August 2010 - Vol. 53 No. 8

Features

News Aug 1 2010

It has been almost a year since I assumed the editor-in-chief role for Journal of the ACM (JACM). It seems the right time to share some thoughts on how ACM's oldest publication is doing and where it might be headed.

Victor Vianu

Computing Applications

News Aug 1 2010

In the Virtual Extension

Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.

CACM Staff

Opinion Letters to the editor Aug 1 2010

CS Expertise For Institutional Review Boards

IRBs need computer scientists, a point highlighted by the Viewpoint "Institutional Review Boards and Your Research" by Simson L. Garfinkel and Lorrie Faith Cranor (June 2010). The column was timely but also somewhat misleading.

CACM Staff

BLOG@CACM Aug 1 2010

The War Against Spam; and More

Greg Linden asks if spammers have been defeated; Michael Bernstein discusses Clay Shirky's keynote speech at CSCW 2010; and Erika S. Poole writes about how the digital world can help parents cope with the death of a child.

Greg Linden, Michael Bernstein, and Erika Shehan Poole

Computing Applications

Opinion CACM online Aug 1 2010

Print Is Not Just Ink Anymore

The world of Communications is not contained in the pages of a monthly magazine. Like other publications, it has expanded over time into a variety of electronic formats for members and readers. Each format delivers something its counterparts do not.

David Roman

Computing Applications

News Aug 1 2010

Mechanism Design Meets Computer Science

A field emerging from economics is teaming up with computer science to improve auctions, supply chains, and communication protocols.

Gary Anthes

Computing Applications

DARPA Network Challenge red weather balloons

News Aug 1 2010

Looking Beyond Stereoscopic 3D’s Revival

Researchers working in vision and graphics are attempting to develop new techniques and technologies to overcome the current limitations in stereoscopic 3D.

Kirk L. Kroeker

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

News Aug 1 2010

Making Sense of Real-Time Behavior

Data captured by sensors worn on the human body and analyzed in near real-time could transform our understanding of human behavior, health, and society.

Sarah Underwood

Computing Applications

Alex Pentland and researchers at MIT's Media Lab

News Aug 1 2010

Celebrating the Legacy of Plato

The PLATO@50 Conference marked the semicentennial of the computer system that was the forerunner of today's social media and interactive education.

Kirk L. Kroeker

Architecture and Hardware

News Aug 1 2010

Gödel Prize and Other CS Awards

Sanjeev Arora, Joseph S.B. Mitchell, and other researchers are recognized for their contributions to computer science.

Jack Rosenberger

Computing Applications

Opinion Economic and business dimensions Aug 1 2010

Is the Internet a Maturing Market?

Two concerns dominate the current debates over U.S. Internet policy: the relatively low level of U.S. broadband adoption; and the debate over network neutrality. Interestingly, both may simply reflect the way innovation evolves as markets mature.

Christopher S. Yoo

Computing Applications

Opinion Education Aug 1 2010

Preparing Computer Science Students For the Robotics Revolution

Robotics will inspire dramatic changes in the CS curriculum.

David S. Touretzky

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Emerging markets Aug 1 2010

Has China Caught Up in IT?

An assessment of the relative achievements in IT infrastructure, firms, and innovation in China.

Ping Gao and Jiang Yu

Computing Applications

Opinion Kode Vicious Aug 1 2010

Presenting Your Project

The what, the how, and the why of giving an effective presentation.

George V. Neville-Neil

Computing Applications

Opinion Privacy and security Aug 1 2010

Remembrances of Things Pest

Recalling malware milestones.

Eugene H. Spafford

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint Aug 1 2010

Rights For Autonomous Artificial Agents?

The growing role of artificial agents necessitates modifying legal frameworks to better address human interests.

Samir Chopra

Architecture and Hardware

News Interview Aug 1 2010

An Interview With Edsger W. Dijkstra

The computer science luminary, in one of his last interviews before his death in 2002, reflects on a programmer's life.

