into the environment and everyday objects would enable people to interact with information-processing devices more naturally and casually than they currently do, and in whatever location or circumstance they find themselves.

Ubiquitous computing encompasses wide range of research topics, including distributed computing, mobile computing, sensor networks, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence..

For more information about the topic Computing power everywhere, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles: