August 2008 - Vol. 51 No. 8

Features

Opinion President's letter Aug 1 2008

I am writing this column in my last month as President of ACM. It's been a great opportunity to support the Association's many successful programs and to expand and firmly establish new directions. Much has been accomplished, much remains to be done.

Stuart I. Feldman

Computing Applications

Opinion Letters to the editor Aug 1 2008

Words Both Kind and Contrary

For the first time in many, many years I found Communications (July 2008) both friendly to the reader and useful. Over the years, the physical form and font of the issues were very unfriendly, let alone the content, which was quite rarified. Not this latest issue. The redesign makes the physical attributes—paper (non-glossy, yeah!), layout, […]

CACM Staff

Computing Applications

Opinion CACM online Aug 1 2008

Small Changes Hint at Bigger Things

The redesign of Communications Web site is taking place largely out of sight, though a clue to the coming changes is on the cover of this very issue. It’s sitting discretely under the name of the publication. It’s the new URL for the new site, which will launch in early 2009: cacm.acm.org. Back to Top […]

David Roman

Computing Applications

News Aug 1 2008

Designing the Perfect Auction

Distributed algorithmic mechanism design is a field at the intersection of computer science and economics.

Hal R. Varian

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

News Aug 1 2008

Access For All

Accessible technologies are improving the lives of millions of physically impaired people around the world.

Peggy Aycinena

Computing Applications

News Aug 1 2008

Challenging Poverty

Information and communication technologies are an important component in the generation of wealth. How can they help reduce poverty?

Sarah Underwood

Computing Applications

News Aug 1 2008

Remembering Jim

Both melancholy and reverential, the Jim Gray Tribute at the University of California at Berkeley honored one of computer science's leading pioneers and visionaries.

Michael Ross

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Aug 1 2008

The Profession of IT: Voices of Computing

The choir of engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who make up the bulk of our field better represents computing than the solo voice of the programmer.

Peter J. Denning

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Aug 1 2008

From the Front Lines: Software Development Amidst the Whiz of Silver Bullets

Software development organizations must accept the inevitability of silver-bullet solution proposals and devise strategies to defend against them.

Alex E. Bell

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Aug 1 2008

Education: Paving the Way For Computational Thinking

Drawing on methods from diverse disciplines---including computer science, education, sociology, and psychology---to improve computing education.

Mark Guzdial

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Aug 1 2008

Viewpoint: Envisioning the Future of Computing Research

Advances in computing have changed our lives---the Computing Community Consortium aims to help the research community continue that lineage.

Ed Lazowska

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Aug 1 2008

Interview: Donald Knuth: A Life’s Work Interrupted

In this second of a two-part interview by Edward Feigenbaum, we find Knuth, having completed three volumes of The Art of Computer Programming, drawn to creating a system to produce books digitally.

Donald Knuth

Computing Applications

Practice Aug 1 2008

Scaling in Games and Virtual Worlds

Online games and virtual worlds have familiar scaling requirements, but don't be fooled: Everything you know is wrong.

Jim Waldo

Computing Applications

Practice Aug 1 2008

CTO Storage Roundtable: Part I

Leaders in the storage world offer valuable advice for making more effective architecture and technology decisions.

Mache Creeger

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Aug 1 2008

The Rise and Fall of CORBA

There's a lot we can learn from CORBA's mistakes.

Michi Henning

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2008

Designing Games With a Purpose

Data generated as a side effect of game play also solves computational problems and trains AI algorithms.

Luis von Ahn and Laura Dabbish

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2008

The Collaborative Organization of Knowledge

Why Wikipedia's remarkable growth is sustainable.

Diomidis Spinellis and Panagiotis Louridas

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Review articles Aug 1 2008

Computer Science and Game Theory

The most dramatic interaction between CS and GT may involve game-theory pragmatics.

Yoav Shoham

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2008

Technical Perspective: A Methodology For Evaluating Computer System Performance

Computer science has long had a solid foundation for evaluating the performance of algorithms. The asymptotic complexity of the time required by an algorithm is well defined and usually tractable, allowing for a clear evaluation of whether one algorithm provides a fundamental improvement over another.

William Pugh

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2008

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee: Evaluation Methodology For the 21st Century

Evaluation methodology underpins all innovation in experimental computer science. It requires relevant workloads, appropriate experimental design, and rigorous analysis. Unfortunately, methodology is not keeping pace with the changes in our field.

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2008

Technical Perspective: Transactions Are Tomorrow’s Loads and Stores

In computer science, when we say "time is money," we typically refer to two types of time that determine the costs and benefits of a given computer program: the time it takes the program to run, and the time it takes to write and maintain it.

Nir Shavit

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2008

Composable Memory Transactions

In this paper we present a concurrency model based on transactional memory. All the usual benefits of transactional memory are present, but in addition we describe modular forms of blocking and choice that were inaccessible in earlier work.

Tim Harris, Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones, and Maurice Herlihy

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion Last byte Aug 1 2008

Puzzled: Delightful Graph Theory

Welcome to the new puzzle column. Each column will present three puzzles. The first two will have known (and usually elegant) solutions that will appear in the next issue of Communications. The third will be an open problem; good luck with that one. Readers are encouraged to submit prospective puzzles for future columns to puzzled@cacm.acm.org. We start with three delightful graph-theoretic puzzles. Here we go.

Peter Winkler

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