Philip L. Frana and Thomas J. Misa

Computing Applications

Practice Aug 1 2010

Software Development with Code Maps

Could ubiquitous hand-drawn code map diagrams become a thing of the past?

Robert DeLine, Gina Venolia, and Kael Rowan

Computing Applications

Practice Aug 1 2010

Moving to the Edge: A CTO Roundtable on Network Virtualization

Leading experts debate how virtualization and clouds impact network service architectures.

Mache Creeger

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Aug 1 2010

Seven Principles For Selecting Software Packages

Everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask about the decision-making process.

Jan Damsgaard and Jan Karlsbjerg

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2010

The Singularity System

Safe, modern programming languages let Microsoft rethink the architectural trade-offs in its experimental operating system.

James Larus and Galen Hunt

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2010

Predicting the Popularity of Online Content

Early patterns of Digg diggs and YouTube views reflect long-term user interest.

Gabor Szabo and Bernardo A. Huberman

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Review articles Aug 1 2010

Memory Models: A Case For Rethinking Parallel Languages and Hardware

Solving the memory model problem will require an ambitious and cross-disciplinary research direction.

Sarita V. Adve and Hans-J. Boehm

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2010

Technical Persepctive: Attacks Target Web Server Logic and Prey on XCS Weaknesses

A system is secure only if the entire system is secure. While this may sound obvious, achieving total security throughout a system is rarely trivial when you consider many real-world systems are constantly evolving.

Helen Wang

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2010

The Emergence of Cross Channel Scripting

Lightweight, embedded Web servers are soon about to outnumber regular Internet Web servers. We reveal a series of attacks that target Web server logic and are based on a new type of sophisticated vulnerability that we call cross channel scripting (XCS).

Hristo Bojinov, Elie Bursztein, and Dan Boneh

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2010

Technical Persepctive: Large-Scale Sound and Precise Program Analysis

You are given a program. Will it crash? Is it subject to a spoofing, buffer overflow, or injection attack? Is this part of it dead code? Can I replace that code fragment with a more efficient one? All of these questions require program analysis.

Fritz Henglein

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2010

Reasoning About the Unknown in Static Analysis

Static program analysis techniques cannot know certain values, such as the value of user input or network state, at analysis time. While such unknown values need to be treated as nondeterministic choices made by the program's execution environment, it is still possible to glean very useful information about how such statically unknown values may or must influence computation.

Isil Dillig, Thomas Dillig, and Alex Aiken

Computing Applications

Opinion Last byte Aug 1 2010

Puzzled: Figures on a Plane

Welcome to three new puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is (as yet) unsolved. In each, the issue is how your intuition matches up with the mathematics.

Peter Winkler

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Virtual extension Aug 1 2010

Intelligent Service Machine

The service sector is becoming increasingly important to the economies of many countries, especially developed countries. OECD recently released a report noting that government policy in developed countries has not been attuned to the service sector.

Wei-Fung Tung and Soe-Tsyr Yuan

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Virtual extension Aug 1 2010

How a Service-Oriented Architecture May Change the Software Development Process

Software development practices have evolved substantially during the past decade. As so called "agile" approaches have gained more acceptance, the service-oriented approach to IT architecture has become an important alternative to traditional software development.

Marc N. Haines and Marcus A. Rothenberger

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Virtual extension Aug 1 2010

thinkflickrthink: A Case Study on Strategic Tagging

The growth both in quantity and diversity of online communities across the World Wide Web, along with a number of new technologies that enhance both social interaction and content management, have bred an array of increasingly participatory practices.

Eugenio Tisselli

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Virtual extension Aug 1 2010

Plat_Forms: Is There One Best Web Development Technology?

Software developers during their work face a multitude of options. There are methodological choices and technological choices. While solid research is available on some methodological topics, there is hardly any high-quality information on how specific technologies influence development success.

Lutz Prechelt

Computing Applications

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