https://techxplore.com/rss-feed/software-news/ en-us The latest news on the software, software development, software sciences and computer science. A psychology study that once took five or six weeks to build can now be created in less than an hour. Jacob Oliveira, a Ph.D. student in the School of Psychology, developed the new tool by aiming to solve his own research challenge. Now his solution has grown into a venture shaped in part by Waterloo's culture of experimentation and entrepreneurship. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-code-platform-customize.html Software Sat, 19 Sep 2026 08:00:06 EDT news708868470 Open source software underpins much of the modern digital world, from mobile phones and automobiles to cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Now, the rapid adoption of AI is creating new opportunities to improve that software while placing growing pressure on the people responsible for maintaining and securing it, according to a new TechBrief from the Association for Computing Machinery's Technology Policy Council (TPC). https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-ai-reshaping-source-software-straining.html Software Wed, 16 Sep 2026 07:40:01 EDT news708761450 AI is advancing rapidly. One of the major shifts in the field is that, instead of single chatbots performing individual tasks, teams of autonomous agents work together by communicating with each other, sharing tools and accessing shared knowledge libraries. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-ai-agents-math-problems.html Software Wed, 16 Sep 2026 07:20:04 EDT news708747695 As a child, you likely saw a few Disney movies depicting inanimate objects, such as clocks, cups and toys, as interactive companions to humans—an act of pure magic, seemingly. But scientists at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are now doing something similar: transforming stationary items into self-aware tools that perceive and respond to human motion to complete a task. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-software-reimagines-everyday-aware-devices.html Software Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:00:07 EDT news708604981 Networks are everywhere. They connect computers across the internet, carry electricity through power grids and represent transport routes for moving people and goods. Yet many problems that appear to have nothing to do with networks can also be represented and solved as networks. Examples include matching passengers with drivers in a ride-hailing app or distributing computing tasks across servers. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-randomness-vast-network-problems.html Software Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:40:03 EDT news708345421 Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), UAE technology company K2 and autonomous systems specialist Alp Autonomy have won the world's first multi-car autonomous race held in Europe after their joint entry, Team Kinetiz, took first place at Italy's Imola Circuit on Sept. 5. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-driverless-cars-wheel-europe.html Software Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:40:09 EDT news708276661 Turbulence can make a flight unpleasant or, in severe cases, dangerous. A turbulence avoidance tool created by researchers at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) is making flights safer by providing pilots with information that can help them avoid turbulence in real time. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-takeoff-smoother-skies-turbulence-tool.html Software Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:00:09 EDT news708272941 New research suggests that generative artificial intelligence (AI) could weaken not only employment opportunities for junior software developers but also the pathway through which they develop into senior professionals. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-ai-junior-coding-tasks-weaken.html Software Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:40:01 EDT news708263881 A guiding principle for many software engineers—"What you see is what you get" —means creating programs where the content you're editing looks the same as the final product. But when you're using generative AI (genAI) systems to 3D-print, say, a mug, you'll likely get a cup that can't hold your coffee. Why is that? https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-software-tool-users-ai-generated.html Software Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:20:04 EDT news708185941 When a website loads quickly or an operating system runs smoothly, you can thank caching—a widely used computing process for fast data access that works by storing frequently used pieces of data in a computer's memory. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-year-strategy-ai-era-centers.html Software Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:40:09 EDT news708183421 Rockstar Games on Thursday launched, for the first time on Netflix, a preview of its hotly anticipated next installment in the Grand Theft Auto franchise, which will be released in November after a monthslong delay and recent leaks. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-guns-drugs-car-gta-preview.html Software Fri, 28 Aug 2026 06:00:01 EDT news707109019 Some video game fans are flabbergasted at Sony's decision, announced at Germany's Gamescom trade show, to discontinue disc sales starting in 2028—leading to calls for a boycott. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-era-players-lament-decline-disc.html Software Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:50:01 EDT news707108994 A face-recognition system that can identify people even if they are wearing a face mask covering their nose and mouth is discussed in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics. The new system uses biometrics from around the eyes and forehead. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-masked-eyes-forehead.html Software Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:20:03 EDT news707051101 Model checking helps automatically verify whether hardware and software systems satisfy specified requirements. It has become an important formal verification technique, but two major challenges remain: state-space explosion, which limits the size of systems that can be checked, and long verification times. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-conquer-approach-advances-reliability-scalable.html Software Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:40:09 EDT news706972921 Imagine finding a very old family photograph that has faded over time. Parts of the image are missing, the faces are blurry, and years spent inside a cardboard album have erased many details. Restoring such an image traditionally would require painstaking manual work or specialized software trained on thousands of examples. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-stage-ai-rebuilds-blurred-facial.html Software Thu, 20 Aug 2026 10:00:13 EDT news706438616 URL scanning services are now a common component of modern security workflows. They help detect phishing websites or malware early and warn users before they visit a URL. However, the practice of some of these services—publishing scanned URLs—can inadvertently expose sensitive user data. CISPA researcher Ali Mustafa, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy and Ca' Foscari University of Venice, conducted the first systematic investigation of the risks arising from this practice. