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Bridging Cultures For Collaboration

All too often, our technical curricula fail to focus on the human aspect of cross-domain collaboration. Technical skills are necessary, but not sufficient. One must also understand and meld the disparate motivations of the collaborative team in a positive and productive way to achieve success.

Lessons From Apollo

 As we consider how to explain the necessity of long-term investment in science and technology research and development, as we teach a new generation of students, and as we seek to broaden the base of participation in computing, it behooves us to remember the small child in each of us, the one who watched in open mouthed wonder, who felt the chill run down their spine and sensed the passion of others who were committed to discovery. 

The End of a DBMS Era (Might Be ­Upon ­Us)

Relational database management systems (DBMSs) have been remarkably successful in capturing the DBMS marketplace. To a first approximation they are “the only game in town,” and the major vendors enjoy an overwhelming market share. They are selling “one size fits all”; i.e., a single relational engine appropriate for all DBMS needs. Moreover, the code line from all of the major vendors is quite elderly. Hence, the major vendors sell software that is a quarter century old, and has been extended and morphed to meet today’s needs. In my opinion, these legacy systems are at the end of their useful life.

Designing Effective Interfaces For ­Usable Privacy and Security

I often cringe when I hear highly technical engineers talk about people. I usually hear broad generalizations tossed about, like "people are lazy, that's why they can't use the system", or "people don't understand security". The worst is "people are just stupid". This lack of empathy is one of the main causes of poor user interface design today. With this in mind, I explore issues of user interface design for usable privacy and security, looking at the bigger picture of how to design useful, usable, and desirable interfaces in this space.

The Fallacy of Rankings

The list of the world's fastest computers will soon be announced. As always, we can expect the latest announcement to garner interest among the technological community, receive coverage in the popular press, and secure bragging rights for the organizations, vendors and countries involved. Though rankings (total orders) are intuitive and easily explained – a valuable attribute in today’s attention constrained society – they rarely capture the true complexity of multidimensional comparison. 

Shape the Future of Computing

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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.

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