Games aren't just child's play anymore. Advances in computer graphics and communications have given rise to a growing market for "serious games" — nonentertainment applications developed by public-policy advocates, educators, corporate management, the health care industry and nonprofit foundations.

Applications draw on realistic game-based simulation to deliver educational programs, military training and tools for health maintenance and therapy.

Bow (or libbow) is a library of C code useful for writing statistical text analysis, language modeling and information retrieval programs. The current distribution includes the library, as well as front-ends for document classification (rainbow), document retrieval (arrow) and document clustering (crossbow).

A good article on the background and founders of the Chandler project.

Source

We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local structure in the source language
- Donald E. Knuth,1974

Enterprise Java applications will be able to run directly on Palm Tungsten handhelds now that Palm has licensed IBM's WME (WebSphere Micro Environment) Java run-time environment, the companies announced Monday.

Penn State researchers have developed new software that can help decision-making teams in combat situations or homeland security handle information overload by inferring teams' information needs and delivering relevant data from computer-generated reports.
The agent software called CAST (Collaborative Agents for Simulating Teamwork) highlights relevant data. This helps improve a team's decision-making process as well as enhances members' collaboration.

New software instantly connects key bits of data that once eluded teams of researchers

What do Hamas terrorists have in common with Martha Stewart? No, we're not talking about their public-approval ratings. Rather, both may have drawn unwanted scrutiny in part because of the same piece of software.

The data-mining algorithms of ClearForest, based in New York City, are at work within both Israeli security agencies and NASDAQ. Israel uses them to drill for hidden connections among suspected terrorists: say, a pattern of phone calls shortly before each of several suicide bombings. NASDAQ uses the same software to detect block trades of stock quietly placed just before the release of company news — including sales by relatives of ImClone's founder, Sam Waksal, who this fall pleaded guilty to insider-trading charges, and his friend Martha Stewart, who remains under investigation (and has denied any wrongdoing).

Prosody

Computers will really understand what you say when they know how you feel when you say it.

Sometimes it's not what you say, but how you say it. That's a truism most people can relate to--but computers can't. While speech recognition software has gotten quite good at understanding words, it still can't discern punctuation like periods and commas, or choose between ambiguous sentences whose meanings depend on the speaker's emotion. That's because such software still can't make sense of the

MIT Project Oxygen: Overview

For over forty years, computation has centered about machines, not people. We have catered to expensive computers, pampering them in air-conditioned rooms or carrying them around with us. Purporting to serve us, they have actually forced us to serve them. They have been difficult to use.
In the future, computation will be human-centered. It will be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe.