ICPS Offers Major Research Venue
The ACM International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS) has recently being relaunched as a publication venue for research activities.
February 2011 - Vol. 54 No. 2
Features
Opinion Letters to the editor
Shine the Light of Computational Complexity
Regarding Moshe Y. Vardi's view of computational complexity in "On P, NP, and Computational Complexity" (Nov. 2010), I'd like to add that the goal of computational complexity is to explore the potential and limitation of efficient computation.
To ensure the timely publication of articles, Communications created the Virtual Extension (VE) to expand the page limitations of the print edition by bringing readers the same high-quality articles in an online-only format. VE articles undergo the same rigorous review process as those in the print edition and are accepted for publication on merit. The following synopses are from articles now available in their entirety to ACM members via the Digital Library.
Jason Hong considers how software companies could effectively incorporate first-rate design into their products.
Opinion CACM online
End of Days For Communications in Print?
The rise in online publishing raises a question about the durability of print publications and of the printed magazine version of Communications of the ACM. How long will it last?
Chipping Away at Greenhouse Gases
Power-saving processor algorithms have the potential to create significant energy and cost savings.
Information Theory After Shannon
Purdue University's Science of Information Center seeks new principles to answer the question 'What is information?'
Maurice Wilkes: The Last Pioneer
Computer science has lost not only a great scientist, but an important link to the electronic computing revolution that took place in the 1940s.
Crowdsourcing is based on a simple but powerful concept: Virtually anyone has the potential to plug in valuable information.
ACM Launches New Digital Library
More than 50 years of computing literature is augmented, streamlined, and joined to powerful new tools for retrieval and analysis.
Opinion Privacy and security
Cyberterrorism is a concept that appears recurrently in contemporary media. This coverage is particularly interesting if one believes, as I do, that no act of cyberterrorism has ever yet occurred and is unlikely to at any time in the near future.
Opinion Economic and business dimensions
Household Demand For Broadband Internet Service
How much are consumers willing to pay for broadband service? Our research estimates consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for broadband service and shows a high valuation for broadband for average consumers, and even for inexperienced users.
Opinion Inside risks
The Growing Harm of Not Teaching Malware
Revisiting the need to educate professionals to defend against malware in its various guises.
Opinion Kode Vicious
With the amount of disk space available to the modern programmer, and the lack of parental supervision in most workplaces, the time for programmers to "clean your room!" and store their checkouts neatly never comes.
Opinion Education
A series of recent reports claim the U.S. education system is in a very severe crisis; others suggest the crisis is "overblown." An explanation that satisfies these differing claims is that we are educating large numbers of students, but not well enough to address future needs.
Opinion Viewpoint
Technology, Conferences, and Community
Considering the impact and implications of changes in scholarly communication.
Finding Usability Bugs with Automated Tests
Ideally, all software should be easy to use and accessible for a wide range of people. However, software often falls short of these basic goals. We therefore need ways to help us discover usability and accessibility problems efficiently and effectively.
A Plea from Sysadmins to Software Vendors: 10 Do's and Don'ts
What can software vendors do to make the lives of system administrators a little easier?
System Administration Soft Skills
How can system administrators reduce stress and conflict in the workplace?
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Vision-Based Hand-Gesture Applications
Body posture and finger pointing are a natural modality for human-machine interaction, but first the system must know what it's seeing.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Google's Web Tables and Deep Web Crawler identify and deliver this otherwise inaccessible resource directly to end users.
Research and Advances Review articles
What would it take for a true personal knowledge base to generate the benefits envisioned by Vannevar Bush?
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Markov Meets Bayes
The history of probabilistic sequence models dates back to Markov at the turn of the last century. Though informed by decades of research, current practices are still something of a black art.
Research and Advances Research highlights
The sequence memoizer is a new hierarchical Bayesian model for discrete sequence data that captures long range dependencies and power-law characteristics, while remaining computationally attractive.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: DRAM Errors in the Wild
In order to advance the field, knowledge of the types of memory errors at the system level, their frequencies, and conditions that exacerbate or are unrelated to higher error rates are of critical importance.
Research and Advances Research highlights
DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study
While a large body of work exists on DRAM in lab conditions, little has been reported on real DRAM failures in large production clusters. In this paper, we analyze measurements of memory errors in a large fleet of commodity servers over a period of 2.5 years.
Opinion Last byte
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.
Opinion Viewpoints: Virtual extension
The Need For a New Graduation Rite of Passage
A new organization is being proposed that is solely intended to promote and recognize the ethical and moral behavior in graduates of computing-related degree programs as they transition to careers of service to society.
Research and Advances Contributed articles: Virtual extension
10 Scientific Problems in Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality was one of the 14 Grand Challenges identified as awaiting engineering solutions for the 21st century announced in 2008 by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Here, I explore 10 related open VR challenges.
Research and Advances Review articles: Virtual extension
Are the OECD Guidelines at 30 Showing Their Age?
This article briefly reviews the factors that led to production of the Guidelines on the Transborder Flows of Personal Data in the 1970s and some of the key points in them.
