The goal of ACM China Council is threefold: to increase the number of high-quality ACM activities, to raise ACM's visibility, and to contribute to advancing computing as a science and profession. We can report significant progress in these areas since our 2010 launch.
April 2012 - Vol. 55 No. 4
Features
Opinion Letters to the editor
I was disappointed by Robert Green's and Henry Ledgard's emphasis in "Coding Guidelines: Finding the Art in the Science" (Dec. 2011) on "alignment, naming, use of white space, use of context, syntax highlighting, and IDE choice." As effective as these aspects of beautiful code may be, they are at best only skin deep.
The Power of Computing; Design Guidelines in CS Education
Daniel Reed writes about how computing systems increase human intellect and abilities. Mark Guzdial discusses the need to avoid polarized and extreme positions in education and the trend toward design-based research.
Scientific data is expanding at an unprecedented rate. While new tools are helping preserve this data, funding must be increased and policy coordination needs improvement.
Voice recognition programs like Siri are now capable of understanding spoken commands, recognizing a conversation's context, and answering questions in a personable manner.
Opinion Technology strategy and management
Can Services and Platform Thinking Help the U.S. Postal Service?
How the U.S. Postal Service might improve the efficiency of its delivery platform.
Opinion Emerging markets
Information Technology and Gross National Happiness
Connecting digital technologies and happiness.
Opinion Broadening participation
Improving Gender Composition in Computing
Combining academic and industry representation, the NCWIT Pacesetters program works to increase the participation of girls and women in computing.
Opinion Viewpoint
Is Human Mobility Tracking a Good Idea?
Considering the trade-offs associated with human mobility tracking.
Why LINQ Matters: Cloud Composability Guaranteed
The benefits of composability are becoming clear in software engineering.
Interactive Dynamics For Visual Analysis
A taxonomy of tools that support the fluent and flexible use of visualizations.
CPU DB: Recording Microprocessor History
With the open CPU DB database, you can mine microprocessor trends over the past 40 years.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Sample Size in Usability Studies
Magic numbers are strictly hocus-pocus, so usability studies must test many more subjects than is usually assumed.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
What Agile Teams Think of Agile Principles
Even after almost a dozen years, they still deliver solid guidance for software development teams and their projects.
Research and Advances Review articles
Surveying a suite of algorithms that offer a solution to managing large document archives.
Research and Advances Review articles
Putting the ‘Smarts’ Into the Smart Grid: A Grand Challenge For Artificial Intelligence
A research agenda for making the smart grid a reality.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Building Robust Dynamical Simulation Systems
Computational power has been widely used to predict the behavior of dynamical systems using computer simulations, which are often used as an adjunct to or substitute for a dynamical system when a simple closed form analytic solution is not possible.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Asynchronous Contact Mechanics
Physicists have long observed physical phenomena and developed mathematical models to describe them. The advent of computers has allowed us to implement these models as software in a computational environment, launching the field of physical simulation.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Who Knows?: Searching For Expertise on the Social Web
It is difficult to remember what people had to do to find the answer to a question before the Web. One option might be to call a friend who might know the answer. This instinct to call someone is baked into the DNA of Aardvark, the social question and answering engine.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Searching the Village: Models and Methods For Social Search
With Aardvark, a social search engine, users ask a question, either by IM, e-mail, Web input, text message, or voice. Aardvark then routes the question to the person in the user's extended social network most likely to be able to answer it.
