Information Technology Topics

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction's lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.

A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as e-tail. Almost all big retailers have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web.

Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as Business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be...

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the study of interaction between people (users) and computers. It is often regarded as the intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences, design and several other fields of study. Interaction between users and computers occurs at the user interface (or simply interface), which includes both software and hardware, for example, general-purpose computer peripherals and large-scale mechanical systems, such as aircraft and power plants. The following definition is given by the Association for Computing Machinery^[1]:

Because human-computer interaction studies a human and a machine in conjunction, it draws from supporting knowledge on both the machine and the human side. On the machine side, techniques in computer graphics, operating systems, programming languages, and development environments are relevant....

The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

The hypertext portion of the Web in particular has an intricate intellectual history; notable influences and precursors include Vannevar Bush's Memex, IBM's Generalized Markup Language, and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu.

The concept of a home-based global information system goes at least as far back as Isaac Asimov's short story "Anniversary" (Amazing Stories, March 1959), in which the characters look up information on a home computer called a "Multivac outlet" –which was connected by a "planet wide network of circuits" to a mile-long "super-computer" somewhere in the bowels of the Earth. One character is thinking of installing a Mulitvac, Jr. model for his children.

Prior to the widespread inter-networking that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the stations on the network, and the prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe method. In the 1960s, computer researchers, Levi C. Finch and Robert W. Taylor pioneered calls for a joined-up global network to address interoperability problems. Concurrently, several research programs began to research principles of networking between separate physical networks, and this led to the development of Packet switching. These included Donald Davies (NPL), Paul BaranRAND Corporation), and Leonard Kleinrock's MIT and UCLA research programs. (

This led to the development of several packet switched networking solutions in the late 1960s and 1970s, including ARPANET, and X.25. Additionally, public access and hobbyist networking systems grew in popularity, including UUCP. They were however still disjointed separate networks, served only by limited gateways between networks. This led to the application of packet switching to develop a protocol for inter-networking, where multiple different networks could be joined together into a super-framework of networks. By defining a simple common network system, the Internet protocol suite, the concept...

The history of artificial intelligence begins in antiquity. Artificial human beings endowed with consciousness and intelligence have appeared in myths, stories and rumours for thousands of years.^[1] In the middle of the 20th century, a handful of scientists began to explore a new approach to this ancient idea, based on their discoveries in neurology, a new mathematical theory of information, an understanding of control and stability called cybernetics, and above all, by the invention of the digital computer, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning.^[2]

The field of artificial intelligence research was born at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for many decades. Many of them predicted that a machine as intelligent as a human being would exist in no more than a generation and they were given millions of dollars to make this vision come true. Eventually it became obvious that they had grossly underestimated the difficulty of the project. In 1973, in response to the criticism of Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from congress, DARPA and the British Government stopped funding...