Careers Policy letter
ACM members have a professional duty to ensure that the public comprehends and benefits from advances in computing.
February 2009 - Vol. 52 No. 2
Features
Opinion Letters to the editor
Seven Principles For Secure E-Voting
E-voting can be as secure and confidential as paper-based voting, as discussed in "The U.S. Should Ban Paperless Electronic Voting Machines" (Oct. 2008). However, to work properly, such systems must first incorporate seven design principles.
Opinion CACM online
One of the first things you'll notice about the new Communications Web site (cacm.acm.org) is that it has different content than the monthly magazine. A distinctive example is the blogs. The site hosts two kinds.
Researchers working in computational photography are using computer vision, computer graphics, and applied optics to bring a vast array of new capabilities to digital cameras.
Researchers are recognizing the potential of position sensors to help them overcome the limitations of traditional user interfaces.
Barack Obama's presidential campaign utilized the Internet and information technology unlike any previous political campaign. How politicians and the public interact will never be the same.
ACM's premier computer graphics conference hosts its first-ever graphics event in Asia, with a more global focus.
Opinion Viewpoints
Economic and Business Dimensions: The Extent of Globalization of Software Innovation
Will the software development laboratories follow the production mills?
Careers Viewpoints
Human Computing Skills: Rethinking the K-12 Experience
Establishing the fundamentals of computational thinking is essential to improving computer science education.
Opinion Viewpoints
International Communications Tapped For Intelligence-Gathering
Governments concerned with national-security threats use the Internet to gather intelligence from communications traffic that transits local facilities. This surveillance is expanding — to the detriment of communications privacy.
Opinion Viewpoints
Inside Risks: U.S. Election After-Math
Recounting problems still associated with election integrity, transparency, and accountability.
Opinion Viewpoints
Point/Counterpoint: Network Neutrality Nuances
A discussion of divergent paths to unrestricted access of content and applications via the Internet.
Parallel Programming with Transactional Memory
While still primarily a research project, transactional memory shows promise for making parallel programming easier.
Improving Performance on the Internet
Given the Internet's bottlenecks, how can we build fast, scalable, content-delivery systems?
Research and Advances Contributed articles
2W is a result of the exponentially growing Web building on itself to move from a Web of content to a Web of applications.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Compiler Research: The Next 50 Years
Four recommendations address the major challenges to keeping compilers and high-level languages vibrant.
Research and Advances Review articles
What strategies can employers and educators use to successfully recruit, retain, and inspire women in computing?
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Tools For Information to Flow Securely and Swift-ly
Back in the old days of the Web (before 1995), Web browsers were fairly simple devices. The server's Web interface was simple enough that an auditor could at least look at it and reason about its security. Today, it's a different world.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Building Secure Web Applications With Automatic Partitioning
Swift is a new, principled approach to building Web applications that are secure by construction. Swift automatically partitions application code while providing assurance that the resulting placement is secure and efficient.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: The Complexity of Computing Nash Equilibrium
Computer science and game theory go back to the same individual, John von Neumann, and both subjects deal with the mathematization of rational decision making. Yet, for many years they continued to work apart. But in the last dozen years we have seen a fusion of the two fields.
Research and Advances Research highlights
The Complexity of Computing a Nash Equilibrium
Traditionally, computational problems fall into two classes: those that have a polynomial-time algorithm and those that are NP-hard. However, the concept of NP-hardness cannot be applied to the rare problems where "every instance has a solution."
Opinion Last byte
Puzzled: Will My Algorithm Terminate?
Welcome to three new challenging mathematical puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is as yet unsolved. In them all, I concentrate on algorithm termination, outlining some simple procedures and asking whether they always terminate or might possibly run forever.
Research and Advances Virtual extension
Networks of Contextualized Data: a Framework For Cyberinfrastructure Data Management
Data, and those who manage it, have received heightened attention in recent years. Data is widely viewed as a valuable organizational resource,5 and those charged with its management have been elevated to executive levels of the organization.9 However, as organizations respond to the ever-increasing demands for information, data management activities have become much more complex.1 […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension
For Sale By Owner Online: Who Gets the Saved Commission?
The evolution of the internet in commerce has dramatically reshaped many industries such as security trading, retail banking, and travel agency industry. It had been widely predicted that the Internet would also present a serious threat to real estate agent as a market intermediary. Recent studies show, however, that in spite of growing use of […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension
Oracle, Where Shall I Submit My Papers?
In April 2005, a group of MIT students pulled prank1 on the conference – World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics [WMSCI]10-known for sending unsolicited invitation emails to people in academia. The MIT students used software to generate bogus research papers, complete with context-free grammar, and submitted two of them to the conference. To their […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension
Automatically Profiling the Author of an Anonymous Text
Imagine that you have been given an important text of unknown authorship, and wish to know as much as possible about the unknown author (demographics, personality, cultural background, among others), just by analyzing the given text. This authorship profiling problem is of growing importance in the current global information environment– applications abound in forensics, security, […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension
Shadow Systems: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
We know them as shadow systems, workaround systems, and even feral systems. Operating at the fringes of an organization, they covertly replicate the data and functionality of formally sanctioned systems. Because of their duplicative acts, they are often said to have negative consequences for their hosts: undermining official systems,12 sapping valuable resources and corrupting organizational […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension
Why Is Management Is In Trouble and How to Save It: Lessons Learned in the Automotive Industry
CIOS often face difficulties justifying their requests for investment in information systems (IS). Clear, simple, definitive evidence that investment in IS will benefit the total organization is hard to come by, and the evidence that is available requires the kind of knowledge and training that the CIO (and perhaps his or her staff) possess but […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension
Why File Sharing Networks Are Dangerous?
Peer-to-peer (P2P) software clients have become part of the standard suite of PC applications for many users. With millions of users worldwide sharing music, video, software, and pictures,15 file movement on these networks represent a significant percentage of internet traffic. Beyond the much discussed copyright infringement issues, P2P networks threaten both corporate and individual security. […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension
Technical Opinion: Multitasking With Laptops During Meetings
For what purposes do people use their laptops during meetings? Recent press articles and academic studies describe a pervasive tendency to use computers for multiple purposes during lectures and workplace meetings.2,3,4 Participants may use their laptops to take notes in electronic format, follow presentation slides at their own pace, or look up related information on […]
