"Another reason to ditch ACM," thundered an ACM member in a social-media posting during recent debate over the Research Works Act, introduced by Congress in 2011. While deep concerns with the bill were widespread, the nasty tone of the posting was surprising to me.
Moshe Y. Vardi
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Predatory Scholarly Publishing
In a typical business, you have two parties: sellers and buyers. In scholarly publishing you also have sellers and buyers, these are the publishers and the research libraries. However, you have two additional parties. On one side, authors. On the other, editors and reviewers.
Now that the sound and fury in the Open Access movement has quieted down a bit, we can revisit the arguments for open access. The basic question I would like to address is what ACM's stance should be with respect to open-access publishing models.
The 14th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, held last July, included a special symposium on the subject of "What is an algorithm?" This may seem to be a strange question to ask just before the Turing Centenary Year. Didn't Turing answer this question decisively?
Artificial Intelligence: Past and Future
The most dramatic chess match of the 20th century was the May 1997 rematch between the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue and world champion Garry Kasparov, which Deep Blue won. While this victory was considered by many a triumph for artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, who coined the very name of the field, was rather dismissive of this accomplishment.
Leibniz conceived of a universal mathematical language in which all human knowledge can be expressed, and calculational rules carried out by machines to derive all logical relationships. His definition of computing captures, I believe, the essence of our field.
For almost 50 years we have been riding Moore's Law's exponential curve. Oh, what a ride it has been! No other technology has ever improved at a geometric rate for decades. But exponential trends always slow down, and the end of "Moore's Party" may be near.
I recently attended a rather theoretical computer-science conference, and sat, as is my habit, in the front row. The speaker was trying to convey the fine details of a rather intricate mathematical construction. I was hopelessly lost.
On June 16, 1902, philosopher Bertrand Russell sent a letter to Gottlob Frege in which he argued that Frege's logical system was inconsistent. The letter launched a "Foundational Crisis" in mathematics, triggering an almost anguished search for proper foundations for mathematics.
Technology Has Social Consequences
A conference paper submission constitutes privileged communication. In theory, reviewers should immediately "forget" what they have read. How could a program committee member not know the fundamental rules of scholarly reviewing?
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