Technology News - Technopreneur

GRASP

A new optimization tool has the potential to help school administrators solve their timetabling problems. Developed by Arnaldo Vieira Moura and Rafael Augusto Scaraficci of the Institute of Computing at Brazil's University of Campinas, the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) algorithm performed well in tests at three high schools in Brazil. Educational administrators normally address the issue of having enough teachers and resources for the appropriate classrooms and students manually, and that can take weeks for larger schools. School timetabling is viewed by mathematicians as NP-hard, the kind of problem that might be difficult for a supercomputer to generate a single, simple answer. GRASP is designed to find slots for teachers and classes for students, taking into consideration variables such as teacher preferences and workload requirements, the courseload requirements of students, and the conflicting demands for resources for different grade levels. The algorithm randomly selects lectures, assigns resources, and gives those with "greedy" criteria the highest scores; compares neighboring lectures and then re-ranks them in pairs; and then looks for near optimum solutions to guide its final decision. The basic cycle is repeated a number of times and the overall champion solution is returned as the final answer of the algorithm. GRASP could be adapted for other educational institutions and other timetabling problems. To read more, you can follow the link : http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-01/ip-gag010610.php .

Go : Google's new programming language

Google has unveiled Go, a new programming language the company says offers the speed of working in a dynamic language such as Python and the performance and safety of a compiled language such as C or C++. Go is a language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection. However, Google is not using the experimental language internally for production systems. Instead, Google is conducting experiments with Go as a candidate server environment. The Go project was conceived to make it easier to write the kind of servers and other software Google uses internally, but the implementation isn't quite mature enough yet for large-scale production use. With Go, developers should find builds to be spontaneous. Large binaries will compile in just a few seconds, and the code will run close to the speed of C. Go is the second programming environment Google has released this fall. In September, Google released Noop, a Java-like programming language. To know about the language, follow http://golang.org/ . To read more, you can follow the link : http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Google-Launches-New-Programming-Language-Go-748082/ .

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