The 2008 presidential campaign slogan "Yes, We Can" is the English translation of the United Farm Workers' 1972 slogan "Sí, se puede," or "Yes, it can be done."

Advanced computational models are enabling researchers to create increasingly sophisticated prediction markets.

Researchers are turning to computers to help us take advantage of our own cognitive abilities and of the wisdom of crowds.

Virtualization is moving out of the data center and making inroads with mobile computing, security, and software delivery.

On the 40th anniversary of Douglas C. Engelbart's "The Mother of All Demos," computer scientists discuss the event's influence — and imagine what could have been.

Forty-four men and women are being inducted this year as 2008 ACM Fellows.

Software engineering continues to be dogged by claims it is not engineering. Adopting a computer-systems view that embraces hardware, software, and user environment may help.

Can you resell software even if the package says you can't? What are the implications for copyright law of the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous June 2008 decision in Quanta v. LG Electronics?

This Viewpoint boils down into a few magazine pages what I've learned in my 32 years of mentoring Ph.D. students.

Some advice for those doing the advising (and what the advisors can learn from the advisees).

C.A.R. Hoare, developer of the Quicksort algorithm and a lifelong contributor to the theory and design of programming languages, discusses the practical application of his theoretical ideas.

Smarter, more powerful scripting languages will improve game performance while making gameplay development more efficient.

Designed for concurrency from the ground up, the Erlang language can be a valuable tool to help solve concurrent problems.

HCI experts must broaden the field's scope and adopt new methods to be useful in 21st-century sociotechnical environments.

How avionics work led to a graphical language for reactive systems where the diagrams themselves define the system's behavior.

Can a proof be checked without reading it?

Error-correcting codes are the means by which we compensate for interference in communication, and are essential for the accurate transmission and storage of digital data.

Ever since the birth of coding theory almost 60 years ago, researchers have been pursuing the elusive goal of constructing the "best codes," whose encoding introduces the minimum possible redundancy for the level of noise they …

Alan Turing died in 1954 in his laboratory after eating a cyanide-laced apple. During his last years, Turing had become interested in bio-chemical systems. He had proposed a reaction-diffusion model in his 1952 paper entitled …

We address the problem of specifying and detecting emergent behavior in networks of cardiac myocytes, spiral electric waves in particular, a precursor to atrial and ventricular fibrillation.

Last month (February 2009, p. 104) we posed a trio of brain teasers concerning algorithm termination. Here, we offer some possible solutions. How did you do?

In 1913, the U.S. Government prosecuted Lee De Forest for telling investors that RCA would soon be able to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic. What similarly preposterous claims are enabled by today's technology?

Should corporations try to "do good" for society?

The landscape for Information Systems (IS) research spreads across a large, diverse, and growing territory with linkages to other fields and traversed by increasing numbers of researchers. There are well over 500 journals for …

In June 2006, the trustees of Ohio University (OU) voted unanimously to spend up to $4 million on enhanced information security. The decision came in the wake of the media coverage about OU's "lax, low-priority attitude toward …

Computational models are of great scientific and societal importance because they are used every day in a wide variety of products and policies. However, computational models are not pure abstractions, but rather they are tools …

While the evolving information society is freely opening and sharing its diaries, social networks and source codes, it remains to be seen if the same will come true for scientific knowledge. Despite strong sympathy for the idea …

Innovation is often touted as a key driver of economic growth. However, when firms operate within production and innovation networks that span national and firm boundaries, the question arises as to who actually benefits from …

Evaluating semantic similarity of concepts is a problem that has been extensively investigated in the literature in different areas, such as Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Databases, and Software Engineering. Currently …

In a recent security experiment, a computer with a Bluetooth sniffing program was hidden in a suitcase that was wheeled around public places. The objective was to ascertain the number of Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices that …