Human teams aided by a software system can make decisions more accurately and quickly in time-stressed situations than teams of just people, according to the Penn State researchers who developed the new software.

The researchers tested their software in a military command-and-control simulation which involved intelligence gathering, logistics and force protection. When time pressures were normal, the human teams functioned well, sharing information and making correct decisions about the potential threat, according to the researchers. But when the time pressure increased, the teams' performance suffered, according to the researchers. Because there was no time to share information, the teams made incorrect decisions about whether to avoid or attack the coming aircraft.

"This is the first test of the R-CAST architecture, and it shows that software agents can play an essential role in helping human partners make the right decision at the right time," said Xiaocong Fan, a post-doctoral scholar in Penn State's School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and lead author.

IBM's mission to spice up corporate search and become a "Google for the enterprise" continues in earnest.

By the end of the year, Big Blue intends to release an update to its corporate information-management tools, which are designed to bring order to potentially thousands of data sources in a company's network.

Code-named Serrano, the product will use technologies including artificial intelligence and data mining to derive more meaning from corporate documents. It will also have a revamped search engine and front-end tool designed to make hunting for company information as straightforward as searching the Web, according to IBM.

Suddenly, the computer world is interesting again. The last three months of 2004 brought more innovation, faster, than users have seen in years. The recent flow of products and services differs from those of previous hotly competitive eras in two ways. The most attractive offerings are free, and they are concentrated in the newly sexy field of "search."

Google, current heavyweight among systems for searching the Internet, has not let up from its pattern of introducing features and products every few weeks. Apart from its celebrated plan to index the contents of several university libraries, Google has recently released "beta" (trial) versions of Google Scholar, which returns abstracts of academic papers and shows how often they are cited by other scholars, and Google Suggest, a weirdly intriguing feature that tries to guess the object of your search after you have typed only a letter or two. Give it "po" and it will show shortcuts to poetry, Pokémon, post office, and other popular searches. (If you stop after "p" it will suggest "Paris Hilton.") In practice, this is more useful than it sounds.

Microsoft, heavyweight of the rest of computerdom, has scrambled to catch up with search innovations from Google and others. On Dec. 10, a company official made a shocking disclosure. For years Microsoft had emphasized the importance of "WinFS," a fundamentally new file system that would make it much easier for users to search and manage information on their own computers. Last summer, the company said that WinFS would not be ready in time for inclusion with its next version of Windows, called Longhorn. The latest news was that WinFS would not be ready even for the release after that, which pushed its likely delivery at least five years into the future. This seemed to put Microsoft entirely out of the running in desktop search. But within three days, it had released a beta version of its new desktop search utility, which it had previously said would not be available for months.

Meanwhile, a flurry of mergers, announcements and deals from smaller players produced a dazzling variety of new search possibilities. Early this month Yahoo said it would use the excellent indexing program X1 as the basis for its own desktop search system, which it would distribute free to its users. The search company Autonomy, which has specialized in indexing corporate data, also got into the new competition, as did Ask Jeeves, EarthLink, and smaller companies like dTSearch, Copernic, Accoona and many others.

I have most of these systems running all at once on my computer, and if they don't melt it down or blow it up I will report later on how each works. But today's subject is the virtually unpublicized search strategy of another industry heavyweight: I.B.M.

A U.S. nuclear engineer and a Russian scientist say their firm will be the first to create the technology that finally succeeds at mimicking human sight.

That seems like a long shot for their Los Altos, Calif.-based startup Pixlogic, as well as for the myriad industry, government and academic researchers who have been pounding away at this technical challenge for decades. "People have not been able to crack this problem," admits Pixlogic founder and Chief Executive Joseph Santucci.

Indeed, computer vision was one of the original promises of artificial intelligence when it first was talked about decades ago. Nevertheless, efforts to achieve that far-fetched feat have resulted in some exciting new technology in the realm often referred to as visual search, or image understanding.

Pixlogic is backed by the Central Intelligence Agency's nonprofit venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, whose mission is to nurture technology that serves U.S. security interests--and to make money for taxpayers while they're at it. Santucci and his Russian-born chief scientist, Dr. Shelia Guberman--who invented the handwriting recognition technology used in Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Windows CE program--say that the CIA is now testing their software. In their words, the technology can be "visually programmed" to monitor video feeds in real time to search for certain events or elements.

The microprocessor giant is thinking even smaller: tiny sensor chips that network with each other - inside everything on earth.

As a department head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, David Tennenhouse spent the late 1990s approving or denying funding for hundreds of far-out military programs. One proposal he reviewed, from a research team at UC Berkeley, outlined a concept called smart dust - fleck-sized wireless sensors intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks. Dropped from a passing helicopter, the sensors could spy on enemy movements or detect a hidden stash of mustard gas. Tennenhouse was intrigued enough to authorize several hundred thousand dollars in funding. Then he moved on to the next bizarre proposal.

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.

The goal of Agent Frank is to be a personal intelligent intermediary and companion to internet infovores during their daily hunter/gatherer excursions.

Just as IBM's Deep Blue showed the world a computer can play chess as well as a human master, Eduardo Reck Miranda, a researcher for the Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc., aims to demonstrate a computer program able to compose original music. So far, neural networks have succeeded in imitating distinct musical styles, but truly original compositions have remained elusive. Miranda is tackling that problem with an orchestra of virtual musicians — called agents — that interact to compose original music.