Information Technology

Computing systems combined with sensor technology are changing car design. Car maker Audi is using the technology to change the driving experience in fundamental and energy-saving ways. German car maker Audi is proposing to connect cars with the traffic light network via links to the central traffic computer in each town or city. Audi’s on-board computer connects with the traffic light network ...

Chancellor George Osborne has announced government funding for a new Alan Turing Institute with the aim of putting UK universities at the centre of the so-called “big data” phenomenon. So what is big data and why does the government believe it is so important to the UK? Digital systems run on digital data. This is the threads of ‘1s’ and ...

UK-based internet-of-things (IoT) start-up 1248 has received a £250,000 investment from telco entrepreneur Rob Dobson, who will take up the position of chair of the firm’s board. The company is playing a role in creating an open standard to enable IoT applications and services to work together automatically, as part of a project funded by the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board. The prime minister, David ...

Rebecca Simpson from Dame Alice Owen’s School, Potters Bar won the Young Engineer of the Year award at the Big Bang Fair for her project to build a six foot Arcade Machine to help GCSE students revise their STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects. Twins Aneeta and Ameeta Kumar, aged 18, from The Abbey School, Reading were named as the UK Young Scientists ...

Last year only 4,228 girls applied to read engineering at university, compared to 28,020 boys, according to the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation and it believes this is related to parents’ attitudes towards engineering. Recent research conducted by the QEPrize shows the engineering still suffers from an image problem – especially among the parents of girls. Despite the fact ...

Qualcomm Life is working with Tunstall Healthcare to deploy its care services on a cloud-based system to allow doctors or carers to access biometric data. “It alleviates the challenges of interoperability by making it easier for customers to liberate data from a patient’s medical device through seamless data acquisition and transmission to the manufacturer’s interface of choice,” said Qualcomm Life. The servce will ...

Twenty-six billion devices in the internet-of-things (IoT) may not be wrong but can they be secure? We all know that computers can be hacked and so three presentations at Black Hat Asia 2014 in Singapore later this month on the dangers of hacking internet-enabled hardware will be of specific interest to anyone developing IoT technology. It used to be that most of us would only worry about corporate ...

Facebook continues to build its position in the mobile social media market with its acquisition of WhatsApp, the messaging app service with 450 million users. “Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp should come as no surprise and makes sense for both parties, although there are some key challenges ahead in terms of how Facebook develops and monetises WhatsApp going forward,” said Eden ...

How many of us now listen to our favourite music tracks in the cloud? Music download websites – Amazon, Google and iTunes – all offer cloud storage, which allows us to stream music to our smartphones and PCs when and where we want. Streaming music looks set to kill the concept of storing your own music collection on your phone, PC ...

Luxury car maker Daimler expects internet-based applications will become a major element of car design and to support the data communications demands of internet-based devices it has implemented the Ethernet bus technology as defined by the MOST150 standard in its new Mercedes-Benz S-Class vehicles. “At Daimler, we expect that the prevalence of internet applications in the automotive environment will grow ...