DARPA simulations teach habits of thought so soldiers respond on the first day of combat as if they had been there a week. More often than not, it's don't shoot, talk instead.
Personal, mobile synchronous and asynchronous communication has proven to be very desirable for all types of users, with estimates of more than a half-billion mobile phones sold each year [2]. Nokia Research Center's User Experience Group, working with other user practitioners in Nokia, seeks to understand why people do the things they do with their mobile communication devices and proposes solutions that best address their wants and needs. In accordance with the principles of user-centric product concept design [4], the solutions are designed to inform and inspire the product creation process within Nokia. Given that the group works three to eight years ahead of what appears on the market, confidentiality concerns restrict disclosure of many of these concepts and the findings on which these concepts are based. Instead, in this article we share some of the essential lessons learned from our projects centering on the early stages of product concept development. Two areas have proved to be particularly challenging in this respect: coping with multiple contexts and multiple cultures in the study of mobility.
I strongly disagree with the implication in Steven M. Bellovin et al.’s "Inside Risks" column "Internal Surveillance, External Risks" (Dec. 2007) that because the U.S. is a transit point for so much transcontinental international Internet traffic, U.S. government agencies should be able to intercept international communications transiting the U.S. Internet infrastructure. They said that if […]
Crunching unstructured text rather than numbers is the basis for a new class of high-value applications ranging from regulatory compliance monitoring to business intelligence.
Many organizations are successful with software reuse at fine to medium granularities — ranging from objects, subroutines, and components through software product lines. However, relatively little has been published on very large-grained reuse.
The "Viewpoint" by Norman Matloff ("Globalization and the American IT Worker," Nov. 2004) was offensive and its publication in Communications inappropriate. Its point was impossible to miss: The U.S. should take action to preserve its economic superiority in IT, as well as its superiority in innovation. High-paying, high-technology jobs should be kept in the U.S. […]
I especially liked Phillip Armour’s idea of viewing projects through the lens of knowledge acquisition ("The Business of Software," Nov. 2002). I work for a European pharmaceutical wholesaler and retailer, currently dealing with the first stages of a project to replace wholesale supply chain systems across Europe in conjunction with a large consulting firm. Though […]
The literature in the field of project management, especially the literature about risk, is particularly rich in advice about addressing software failure. For all the discussion of failures, however, there is one factor that is rarely included — failure caused by subversive stakeholders.
The globalization of Internet technologies has brought about tremendous changes in how a business should be and could be run regardless of where the business is. As a leader in the transition from a planned economy to a market economy, China is believed to be the world’s “super economic power” in the decades to come.4 […]
Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
