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 13 bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish excerpts from selected posts, plus readers' comments.

Recommender systems that provide consumers with customized options have redefined e-commerce, and are spreading to other fields.

By using sparse representation and compressed sensing, researchers have been able to demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy over traditional face-recognition techniques.

Technologists discuss government policies affecting broadband, patent reform, privacy---and President Obama's effect on it all.

Electronic games can inspire players to explore new ideas and concepts. By gaining a better understanding of the dynamic between player and game, researchers hope to develop more interesting and effective approaches.

'Intent and timing' may help the federal cyberspace initiative work better than previous blueprints.

A contrarian's perspective on how entrepreneurial opportunities and innovation can thrive during an economic crisis.

The innovative Alice 3 programming environment, currently in beta testing, teaches students to program with Alice and Java software.

Debating and arguing the points of a proposed code of behavior to provide guidance in making choices can produce the most effective ethics training.

As the computer science field has evolved, so should the methods for disseminating computing research results.

Scale up your datasets enough and your apps come undone. What are the typical problems and where do the bottlenecks surface?

To shield the browser from attacks, Google Chrome developers eyed three key problems.

The age of cloud computing has begun. How can companies take advantage of the new opportunities it provides?

Meaning can be as important as usability in the design of technology.

The humanitarian focus of socially useful projects promises to motivate community-minded undergrads in and out of CS.

Satisfiability solvers can now be effectively deployed in practical applications.

Welcome to three new puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is (as yet) unsolved. In each puzzle, the issue is how your intuition matches up with the mathematics.

Introduction

Global spending on Information Technology (IT) continues to grow and is expected to reach $1.66 trillion in 2009. In addition, IT represents a large (40--45%) and stable share (in nominal dollars) of firm spending …

Introduction

The research community has long and often been fervently keen on debating the topic of journal impact. Well, just what is the impact of a journal? Today, the Science Citation Index (SCI) recognizes over 7,000 journals …

Introduction

"After the flames from the slammer's attack were doused and the technology industry caught up on its lost sleep, we started asking questions. Why did this happen? Could we have prevented it? What can we do to keep …

Introduction

Information Technology (IT) pervades every aspect of a firm's value chain as a vast electronic network of interconnected applications and data. Managers perceive the immense potential of this complex infrastructure …

Introduction

Global Software Development (GSD) is increasingly becoming the normal practice in the software industry, readily evidenced by U.S. estimates that the value of the offshore software development market has increased …

Introduction

Because of the web's rapid growth and lack of central organization, Internet search engines play a vital role in assisting the users of the Web in retrieving relevant information out of the tens of billions of documents …

Introduction

In the last two decades, the racial/ethnic composition of those earning computer science (CS) bachelor's degrees has changed in the U.S. Between 1985 and 2005, the proportion of CS bachelor's degrees awarded to White …

Introduction

Phishing mongers and posers have taken the world by a storm and it is estimated that the annual financial loss due to phishing scams is at least US $320 million. Hong Kong has been a hotspot of phishing attacks and …