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-factor-privacy-url-scanning.html Software Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:40:09 EDT news705323885 Many software tools, including compilers, optimizers and synthesizers, have a common task at their core. They must transform long, complicated programs into simplified equivalents. These scaled-down programs run faster and on a wider range of hardware but must deliver the same results as their original versions. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-optimizing-software-professor-egg-downsizes.html Software Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:40:24 EDT news705234721 A total of 265 couples have married after meeting on an AI-powered dating app launched by the Tokyo government in 2024 to lift Japan's low birth rate, according to official data. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-appy-marriages-ai-hundreds-japanese.html Software Tue, 28 Jul 2026 05:20:03 EDT news704432786 In the current issue of the journal Nature Methods, siibra is introduced as a software suite that integrates data from different multimodal sources into a comprehensive atlas of the human brain and makes the data easily accessible—for interactive exploration and automated, reproducible data analyses, simulations and AI applications. siibra is developed by an international team of scientists led by the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at Forschungszentrum Jülich. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-molecules-networks-siibra-brain-atlas.html Software Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:20:01 EDT news703850660 The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models, including ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, has transformed educational pedagogy by enabling new forms of interaction, reflection and learning. Yet the use of GenAI in software development education often fails to support deep conceptual learning. In a new article, researchers introduce Teachable AI, a prototype learning system that applies a learning-by-teaching approach in which students explain newly learned concepts to an AI agent. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-prototype-software-approach.html Software Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:20:03 EDT news703759045 Engineers often use vision-language models to produce new designs, such as airplane or automobile components. To simulate how those components will perform in realistic situations, they'll use tried-and-true computer-aided design (CAD) software to generate 3D models of those designs, which they can put through virtual crash or durability tests. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-2d-3d-rapid-prototyping.html Software Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:20:01 EDT news703405444 During the day, our brain acquires new memories; at night, during sleep, it consolidates the important ones and eliminates the useless ones. A similar principle has been applied to Hopfield networks, one of the classic models of artificial intelligence inspired by the workings of the brain. In 2025, Federico Ricci-Tersenghi and colleagues developed Daydreaming, an algorithm that combines the learning of new memories with the elimination of spurious ones, drastically improving the network's capacity. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-daydreaming-algorithm-ai.html Software Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:05 EDT news703173437 Many experts refer to hydrogen as "the fuel of the future." It is expected to help decarbonize the global economy in two main ways: Burning it or feeding it into a fuel cell produces storable energy with no carbon emissions, just water. It can also be used in place of fossil fuels or as a chemical feedstock in hard-to-decarbonize industrial processes such as steel and cement production. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-hydrogen-fuel-future-cheap-ship.html Software Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:20:07 EDT news702646984 Developers are increasingly relying on large language models (LLMs) for everyday computing tasks such as fixing bugs, explaining code and automating text-processing tasks like filtering logs. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-ai-automate-everyday-tasks.html Software Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:16:01 EDT news702562549 The Horizon Europe project Mopo has published a new technical publication dedicated to Spine Toolbox, the open-source workflow management system that supports flexible data, scenario and workflow management for complex modeling environments. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-source-workflow-tool-showcases-flexibility.html Software Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:00:02 EDT news702212281 Artificial intelligence can now generate images that are virtually indistinguishable from real ones. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB have developed RealOrRender, a tool that not only specifically detects such deepfakes but also explains why an image is classified as real or AI-generated. The new hybrid approach significantly improves detection accuracy, while explainable AI processes ensure transparent results. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-reliably-deepfake-images.html Software Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:20:05 EDT news702116221 A technology developed at the Technion enables ordinary users to create realistic video clips intuitively, without the need for massive computing resources. Called Time-to-Move (TTM), it offers unprecedented control over the movement of objects and characters in AI-generated videos using nothing more than mouse movements, eliminating the need for complex and expensive infrastructure or training on millions of videos. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-mouse-realistic-ai-video-extra.html Software Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:20:08 EDT news701353775 It's game over for fans of discontinued video games after the EU admitted defeat Tuesday and said it cannot stop publishers from making them unplayable. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-eu-discontinued-video-games.html Software Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:20:04 EDT news700845554 How do software developers respond when they come across code they do not intuitively understand? Neuropsychologists have now explored this question by recording brain activity alongside eye movements. A team of psycholinguists then compared the findings with established patterns from natural language processing and identified some surprising parallels. The interdisciplinary team from Saarland University and Chemnitz University of Technology has now published its study in Scientific Reports. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-code-brain-eye-tracking-reveal.html Software Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:20:47 EDT news700315981 Operating large language model (LLM) services like ChatGPT requires a server infrastructure on the scale of tens of thousands of units. However, constructing actual equipment every time a new AI semiconductor or system architecture needs to be verified incurs massive costs and time. https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-virtual-ai-testbed-massive-llm.html Software Fri, 29 May 2026 13:40:01 EDT news699280081