If you have anything to do with the Department of Defense, plan on someone getting in your face before long. The DoD recently awarded a $2.7 million development to Viisage Technology and Lau Technologies to develop digital identification based on facial recognition. The facial recognition technology used was originally developed at MIT. Viisage currently provides facial recognition software for driver's license bureaus in a number of states, including Arkansas, New Mexico, and Illinois, as well as voter identification systems for the Philippines. For more information, see http:// www.viisage.com/.
As we continue to distance ourselves from the Cold War, information on previously classified research is slowly becoming public. Ray Holt, for instance, is responsible for one of the latest disclosures, made public at the recent Vintage Computer Festival.
According to Holt, he and fellow engineer Steve Geller created the microprocessor while working on the Navy's F-14 jet fighter program in 1969 -- two years before Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, and Stan Mazor created the 4004. Holt and his team were engineers at Garrett AiResearch, a Navy contractor building the F-14's Central Air Data Computer (CADC). Because their computational and environmental requirements were greater than what available technology could handle (the computer needed to clock at 2 MHz, use no more than 10 watts at room temperature, and operate at temperatures ranging from -55 to 125 degrees Celsius) Holt and crew had to invent their own solution.
The computer they designed had 133 instructions and 20-bit words. Their original design consisted of a single chip, but since they were only able to get 375 KHz, they switched to a multiple-processor design consisting of a Parallel Multiplier Unit (PMU) and Parallel Divider Unit (PDU) (equivalent to a math coprocessor), a Special Logic Function (SLF) (essentially the microprocessor), and a Data Steering Unit (DSU).
Holt first wrote about his team's work on the CADC in 1971, but was unable to get the paper published because it was classified. The work remained classified until April, 1997. Whether or not Holt indeed created the first microprocessor depends on your definition of a microprocessor. You can decide for yourself by examining the papers at http://www .microcomputerhistory.com/.
Qualcomm has wedded its wireless digital phone technology with 3Com's PalmPilot computing platform, resulting in the pdQ smartphone. The pdQ smartphone can be used for voice calls, sending and receiving e-mail, web browsing, receiving alphanumeric pages, keeping track of appointments, and the like. To support the smartphone, Qualcomm has developed a set of telephony APIs, and an SDK. See http://www .qualcomm.com/ for details.
If all goes according to plan, classes will begin at the Caribbean Institute of Technology (CIT), a high-tech training center to be located in Montego Bay, Jamaica, in early 1999. CIT is a joint venture of Furman University, INDUSA, LLC (an Atlanta-based software company), HEART (a Jamaican government agency involved in technical and vocational training), the Institute of Business of the University of West Indies-Mona in Jamaica, and the International Development Consortium (a group including the University of Hertfordshire and other institutions in the United Kingdom). CIT students will be able to earn certificates in client/server, database, and web programming. The three universities will oversee the center's certification standards, and the courses will be accredited in both the U.S. and Europe. In addition, INDUSA will establish an information technology center in the Montego Bay Free Zone and provide jobs in the center to qualified CIT programming trainees.
As reported in the September 1998 issue of Intelligence: The Future of Computing (http://www.eintelligence.com/), researchers at the Los Alamos National Lab have for the first time in the U.S. demonstrated a reliable quantum computing system. In their paper "Experimental Quantum Error Correction," D.G. Cory, M.D. Price, W. Maas, E. Knill, R. Laflamme, W.H. Zurek, T.F. Havel, and S.S. Somaroo (published in the Physical Review Letters, September 7, 1998, http:// ojps.aip.org/). Laflamme said, "We have demonstrated for the first time that our quantum error correction works as expected...This is the most interesting proof to date that quantum computing is not just a crazy idea." The idea behind quantum computation and cryptography is the use of the laws of quantum mechanics for either computing or exchanging secret messages. Quantum mechanics make applications more powerful, but also more fragile against noise. The paper is available at http://qso.lanl.gov/qc/.
According to a new study by credit card giant Visa International, which clearly has a vested interest, worldwide consumer online purchases are projected to grow from $15.3 billion in 1998 to $100.5 billion by 2002. Visa expects to see a 67 percent e-commerce growth rate over the next five years, with 1999 global online sales hitting $26.5 billion, $43.3 billion in 2000, and $65.7 billion in 2001. Market research firms IDC and Forrester concur. IDC projects e-commerce spending will grow to $426 billion by 2002. Forrester Research's crystal ball says that in the U.S. alone, e-commerce will more than double in 1999 from 1997's $2.5 billion. As you might expect, Visa also championed industry analysts who said credit and debit cards will continue to be the preferred payment method on the Internet.
Even though Visa International expects that credit/debit cards will continue to be used for online purchases, the credit card company is hedging its bets by pushing forward with smart cards. But consumers aren't buying them yet, or rather they're not buying with them. According to CNNfn, CNN's financial news service, smart cards have been met with lukewarm success in U.S. test-marketing campaigns. Part of the problem, says Forrester Research's James McQuivey, is that "the smart card is a solution designed more for the benefit of the financial institution than it is for the consumer."