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Editor's corner
By Rowan Dordick
According to a popular view of technological development, ideas are gradually refined in research and development labs before wending their way through manufacturing and marketing to the customer. Increasingly, though, that well-worn path is being supplemented by others, in which new technologies are immersed in the crucible of real-life customer encounters as an essential step in their evolution. Several of the topics in this issue fall broadly into that category.
In our cover story, Gary Taubes describes an ongoing effort to create the cyberspace equivalent of the biological immune system for networked computers. The system, which has been under development for several years, has been partially implemented in IBM's AntiVirus family of products. When fully deployed, it will detect the presence of viruses - including viruses previously unseen - eliminate them from infected machines, and broadcast means of preventing infection to other computers throughout the world.
Another way to understand the requirements of a new technology and gain valuable feedback from users is through special trials. When the Tokyo Metropolitan Government decided to explore advanced telecommunications projects in its futuristic Tokyo Teleport Town, IBM Japan saw an opportunity to explore the capabilities of interactive television services on a larger scale than had previously been attempted. In "Video on Demand", Michael Sinclair tells how IBM Japan integrated several Research technologies and contributed several key components to create a system capable of supplying information and entertainment to some 500 residents.
This decade has seen the Internet and World Wide Web change the way we communicate, learn, shop, do business and seek entertainment. Behind the scenes, however, Webmasters are scrambling to manage the explosion of content and the popularity of their sites. IBM computer scientists and programmers have created a new approach, called Web Object Manager (WOM), that provides both the tools to manage content and an environment in which to create new applications. It also includes provisions for linking the Web with legacy data. First used at the 1995 Wimbledon tennis tournament, a much enhanced version of WOM permitted the flawless operation of the Web site of the 1996 Summer Olympics.
The proliferation of digital data has also heightened concerns about intellectual property protection. Hiding data in digital files can help the process of authenticating ownership. It also provides a means to trace distribution, detect tampering, and embed additional information, including authorship, titles, captions, time stamps, and so on.
One of the more difficult realms to bring into the computer age has proved to be the task of writing music. Because of the need to handle a vast number of special symbols, most techniques for composing directly with a computer are far from easy to execute. In , Katherine Silberger describes a new pen-based system that greatly simplifies the process.
In future issues, watch for articles on speech recognition, personal area networks, digital video discs, software agents, networking and more.
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