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What’s the Best Way to Teach Computer Science to Beginners?
Mark Guzdial questions the practice of teaching programming to new CS students by having them practice programming largely on their own.
Rising Enrollment Might Capsize Retention and Diversity Efforts
Rapid increase of enrollment in CS classes in the US might undermine efforts to improve diversity.
In the NIPS experiment, 10% of papers submitted to the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation went through its review process twice, with results compared.
Some Thoughts For Computer Science Teaching Assistants (and Faculty)
Some musings on practices that can help create a positive educational environment for all students in a class.
Recommended SF Reading For Computer Scientists
Courtesy of a SIGCSE 2014 BOF, here are some SF books containing themes of special interest to computer scientists.
A Valuable Lesson, and Whither Hadoop?
Valerie Barr considers outcomes from the Grace Hopper Celebration, while Michael Stonebraker ponders the past, present, and possible future of the "Hadoop stack."
Why the ‘Data Lake’ Is Really A ‘Data Swamp’
The notion of putting all one's data into a "data lake" to encourage employees to run analytics has a serious flaw.
The Role of Tech Firms in Computing Education
Computing education can't be about jobs. It has to be about schools to reach everyone.
Yet Another Major Data Breach, But Will This Time Be Any Different?
Why is our community having such an anemic response to all of these major data breaches? What can we do differently? What should we be doing differently?
HPC: Computational Performance vs. Human Productivity
One of the themes at SC14 was the tension between developing programs that run fast vs. the time required by humans to develop and maintain fast-running programs.
Women in STEM, Women in Computer Science: We’re Looking At It Incorrectly
A rethinking of how best to analyze data on women's undergraduate degrees in STEM disciplines.
Meeting Student and Teacher Needs in Computing Education
Mark Guzdial reports on the 2014 meeting of the ACM Education Council, where updates from its global representatives led to action plans.
Envisioning Your Ideal Live-In Robot at Miraikan
Miraikan in Tokyo showcases Japanese technologies and challenges visitors to think how humans can improve their quality of life while mitigating risks.
Doing Our Part to Show Why HPC Matters
As managers and practitioners in the HPC community part of our responsibility is to make sure that everyone we come into professional contact with appreciates how broadly HPC touches our daily lives. From the products we consume, to the financial services we employ and the medical treatment we receive, HPC matters
Locality, Locality, Locality: A Note from SC14
Steadily growing chips, systems, and application parallelism are driving the movement of data across larger distances in systems, and data locality is becoming one of the major topics in efficient parallel computing. Locality has emerged as a significant theme at SC14, and research in this area is growing as researchers struggle to effectively manage this growing challenge to HPC application performance.
At SC14, graduate students mentor undergraduates interested in pursuing advanced degrees in fields related to high performance computing.
The Toy Aisle Matters More Than Ever: Girls and Computing
A look at the toy aisle and the message it sends girls (and boys), from the 1970s to today.
Animal-Human Computer Interaction: The First International Congress Report
Was the Internet communication really invented exclusively for humans, or do you think your cat should join your weekend teleconference?
SC14 launched this year’s gala with a new plenary session to highlight the advancements that HPC enables in everything from soap to safer cars to the discovery of the origins of our universe.
Is There a 10x Gap Between Best and Average Programmers? And How Did It Get There?
There's not much evidence for a 10x programming productivity gap, but it doesn't matter from an education perspective.
HPC Matters, and We Have Video Evidence
SC14 gets underway this week in New Orleans, LA (USA). This year the conference has produced a series of accessible videos highlighting why — in terms that hopefully everyone can understand — HPC matters to all of us.
Lessons from Winnie the Pooh: Sustainable Cyberinfrastructure
The longitudinal value of research data often accrues to disciplines other than those where it was created. We need a new model that judiciously balances investment between the "next big thing" and sustainable cyberinfrastructure, for the latter is itself a crucial enabler of discovery.
Computing Is The Safe STEM Career Choice Today
The US-BLS 2012-2022 employment projections predict that nearly 3 out of 4 new STEM jobs and 3 out of 5 total STEM jobs will be in computing.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get InvolvedCommunications 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.
Learn More