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Socializing with Robots at Ginza
From BLOG@CACM

Socializing with Robots at Ginza

Modern social robots are making their debut in our daily lives.

The NIPS Experiment
From BLOG@CACM

The NIPS Experiment

In the NIPS experiment, 10% of papers submitted to the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation went through its review process twice, with results compared...

Lessons from Winnie the Pooh: Sustainable Cyberinfrastructure
From BLOG@CACM

Lessons from Winnie the Pooh: Sustainable Cyberinfrastructure

The longitudinal value of research data often accrues to disciplines other than those where it was created. We need a new model that judiciously balances investment...

Little's Law in the Exascale Era
From BLOG@CACM

Little's Law in the Exascale Era

When performance optimization, reliability requirements, and energy management are convolved with component costs, device physics, system software services and...

HPC, Big Data and the Peloponnesian War
From BLOG@CACM

HPC, Big Data and the Peloponnesian War

We need a concord and strategic research investment plan that recognizes the shared importance of HPC and big data. Both warrant investments in basic research,...

Priming, Assimilation Bias, Social Proof in Social Media
From BLOG@CACM

Priming, Assimilation Bias, Social Proof in Social Media

As the US election draws near, what is the role that social media play in this political process?  How do social theories and psychological tendencies affect the...

What Does 'Big Data' Mean?
From BLOG@CACM

What Does 'Big Data' Mean?

It is interesting to note that a substantial subset of the computer science community has redefined their research agenda to fit under the marketing banner of "Big...

Conferences vs. Journals in Computer Science: An Alternative Perspective from Education
From BLOG@CACM

Conferences vs. Journals in Computer Science: An Alternative Perspective from Education

What if computer science conferences required proposals for presentations and then selected some for consideration in journals and book chapters?  

My Scientific Big Data Are Lonely
From BLOG@CACM

My Scientific Big Data Are Lonely

Although there are daunting technical challenges posed by big data in science and engineering, the social and economic challenges are just as difficult, though...

Possible Hadoop Trajectories
From BLOG@CACM

Possible Hadoop Trajectories

Hadoop has spread rapidly in the last few years as a platform for parallel computation in Java, but we believe a lot of improvement will be required for serious...

­Using 'Averages' While Thinking About Social Behavior? That's Probably Wrong!
From BLOG@CACM

­Using 'Averages' While Thinking About Social Behavior? That's Probably Wrong!

Using "averages" as a metric while thinking about Social Systems is probably wrong.

NITRD 20: A Day in Your Life
From BLOG@CACM

NITRD 20: A Day in Your Life

Progress in information technology over the past 20 years has dramatically changed our lives — in our daily routine, at play, and at work. 

COLT/ICML Open Problems and ICML Instructions
From BLOG@CACM

COLT/ICML Open Problems and ICML Instructions

Open problems will be presented in a joint session in the evening of the COLT/ICML overlap day. If you have a difficult, theoretically definable problem in machine...

Research Data Sustainability and Access
From BLOG@CACM

Research Data Sustainability and Access

The dramatic growth of research data, the collaborative nature of international research, expectations for economic returns, and disciplinary differences all make...

From BLOG@CACM

John McCarthy

The contributions and personality of John McCarthy, one of the pioneers of computer science.

What We Owe Google, and What Google Owes ­Us
From BLOG@CACM

What We Owe Google, and What Google Owes ­Us

We rely on online information sources—maybe too much. What is our responsibility to make sure that they're accurate, and what responsibility do the sources have...

Research Directions For Machine Learning and Algorithms
From BLOG@CACM

Research Directions For Machine Learning and Algorithms

An in-depth discussion of near-term research directions for machine learning and algorithms.

Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations
From BLOG@CACM

Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations

That picture of you at a family reunion, squinting into the sun, can rarely be delimited by a physical location once it is placed on the web. Instead, information...

Embracing Noise or Why Computer Scientists Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Errors
From BLOG@CACM

Embracing Noise or Why Computer Scientists Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Errors

Precision is not required in everything or even most things.  Failures are best handled by expecting them all the time, not treating them as exceptions.  We should...

Explaining Science and Engineering
From BLOG@CACM

Explaining Science and Engineering

As I have followed the international news regarding the Japanese disaster, I have been struck by the challenges each news organization has faced in explaining technical...
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