Abolish Software Warranty Disclaimers
Carl Landwehr was right to suggest in his Viewpoint "We Need a Building Code for Building Code" (Feb. 2015) that there should be a building code for software.
CACM Staff
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We wish to clarify an account of the 2014 Turing Test experiment we conducted at the Royal Society London, U.K., as outlined by Moshe Y. Vardi in his Editor's Letter "Would Turing Have Passed the Turing Test?" (Sept. 2014).
Make Abstracts Communicate Results
ACM should make its publications communicate more effectively by insisting abstracts include a summary of results and key concepts, communicating important information even when readers skip or skim the rest.
Software Engineering, Like Electrical Engineering
Though I agree with the opening lines of "A New Software Engineering" (Dec. 2014) outlining the "promise of rigorous, disciplined, professional practices," we must also look at "craft" in software engineering if we hope to raise the profession to the status of, say, electrical or chemical engineering.
Toward a Map Interface Not Inherently Related to Geography
"Reading News with Maps by Exploiting Spatial Synonyms" (Oct. 2014) was an impressive and informative description of how a map-query interface should work. I am not sure if the authors intend to broaden their scope to include even perhaps non-geographically related information but hope they do.
This is an extraordinary time to be part of the world's largest educational and scientific society in computing. Membership is at a record high, ACM continues to expand its global reach, and ACM's position at the forefront of computer science education has never been more prominent.
On the Significance of Turing’s Test
Contrary to what the first sentence of Alan Turing's 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" might suggest, the paper was not about the question "Can machines think?"
ACM’s Turing Award Prize Raised to $1 Million
The funding level for the ACM A.M. Turing Award is now $1 million. Google Inc. will provide all funding for this award, recognized as the highest honor in computer science and often referred to as the field's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Accountability Is No Excuse For Surveillance
British philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham would have wholeheartedly endorsed many of the accountability mechanisms Stefan Bechtold and Adrian Perrig outlined in "Accountability in Future Internet Architectures" (Sept. 2014).
Responsible Programming Not a Technical Issue
Vinton G. Cerf's "Responsible Programming" (July 2014) raised the interesting question of whether it is responsible to produce software without using state-of-the-art defect-detection-and-validation tools. The answer is legal, not technical.
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