Microsoft is working with three organizations in Europe to broaden researcher access to cloud resources. The company has announced that it's working with Europe's VENUS- consortium, France's INRIA, and the University of Nottingham Horizon Institute.
Indiana-based Purdue University will be opening a new west coast center in Mountain View, CA in NASA Research Park, the same base where Pennsylvania-based Carnegie Mellon also runs a university. The new center is intended to link Purdue's engineering and technology faculty and researchers with high-tech companies and entrepreneurs.
Autodesk has brought AutoCAD 2011 for Mac OS X to its Education Community, offering teachers and students about 90 percent off the full commercial version. The standard education edition of AutoCAD 2011 for Mac, which also began shipping this month, will continue to be free for education users.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded $50 million in grants across five institutions to support the construction of new scientific research facilities. These labs--at four universities and a non-profit organization--will cover a wide variety of research fields.
Four decades after it hosted the first message to be sent out over the Internet in 1969, the University of California, Los Angeles will be managing a joint institutional research project to lay out the framework for a new Internet.
Pricey subscription journals will take another hit with news that Duke University has joined a group of kindred research institutions in signing a Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE).
As part of its marketing push for "smarter cities," IBM has launched a new simulation game to help players understand the challenges faced by cities. CityOne gives participants the opportunity to tackle crisis scenarios by exploring 100 real-world scenarios to transform cities through technologies that reduce traffic congestion, save water, streamline supply chains, and tap alternative energy sources.
An experiment in digital voting by Washington, DC not only gave the developers behind the project a taste of the challenges they face in creating a secure voting application, but it gave researchers at the University of Michigan a chance to broadcast their school's fight song every time somebody cast a vote.
Scientists in Japan will be gaining free access to cloud computing resources in a joint grant program set up between Microsoft and Japan's National Institute of Informatics. The initiative is part of a project being promoted by the institute to encourage researchers to explore the use of the cloud for supporting data retrieval from new kinds of information systems that require high performance computing.
IBM has opened a new analytics center in Budapest, Hungary, located on the campus of the 375-year-old ELTE University.