4. Mapping the whole Internet
Israeli researchers have created a topographical map of the Internet by enlisting more than 5,600 volunteers across 97 countries who agreed to download a program that tracks how Internet nodes interact with each other.
The result is "the most complete picture of the Internet available today," Bar Ilan University researcher Shai Carmi told the MIT Technology Review.
"A better understanding of the Internet's structure is vital for integration of voice, data and video streams, point-to-point and point-to-many distribution of information, and assembling and searching all of the world's information," Carmi and fellow researchers state in a new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It may reveal evolutionary processes that control the growth of the Internet."
Carmi's research uses a program called the DIMES agent, which is downloaded onto volunteers' computers and performs Internet measurements such as traceroute and ping. The project's Web site promises that, along with providing a "good feeling," using the DIMES agent will provide maps to users showing how the Internet looks from their homes. Users of the program chat about their findings at this forum.
Another project that tracks Internet traffic growth is called the Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) site.
5. The Fluid Project
A handful of universities, including the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley, is working to build a software architecture and reusable components that can make Web applications easier to develop and use. The Fluid Project's work focuses on user-centered design practices. Vendors such as Mozilla Foundation, IBM and Sun are also taking part.
The latest news out of the project is that a grant has been awarded to the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto from the Mozilla Foundation to promote DHTML accessibility and the adoption of ARIA (the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative's Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification).
6. Attila: one radio on many wireless networks
Today's wireless networks are in a rut: Most radios that form the networks can only work on one frequency band of the spectrum. If that band is glutted, glitchy or jammed, the radios are useless.
Enter Attila the Radio, invented by two researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology. The concept is simple: Attila parcels out a stream of data packets over any and all available wireless spectrum at the same time. The packets could stream, for example, over a Wi-Fi mesh, Verizon's Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) cell network, rival AT&T's Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) airwaves, and over a WiMAX link.
Current prototypes use several radios, one for each of the networks being used, but the goal is a single radio. The future of Attila the radio lies now with Attila the company, formally known as Atilla Technologies, which was founded in 2005 by two Stevens Institute of Technology researchers.