BLOG@CACM

The Importance of Quest to Learn

Sep 21 2010

Why we need more educational projects like Quest To Learn, a New York program in which children's learning is based around game playing and design.

Judy Robertson

Sep 15 2010

Talking With PCAST

I told three stories at PCAST — The Google Story, Model Checking, and Machine Learning — as a way to illustrate the importance of sustained federal funding of basic research in computer science, the rapid pace of innovation in our field, and the deep scientific contributions we offer besides our obvious technological ones.

Jeannette M. Wing

Can the U.S. Afford Universities Focusing on Research Over Teaching?

Carnegie Mellon Professor Jeannette Wing

Sep 11 2010

The American University system is increasingly turning toward research and away from teaching. The result is higher costs, and we can get quality education without the research programs.

Tell Me a Story: Join the Effort to Collect Teacher Stories

Sep 10 2010

Sally Fincher wants your stories about being a teacher, every month for a year, to figure out how to improve teaching and learning.

Why Do the U.K. and Sweden Take Computing Education Research More Seriously Than the U.S.?

Sep 10 2010

The UK and Sweden are establishing research centers on Computing Education. Where's the USA?

Old Geeks Never Die, They Just Get Grumpier

Sep 8 2010

With age comes wisdom, or so they say. But when we geeks age, does it make us wiser or just grumpier?

Greg Linden

Sep 7 2010

Why Peer Review Matters

At the most recent Snowbird conference, there was a plenary session during which the panelists and audience discussed the peer review processes in computing research, especially as they pertain to a related debate on conferences versus journals. It’s good to go back to first principles to see why peer review matters, to inform how we then would think about process.

Jeannette M. Wing

Mind Meld in Group Decision Making

Sep 6 2010

Simple HPC Wins

You want to be the first person to design a successful, transistorized computer system, not the last person to design vacuum tube computer. Any designer's challenge is to pick the right technologies at the right time, recognizing when inflection points — maturing, disruptive technologies — are near.

Daniel Reed

Systems and Networking

Sep 1 2010

Social computing remains a hot research topic, and basic research on understanding group decision making and conditions under which crowdsourcing can lead to advantages is sparse. Here is one recent result on how to combine perceptual evidence from multiple people to make better decisions.

Ed H. Chi

Expanding CS Education; Improving Software Development

Sep 1 2010

Ed H. Chi writes about the social Web's impact on CS education. Ruben Ortega discusses software and test-driven development.

Ed H. Chi and Ruben Ortega

My Top 10 Assertions About Data Warehouses

Aug 26 2010

Data warehouses, business intelligence, business analytics, and complex analytics are the subject of increasingly intense marketing wars, seemingly accelerated by Oracle’s recent introduction of the Exadata appliance. Here is my spin on the situation, organized as my top 10 assertions about this topic.

Michael Stonebraker

Data and Information

Aug 23 2010

Why Is Great Design So Hard (Part Two)?

Previously, I asked the question of why great design is so hard to integrate in organizations. In this article, I take a look at how Apple does design, and what we can learn from it.

Jason Hong

The First ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC)

Aug 23 2010

Earlier this summer the first ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing was held in Indianapolis, Indiana. With three stellar keynotes and an exceptional program, the inaugural symposium was a success. Next year's SoCC will be co-located with SOSP in Portugal, and the CFP is already up at http://socc2011.gsd.inesc-id.pt/call-for-papers.

Jeff Hammerbacher

A Tale of A Serious Attempt At P≠NP

Aug 15 2010

This is a discussion of the recent claimed proof that P≠NP by Vinay Deolalikar.

Richard J. Lipton

How to Attend an Academic Conference

Aug 13 2010

Tips on attending academic conferences for young CS researchers

Tessa Lau

Research in the Wild: Making Research Work in Industry

Aug 12 2010

What is the best way to organize researchers into a company? An independent research lab? Mixing researchers in with product teams? Or not hiring researchers at all?

Greg Linden

Better Game Playing Using Parallel Algorithms

Aug 11 2010

Innovations in playing the game "Go" using Monte Carlo Tree Search and parallel algorithms.

Ruben Ortega

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Aug 9 2010

On Software Updates and Version Changes

Since the beginning of software industry, developers have produced updates for their products on a regular basis. How do these updates affect the software itself and the end user?

Carlos Brewer

Remembering Internet Dogs

Drummond Ltd. Systems engineer Carlos A. Brewer R.

Aug 8 2010

An iconic cartoon by Peter Steiner, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1993, captured the nature of the nascent Internet. It shows a dog seated at a computer, remarking to a second dog on the floor that, “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog.”

Daniel Reed

CS Education Gets Congressional Attention

Aug 3 2010

Two Congressman introduced two pieces of legislation -- The Computer Science Education Act and the Computer Science Education Week Resolution -- to offer reforms for computer science education and bring attention to the field and its issues.

Cameron Wilson

Evaluating the Success of Mentoring Programs

Aug 3 2010

Can HCI evaluation methods help to assess the effectiveness of mentoring programs for women?

Tessa Lau

The War Against Spam; and More

Aug 1 2010

Greg Linden asks if spammers have been defeated; Michael Bernstein discusses Clay Shirky's keynote speech at CSCW 2010; and Erika S. Poole writes about how the digital world can help parents cope with the death of a child.

Greg Linden, Michael Bernstein, and Erika Shehan Poole

What Do Scientists and Engineers Need to Know About Computer Science?

Jul 27 2010

As computational science and engineering becomes more common, it becomes important to ask what should all scientists and engineers know about computer science to be effective.