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May 2009 - Vol. 52 No. 5

May 2009 issue cover image

Features

Opinion Editor's letter May 1 2009

Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research

An old joke tells of a driver, returning home from a party where he had one drink too many, who hears a warning over the radio about a car careening down the wrong side of the highway. "A car?" he wondered aloud, "There are lots of cars on the wrong side of the road!" I am afraid that driver is us, the computing-research community.
Computing Applications
Opinion Letters to the editor May 1 2009

Logic of Lemmings in Compiler Innovation

I am deeply ambivalent about what I read in the contributed article "Compiler Research: The Next 50 Years" (Feb. 2009). On the one hand, its description of the field's challenges and opportunities evoke great excitement; on the other, the realities cast a discouraging pall on that excitement.
Computing Applications
News May 1 2009

Learning Goes Global

In a world that's increasingly global and interconnected, international education is growing, changing, and evolving. More than 1.5 million students a year study at schools outside their country's borders, and the nature and types of available programs are expanding, ranging from short-term programs of eight weeks or less to master's programs with a full term abroad.
Computing Applications
Practice May 1 2009

API Design Matters

It is very easy to create a bad API and rather difficult to create a good one.  Recent APIs implemented in modern programming languages make the same mistakes as their 20-year-old counterparts written in C. What can be done to get things right?
Computing Applications
Research and Advances Research highlights May 1 2009

Lest We Remember: Cold-Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys

DRAM retains its contents for several seconds after power is lost. Although DRAM becomes less reliable when it is not refreshed, it is not immediately erased, and its contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images.
Computing Applications
Research and Advances Research highlights May 1 2009

Scalable Synchronous Queues

In a thread-safe concurrent queue, consumers typically wait for producers to make data available. In a synchronous queue, producers similarly wait for consumers to take the data. We present two new nonblocking, contention-free synchronous queues that achieve high performance through a form of dualism: The underlying data structure may hold both data and, symmetrically, requests.
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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Research and Advances Virtual extension May 1 2009

Software Developers’ Views of End-Users and Project Success

For many years software development has been plagued by systems that, if they are completed at all, are limited in functionality, and are delivered over-budget and late.3 It has been suggested that an on-going “culture gap” is behind many of the problems associated with such systems,7,10 and that “poor communication” between end-users and developers has […]
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances Virtual extension May 1 2009

Designing Ubiquitous Computing Environments to Support Work Life Balance

Information technology is no longer restricted to organizational use but is as common place in the home as electricity and water. Because of this increased ubiquity, work activities infiltrate the home with ease and spontaneity and employees can carry out family activities at work effortlessly. For the employee, this has lead to "the always-connected lifestyle." However, concerns have been raised as to the possible adverse effects on work life balance.
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances Virtual extension May 1 2009

An Overview of IT Service Management

The July 2006 issue of the Communications2 was dedicated to the topic of Services Science, a new approach to viewing, developing, and deploying Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The introduction, written by Jim Spohrer and Doug Riecken, both of IBM Corporation, stated: “To the majority of computer scientists, whether in academia or industry, the term […]
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances Virtual extension May 1 2009

Toward an Information-Compatible Anti-Spam Strategy

Anti-spam researchers are in an arms race. Deploying ever-more-sophisticated identification and filtering technologies, they have kept one step ahead of the spammers. But the achievement has come at a price, and the spammers are not giving up. Rather, they are commandeering an ever-growing amount of the Internet bandwidth we all pay for.
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances Virtual extension May 1 2009

Cross-Bidding in Simultaneous Online Auctions

Online auctions have dramatically transformed the way many people trade goods and services on the Internet. The popularity of the online auction market and evolving variations in the auction format from single-item auctions to multiple-item simultaneous or sequential auctions have motivated bidders to experiment with different bidding strategies.
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances Virtual extension May 1 2009

To Trust or to Distrust, That Is the Question: Investigating the Trust-Distrust Paradox

One major obstacle to the widespread diffusion of e-commerce is consumer distrust. In the highly uncertain virtual environment, people have a more prevalent tendency to distrust than to trust, so as to avoid potentially negative consequences. Although mechanisms to promote trust have been extensively researched, it is not clear whether these recommended trust-building mechanisms would be equally effective in reducing distrust.
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Computing Applications

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