Communications of the ACM
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What Does Digitization Mean, and When Did It Begin?
Digitization is on everyone's lips. What does digitization mean and when did it begin?
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...
From BLOG@CACM
From 'Must' and 'Unsuitable' to Design Guidelines in Computing Education
Rhetoric in education tends to be politicized and polarized, and computing education is no different. Research in computing education might learn from design-based...
From BLOG@CACM
Algorithm Visualizations and Community Building
If you’re interested in using or developing algorithm visualizations (AVs), you should visit AlgoViz.org, a portal dedicated to creating a repository of AVs and...
From BLOG@CACM
Intellectual Amplification via Computing
As the recent performance of IBM's Watson system on the game show Jeopardy! illustrated, the combination of large-scale data, rich algorithm suites and powerful...
From BLOG@CACM
What 'Beginning' Students Already Know: The Evidence
Detailed data collection at ETH Zurich over eight years shows what entering computer science students already know in computer usage and programming.
From BLOG@CACM
Again: The One Sure Way to Advance Software Engineering
There is one proven way to improve the state of software, following the the airline industry's spectacular improvements of safety. The IT industry ignores it. Why...
From BLOG@CACM
Works in Progress: MIA
It is time we extracted a sample of cultural DNA from computing's history and engineered a new generation of contemplative, informal workshops. After gestation,...
From BLOG@CACM
Welcome to SC10: Opening Keynote, Top500 List
SC10—the premier conference for supercomputing—has begun. This post touches on a few highlights from the first day of the full technical program, including the...
From BLOG@CACM
Watts Humphrey: In Honor of a Pioneer
Watts Humphrey left us a few weeks ago. His contributions to professional software engineering have been essential.
From BLOG@CACM
HPC and the Excluded Middle
Betwixt and between ubiquitous consumer software and the ethereal realm of ultra-high-performance computing, lies the excluded middle, the world of day-to-day computational...
From BLOG@CACM
Can Randomly Generated Code Fix Software Bugs?
Can the principles of evolution be applied to software code and used to improve it? Stephanie Forrest thinks so—and has some encouraging data to prove it.
From BLOG@CACM
Old Geeks Never Die, They Just Get Grumpier
With age comes wisdom, or so they say. But when we geeks age, does it make us wiser or just grumpier?
From BLOG@CACM
Why Is Great Design So Hard (Part Two)?
Previously, I asked the question of why great design is so hard to integrate in organizations. In this article, I take a look at how Apple does design, and what...
From BLOG@CACM
The First ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC)
Earlier this summer the first ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing was held in Indianapolis, Indiana. With three stellar keynotes and an exceptional program, the inaugural...
From BLOG@CACM
Better Game Playing Using Parallel Algorithms
Innovations in playing the game "Go" using Monte Carlo Tree Search and parallel algorithms.
From BLOG@CACM
On Software Updates and Version Changes
Since the beginning of software industry, developers have produced updates for their products on a regular basis. How do these updates affect the software itself...
From BLOG@CACM
Why Is Great Design So Hard?
Why is good design so hard to accomplish for organizations? People are coming to the realization that design really matters, but it's not that they don't want to...
From BLOG@CACM
In Vivo, In Vitro, In Silico
These “grand challenges” of systems biology encompass almost every aspect of modern computing, from numerical and symbolic methods through data management and analytics...
From BLOG@CACM
Web Applications Crave Memory
Big web applications are hungry for RAM. They want lots of low power RAM. And they want little else.
From BLOG@CACM