We’re Too Late For ‘First’ in CS1
By the time students get to undergraduate CS1, they already have lots of ideas about computation. Objects, hardware, breadth, functions first--none of that really matters. There is no more "first" in CS1.
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2010 Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach Awards
This year, I again had the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the IEEE Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, both of which were presented at SC10 in New Orleans. These eponymously named awards recognize truly outstanding contributions to high-performance computing, in honor of two early leaders of our field.
Security Advice; Malvertisements; and CS Education in Qatar
Greg Linden discusses security advice and the cost of user effort, Jason Hong considers the increase in malvertisements, and Mark Guzdial writes about gender and CS education in Qatar.
SC10: Green500 and Booth ‘Awards’
SC10 has included several lists that rank supercomputers according to different criteria. The November 2010 Green500, focusing on energy efficiency, is out and has some interesting surprises.
Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration
About the successful game design program for students at McKinley Tech and George Mason University which encourages young people to study STEM.
SC10: Dally Keynote, Heterogeneous Computing Systems
This post provides some impressions from Wednesday, November 17, at SC10, including Bill Dally's keynote address and panel discussions on heterogeneous computing.
Welcome to SC10: Opening Keynote, Top500 List
SC10—the premier conference for supercomputing—has begun. This post touches on a few highlights from the first day of the full technical program, including the keynote by Clayton Christensen, the official release of the Top500 list, and some observations on the exhibit floor.
Watts Humphrey: In Honor of a Pioneer
Watts Humphrey left us a few weeks ago. His contributions to professional software engineering have been essential.
Computer Science as Value Added to a Liberal Education
Computer science education is valuable, even to those who do not major in computer science. Those non-CS major informants who talk about that value are doing us a great service.
Massive Scale Data Mining For Education
With the increased use of computers in education, there will be a big new opportunity for computers to learn to help students learn.
Rethinking the Systems Review Process
Tessa Lau launches a discussion about the acceptance criteria for HCI systems papers at CHI, UIST, and other conferences.
Computers Are a Tool, Even in Education
Computers in schools should be making teachers' jobs easier, making it easier for students to learn, and increasing student achievement in measurable ways. Little else matters.
Betwixt and between ubiquitous consumer software and the ethereal realm of ultra-high-performance computing, lies the excluded middle, the world of day-to-day computational science problems.
Fixing the Process of Computer Science Refereeing
There is a simple way to make refereeing better, almost overnight. It takes a bit of courage, but it would restore honesty and quality to the process.
Grace: A Manifesto For a New Educational Object-Oriented Programming Language
At SPLASH 2010, Andrew Black, Kim B. Bruce, and James Noble presented their manifesto for a new educational object-oriented programming language called Grace.
Can Randomly Generated Code Fix Software Bugs?
Can the principles of evolution be applied to software code and used to improve it? Stephanie Forrest thinks so—and has some encouraging data to prove it.
Should Students Buy an iPad or a Year’s Supply of Pot Noodles?
Considering whether an iPad would be a good educational investment for a student.
How Should Peer Review Evolve?
A simmering debate on peer review processes threatens to boil to the surface of various discussion forums for the scientific communities and the public at large. What are the issues, historical context, and issues we must consider?
When a Crisis Doesn’t Look Like a Crisis
Do we have a crisis in U.S. STEM (and particularly) CS education or don't we? It could be that all the commentators are right, and the problem is too few of the right kinds of graduates.
Computer Science Needs Education Schools. Desperately.
Improving high-school computer science in the United States is critical for the success and growth of computing education. To do that, we need teachers. To get teachers, we need Education schools.
UIST 2010 has concluded with Jaron Lanier's inspiring and profound keynote after another set of paper presentations demonstrating innovative UI technology.
Two papers about enhanced mouse cursors quickly drew my attention today. I briefly introduce these papers among other interesting topics of the second day of UIST 2010.
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing had two special technical tracks added to this year's program: open source and human-computer interaction (HCI). While I was definitely happy to see the open source track, it was the HCI talks that really got me excited.
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.
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