In my May 2009 Editor's Letter, "Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research," I addressed the publication culture of our field: "As far as I know, we are the only scientific …

In his editor's letter "More Debate, Please!" (Jan. 2010), Moshe Y. Vardi made a plea for controversial topics on these pages, citing a desire to "let truth emerge from vigorous …

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

Mark Guzdial and Judy Robertson discuss the role of programming in introductory computer science.

Almost 90% of what we learn comes from reading, estimates say, and the path that online information takes to your brain is less direct than most. TheCommunications Web site …

Biologists can benefit from learning and using the tools of computer science, but several real-world obstacles remain.

As Web technologies move beyond two-way interactive capabilities to facilitate more dynamic and pervasive experiences, the Web is quickly advancing toward its third major upgrade.

Researchers are focusing on the so-called "removal chain" in an attempt to save landfill space, improve recycling rates, and trim the flow of toxic materials into the environment.

Donald E. Knuth, Jon Kleinberg, Andrew Herbert, and other members of the computer science community were recently honored for their innovative research and service.

How gaming, as the first media market to successfully transition toward media-as-a-service, is an exemplar for a similar evolutionary transition of content and entertainment.

The U.S. Supreme Court will narrow the universe of process innovations that can be patented to those that are "technological," but what will that mean for software?

Surveying the increasing variety and nature of ethical challenges encountered by computing researchers and practitioners.

Learning to build virtual teams of people of diverse backgrounds is an urgent challenge.

Emphasizing the importance of creating more programs and investing more funding toward the goal of developing minority faculty at research universities.

Seeking funding for current and future computing initiatives requires both a strong argument and a broad community of supporters.

Considering the nebulous question of ownership in the virtual realm.

Kirk McKusick and Sean Quinlan discuss the origin and evolution of the Google File System.

What will it take to make server-side computing more energy efficient?

To succeed on a global scale, businesses should focus on a trio of key elements.

With no HIV vaccine in sight, virologists need to know how the virus will react to a given combination drug therapy.

Student participation and resulting expertise is as valuable as having the high-performance resource itself.

Computer scientists have made great strides in how decision-making mechanisms are used.

We all know how to protect our private or most valuable data from unauthorized access: encrypt it. Still, the use of encryption to protect valuable or sensitive data can be …

Suppose that you want to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. This separation is possible: we describe a "fully homomorphic" encryption scheme that keeps data private, but that allows a …

Bristling with cameras, microphones, and other sensors, today's portable phones are nevertheless essentially deaf and blind. How shall we go about building machines that can …

Recognizing objects in images is an active area of research in computer vision. However, most of the algorithms for detecting objects perform an exhaustive search across all locations and scales in the image comparing local image …

Last month (February 2010, p. 120) we posted a trio of brainteasers, including one as yet unsolved, concerning the breaking of a bar of chocolate.

Future Tense, one of the revolving features on this page, presents stories and essays from the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, their boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what

There is renewed interest in emergency planning in both the private and public sectors. As managers realize the size of potential exposure to unmanaged risk, insuring "business continuity" is becoming a key task within all industrial …

As many as 400 people may have access to one's personal medical information throughout the typical care process. Patients (consumers) feel that it is critical that their medical information is held in confidence, otherwise they …

Is stickiness the Holy Grail for e-tailing? The conventional wisdom suggests that stickiness is crucial and can contribute to e-tailers' bottom lines considerably. However, the direct economic impacts of stickiness have not been …

A recent industry survey observed that only 34% of IT projects were considered successful. Of the several potential factors contributing to this hard-to-achieve success, user involvement was noted as the most important one.

The established philosophy within the software development industry is that an organization implementing a program to improve software quality can expect to recoup the cost of the implementation many times over. While organizations …

Perhaps the business case for adopting open source software is an easy sell. Less obvious than the cost savings but equally important are the barriers ("hidden costs") of adopting open source software.

A paradox is becoming obvious to both information systems (IS) academics and executives: U.S. demand for IS graduates is increasing, but graduation numbers from university IS programs are flat or in decline, and many CIOs report …

Agent-based systems, or multi-agent systems in general, are a contemporary paradigm for software development.