The Turing Centenary is now behind us and we can afford some reflection on what has transpired. There is a risk, however, that in our focus on highlighting Turing's seminal contributions we may have gone from celebration to hagiography.
January 2013 - Vol. 56 No. 1
Features
Opinion From the president
In most formulations, robots have the ability to manipulate and affect the real world. I would like to posit, however, that the notion of robot could usefully be expanded to include programs that perform functions, ingest input and produce output that has a perceptible effect.
Opinion Letters to the Editor
Computer Science Is Not a Science
To the question Vinton G. Cerf addressed in his President's Letter "Where Is the Science in Computer Science?" (Oct. 2012), my first answer would be that there isn't any. A true science like physics or chemistry studies some aspect of physical reality.
FY12 was an outstanding year for ACM. Membership reached an all-time high for the 10th consecutive year. We witnessed our global hubs in Europe, India, and China take root and flourish.
Daniel Reed on straddling the intellectual divide between technology experts and policymakers.
Side channels give out information that can be used to crack secrets, but researchers are identifying the holes and trying to close them.
The leading open source system for processing big data continues to evolve, but new approaches with added features are on the rise.
In repackaging other companies' news, some news aggregators are diverting readers and ad dollars, and, critics argue, undercutting the incentive to spend money on original reporting. It is an economic and ethical problem without a clear legal fix.
Opinion Technology strategy and management
In search of a middle ground in the intellectual property wars.
Opinion The business of software
How We Build Things: <i> . . . and Why Things Are 90% Complete</i>
It seems to be a law of software development that things always take longer than we expect. When a project manager talks to a designer, programmer, or tester and tries to get a sense of how "complete" the assigned task is, the normal reply is "about 90%."
Opinion Law and technology
Beyond Location: Data Security in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century
Viewing evolving data security issues as engineering problems to be solved.
Opinion Historical reflections
Five Lessons from Really Good History
Lessons learned from four award-winning books on the history of information technology.
Opinion Viewpoint
Considering how to combine the best elements of conferences and journals.
Browser Security: Appearances Can Be Deceiving
A discussion with Jeremiah Grossman, Ben Livshits, Rebecca Bace, and George Neville-Neil
The Web Won’t Be Safe or Secure Until We Break It
Unless you have taken very particular precautions, assume every website you visit knows exactly who you are.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Human Mobility Characterization from Cellular Network Data
Anonymous location data from cellular phone networks sheds light on how people move around on a large scale.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Large genomic databases with interactive access require new, layered abstractions, including separating "evidence" from "inference."
Research and Advances Review articles
Computer Security and the Modern Home
A framework for evaluating security risks associated with technologies used at home.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Visualization, Understanding, and Design
Photographs capture the moment; paintings convey perception, impression, and feeling; illustrations tell stories. Computer graphics aims to enrich all these artistic practices through technology. The following paper is a watershed in depiction, creating imagery that gets ideas across.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Illustrating How Mechanical Assemblies Work
How-things-work visualizations use a variety of visual techniques to depict the operation of complex mechanical assemblies. We present an automated approach for generating such visualizations.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Finding People in Depth
The following article by Shotton et al. describes a landmark computer vision system that takes a single depth image containing a person and automatically estimates the pose of the person's body in 3D.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from Single Depth Images
We propose a new method to quickly and accurately predict human pose — the 3-D positions of body joints — from a single depth image, without depending on information from preceding frames.
Opinion Last byte
Future Tense: Share My Enlightenment
From the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, with boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what could be. I self-publish, and you get to sail my aether wave for free.
