Stagecast Creator lets children and other novice programmers build interactive stories, games, and simulations without syntactic programming languages.
A system needs the right level of intelligence to infer the correct generalizations from examples while providing enough feedback to keep the user in control.
There is no Moore’s Law for user interfaces. Human-computer interaction has not changed fundamentally for nearly two decades. Most users interact with computers by typing, pointing, and clicking. The majority of work in human-computer interfaces (HCI) in recent decades has been aimed at creating graphical user interfaces that give users direct control and perdictability. These […]
I found Vir Phoha’s "Viewpoint" (Sept. 1999, p. 29) on email instruction intelligent and of interest. I recently taught an informal, short email-based course in planning and staging a medieval feast. Normally, this course is taught as a two-hour lecture without practical exercises for six to 12 people. In this particular one, my class consisted […]
Only a few years ago it was difficult to imagine that one day we would have the ability to access the latest news—instantly—about anything in the world from anywhere in the world. Today, it’s difficult to believe that having access to all this news is oftentimes too much of a good thing. In fact, what […]
Professionals looking for IT-related jobs in the U.S. can expect starting salaries this year to increase an average of 6.8% over their 1999 levels, according to RHI Consulting, Menlo Park, Calif. Those specializing in systems integration will see the sharpest rise in base compensation, with starting salaries projected to increase more than 17% over 1999. […]
In most business system developments, the information model is developed separately from the functional model. Information models or data models can only capture limited business semantics (see Figure 1), which include four entities: Customer, Account, Account type, and Transaction together with the cardinality of the relationship between them, such as “A customer may have many […]
Open any popular article on public-key infrastructure (PKI) and you’re likely to read that a PKI is desperately needed for e-commerce to flourish. Don’t believe it. E-commerce is flourishing, PKI or no PKI. Web sites are happy to take your order, even if you use a secure connection, or don’t have a certificate. Fortunately, you’re […]
IT managers commiserate over the challenges of convincing senior executives that, contrary to popular belief, outsourcing isn't always a money-saving option.
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.