January 2002 - Vol. 45 No. 1

January 2002 issue cover image

Features

Opinion Editorial pointers

Editorial Pointers

Today’s newspaper proved a keen barometer for the timeliness of this issue. In the news section, the Associated Press reports that courts often favor employers who monitor and discipline employees for nonwork-related Internet use in the office. Indeed, we should expect an increase in disciplinary actions and firings for personal email and Web use on […]
News News track

News Track

So, you thought walking away from your desk is all it takes to leave your work behind. Sorry. Researchers at AT&T Laboratories in Cambridge, England have created a computer empowered to automatically know where its user is, where it is, and what resources it needs as it follows its user around an office. This follow-me […]
Research and Advances Game engines in scientific research

The New Cards

The most significant recent development in gaming and graphics-intensive computing has been the availability of supercomputer-level graphics on commodity-priced graphics processing units (GPUs). Leapfrogging earlier limits, Nvidia’s Quadro2 Pro GPU delivers 31 million polygons per second at a fill rate of over one billion texture-mapped pixels per second, which makes it the world’s fastest GPU […]
Research and Advances Game engines in scientific research

Research in Human-Level AI Using Computer Games

The goal of my research group is to understand what is required for human-level artificial intelligence. A key component of our methodology is developing AI systems that behave in complex, dynamic environments with many of the properties of the world we inhabit. Although robotics might seem an obvious choice, research in robotics requires solving many […]
Research and Advances Game engines in scientific research

ARQuake: The Outdoor Augmented Reality Gaming System

With the advent of commercially available affordable wearable computers and head-mounted displays (HMDs), it is possible to develop augmented reality entertainment applications suitable for an outdoor environment. We extended an existing desktop game and developed it into the ARQuake system [4], one of the first systems that allows users to play augmented reality games outdoors—allowing […]
Research and Advances Game engines in scientific research

Unreal Tournament For Immersive Interactive Theater

CaveUT is a set of modifications to Unreal Tournament that allows it to display in panoramic (wide field of view) theaters. The result is a useful tool for educational applications and virtual reality (VR) research. Our modifications are open source and freely available to the public (see www2.sis.pitt.edu/~jacobson/ut/). CaveUT provides multiple views—left, right, up, and […]
Research and Advances Game engines in scientific research

Gamebots: A Flexible Test Bed For Multiagent Team Research

GameBots [1] is a virtual reality platform that allows the creation and evaluation of intelligent agents that interact with a rich 3D continuous dynamic environment. As opposed to previous test beds that focus on a single task and environment (such as soccer simulation [4]), GameBots does not define a single benchmark task. Instead, the GameBots […]
Research and Advances Game engines in scientific research

Testing and Demonstrating Context-Aware Services with Quake III Arena

Testing and demonstrating context-aware services can be extremely difficult. Context-aware services inherently need information such as the position of their users, but it is complicated to gather and supply services with information of that kind. Obviously, one needs to do this when the services are up and running, but it may help to simulate the […]
News

The ACM Annual Report FY01

It’s an extraordinary time to be a part of the information technology field. Advances in wireless and embedded technologies are making more of our work invisible; while Wall Street’s roller-coastering, amazing returns in worldwide e-commerce, and government debate over technology policy keep IT firmly in the spotlight. Where’s it all headed? ACM certainly took some […]
Research and Advances Internet abuse in the workplace

Introduction

The ubiquitous nature of the Internet is dramatically revolutionizing the manner in which organizations and individuals acquire and distribute information. Recent reports from the International Data Group indicate the number of people on the Internet will reach 320 million by 2002 [5]. Studies also indicate that in the U.S. alone, e-commerce will account for approximately $325 billion by 2002.
Research and Advances Internet abuse in the workplace

Abuse or Learning?

Some organizations seem to take a dim view of employees spending time surfing the Web for personal pleasure. Some organizations go to extreme measures to limit such "abuse" through monitoring activities and strict bans. However, our position is that a certain amount of playful use of computer applications in the right situation can lead to […]
Research and Advances

Inserting Ilities By Controlling Communications

For many applications, most code is not devoted to implementing the desired input-output behavior but to providing system-wide properties like reliability, availability, responsiveness, performance, security, and manageability. We call such qualities ilities. This article describes a system that enables a more complete separation of ility implementations from functional components, allowing ilities to be developed, maintained, […]
Opinion Inside risks

Uncommon Criteria

The software development process can benefit from the use of established standards and procedures to assess compliance with specified objectives, and reduce the risk of undesired behaviors. One such international standard for information security evaluation is the Common Criteria (CC, ISO IS 15408, csrc.nist.gov/cc). Although use of the CC is currently mandated in the U.S. […]

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