June 1981 - Vol. 24 No. 6

June 1981 issue cover image

Features

Opinion Jun 1 1981

ACM president’s letter: eating our seed corn

On July 12 and 13, 1980, the biennial meeting of Computer Science Department chairmen was held at Snowbird, Utah. This meeting, which is organized by the Computer Science Board (CSB), is a forum for the heads of the 83 departments in the United States and Canada that grant Ph.D.s in Computer Science. The meeting was attended by 56 department heads or their representatives, and by six observers from industry and government. This report was developed during the meeting as a result of intensive discussions about the crisis in Computer Science. This report was endorsed by the entire assembly.

Peter J. Denning

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Jun 1 1981

Triform programs

The concept that three process functions—initialization, production, and completion—and a separate supervisory control function are sufficient to describe the execution of a program is the basis for Triform Program design. Triform programs are composed of modules arranged in a trifurcate tree structure with each branch devoted to the performance of one and only one of the process functions. The root of the program tree is a control module which supervises process-function execution. Such trifurcate tree structures are shown to be minimum complexity structures.

Dan W. Crockett

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Jun 1 1981

Quo Vadimus: computer science in a decade

A panel discussion was held during the third biennial meeting of chairmen of Ph.D.-granting computer science departments in June, 1978 at Snowbird, Utah, a meeting sponsored by the Computer Science Board. Invitees from industry and government were also present. A report was prepared from tapes made of the discussion (Department of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University: Report #CMU-CS-80-127, June 1980). It contained all the prepared statements of the panelists, lightly edited, and the panelists' discussion in its entirety. A selection of the audience discussion was also included, rather heavily edited. The following presentation is derived from that report.

J. F. Traub

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Jun 1 1981

A discipline in crisis

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Jun 1 1981

Response to the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed ruling on standards and certification

In December 1978, the Federal Trade Commission issued a notice of intention of rulemaking in regard to the matter of Standards and Certification. In cooperation with the American National Standards Institute, of which ACM is a member, the ACM Standards Committee prepared a response to that notice and submitted it to the Commission in April 1979. The response gives a summary of the ACM Standards Committee position on a standards regulation and affords insights into the process by which procedures evolve in this area. For this reason, the response is reproduced here as a report.

John A. N. Lee

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Jun 1 1981

Random sample consensus: a paradigm for model fitting with applications to image analysis and automated cartography

A new paradigm, Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC), for fitting a model to experimental data is introduced. RANSAC is capable of interpreting/smoothing data containing a significant percentage of gross errors, and is thus ideally suited for applications in automated image analysis where interpretation is based on the data provided by error-prone feature detectors. A major portion of this paper describes the application of RANSAC to the Location Determination Problem (LDP): Given an image depicting a set of landmarks with known locations, determine that point in space from which the image was obtained. In response to a RANSAC requirement, new results are derived on the minimum number of landmarks needed to obtain a solution, and algorithms are presented for computing these minimum-landmark solutions in closed form. These results provide the basis for an automatic system that can solve the LDP under difficult viewing

Martin A. Fischler and Robert C. Bolles

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion Jun 1 1981

Computing Applications

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