Increasing ACM's relevance and influence as a membership organization in the global computing community has been a top priority from the outset of my presidency.

Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish excerpts from selected posts. Greg Linden writes about machine learning …

The articles, sections, and services available on Communications' Web site all vie for visitor attention. According to our latest Web statistics, the following features …

Dealing with terabytes of data is not the monumental task it once was. The difficult part is presenting enormous amounts of information in ways that are most useful to a wide variety of users.

Advocates seek to protect users from potential business practices, but defenders of the status quo say that concerns are overblown.

To create shape-shifting robotic ensembles, researchers need to teach micro-machines to work together.

Some examples of the upward or downward spiral of behaviors in the workplace.

Since its beginning, the computer industry has been through several major recessions, each occurring  approximately five years after the establishment of a new computing paradigm …

Conficker's alarming growth rate in early 2009 along with the apparent mystery surrounding its ultimate purpose had raised concern among whitehat security researchers. Here is an insider's view of the …

The venture capital industry, like financial services in general, has fallen on hard times. Part of the problem is that large payoffs have become increasingly scarce. But perhaps …

A review of code review do's and don'ts.

C.A.R. Hoare revisits his past Communications article on the axiomatic approach to programming and uses it as a touchstone for the future.

GPU acceleration and other computer performance increases will offer critical benefits to biomedical science.

The biosciences need an image format capable of high performance and long-term maintenance. Is HDF5 the answer?

Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan sits down with the noted hedge fund founder, computational biochemist, and (above all) computer scientist.

Writing programs that scale with increasing numbers of cores should be as easy as writing programs for sequential computers. Here as a concrete example of a coordinated attack on the problem of parallelism …

The result is stable, focused, dynamic discussion threads that avoid redundant ideas and engage thousands of stakeholders.

This Gödel Prize-winning work traces the steps toward modeling real data.

Relational systems have made it possible to query large collections of data in a declarative style through languages such as SQL. There is a key component that isquery optimizer …

The task of estimating the number of distinct values (DVs) in a large dataset arises in a wide variety of settings in computer science and elsewhere. We provide DV estimation techniques for the case in which the dataset of interest …

The database and systems communities have made great progress in developing database systems that allow us to store and query huge amounts of data. Companies are responding …

Many data generation processes can be modeled as data streams. They produce huge numbers of pieces of data, each of which is simple in isolation, but which taken together lead to a complex whole. For example, the sequence of

Jon Kleinberg talks about algorithms, information flow, and the connections between Web search and social networks.

It's been over 10 years since corporate America embraced ERP systems, but hard evidence on the financial benefits that ERP systems have provided has been elusive. This debate has spilled into the mainstream media, as America's …

Introduction

The success of system development is most often gauged by three primary indicators: the number of days of deviation from scheduled delivery date, the percentage of deviation from the proposed budget, and meeting …

Introduction

In 2003, Dell computers shifted support calls for two of its corporate computer lines from its call center in Bangalore, India back to the U.S. The reason was that its customers were not satisfied with the level …

The field of ubiquitous computing was inspired by Mark Weiser's vision of computing artifacts that disappear. "They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." Although Weiser

Taming runaway Information Technology (IT) projects is a challenge that most organizations have faced and that managers continue to wrestle with. These are projects that grossly exceed their planned budgets and schedules, often …

Translation from a source language into a target language has become a very important activity in recent years, both in official institutions (such as the United Nations and the EU, or in the parliaments of multilingual countries …

In multilingual countries (Canada, Hong Kong, India, among others) and large international organizations or companies (such as, WTO, European Parliament), and among Web users in general, accessing information written in other …

While product review systems that collect and disseminate opinions about products from recent buyers (Table 1) are valuable forms of word-of-mouth communication, evidence suggests that they are overwhelmingly positive. Kadet