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.
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Mind Meld in Group Decision Making
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.
Expanding CS Education; Improving Software Development
Ed H. Chi writes about the social Web's impact on CS education. Ruben Ortega discusses software and test-driven development.
My Top 10 Assertions About Data Warehouses
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.
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.
The First ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC)
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.
A Tale of A Serious Attempt At P≠NP
This is a discussion of the recent claimed proof that P≠NP by Vinay Deolalikar.
How to Attend an Academic Conference
Tips on attending academic conferences for young CS researchers
Research in the Wild: Making Research Work in Industry
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?
Better Game Playing Using Parallel Algorithms
Innovations in playing the game "Go" using Monte Carlo Tree Search and parallel algorithms.
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?
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.”
CS Education Gets Congressional Attention
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.
Evaluating the Success of Mentoring Programs
Can HCI evaluation methods help to assess the effectiveness of mentoring programs for women?
The War Against Spam; and More
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.
What Do Scientists and Engineers Need to Know About Computer Science?
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.
Computer Science Left out of National Academies Report
The new draft framework from the National Research Council on "science, engineering, and technology" makes no mention of computer science.
Why is good design so hard to accomplish for organizations? People are coming to the realization that design really matters, but it's not that they don't want to follow suit, it seems that they are not able to.
These “grand challenges” of systems biology encompass almost every aspect of modern computing, from numerical and symbolic methods through data management and analytics to extraordinarily high-performance computing platforms.
In the Internet era, with cell phones, PDAs, and other technologies, humans are more and more connected to each other. All day you can see people walking and at the same time chatting via cell phone. What happens to people that lives connected? What if they simply unplug from the network?
Big web applications are hungry for RAM. They want lots of low power RAM. And they want little else.
Interface Design For New Mothers
Why is there so little research into interface design for new mothers? Interface designers—hear my cry! Here are some pointers for designing interfaces for mothers and babies.
2010 Edition of Campus Party Colombia
A quick look at this special event in Colombia at which people breathe, eat, and sweat technology.
Software Development and Crunch Time; and More
For software developers, crunch time is a period prior to a major product milestone when team members are asked to put in extra effort to get a product finished by a specific delivery date. Why do developers put up with it?
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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