The Biggest Gains Come From Knowing Your Data
Throwing an off-the-shelf machine learning package at your data can get you started, but the biggest gains come when you learn about your data and your customers.
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Are Latin American countries prepared enough to deal with the environmental and health risks caused by techno-garbage?
July 6 2009, is the starting date for the second edition of “campus party” which is one of the most important technological shows of the world.
Science fiction has long told of a Universe thick with real-time speech-to-speech translation devices, and recent experiences in the land of the rising sun suggest that this reality may not be that far away.
Sharing Ideas, Writing Apps, and Creating a Professional Web Presence
Greg Linden reveals his new approach to reading research papers, Mark Guzdial discusses how to encourage students to write computer programs, and Tessa Lau shares her ideas about the importance of Web visibility.
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.
Science and sake in equal parts at the National Science Foundation East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute orientation.
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 nudges of libertarian paternalism have insights for computing education.
Short talk about the evolution and actual status of e-commerce in Latin America
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.
Changing Search Behavior on the World Wild Web
Are we at a turning point in search is the real $100M question of the month. It's more about adaptation then features as most regular Internet Users head toward 10k lifetime queries.
Enviro Scientists Call on Comp Scientists to Bridge Gap in Solving NP-Hard Problems
Environmental scientists are unaware of advances in computational complexity and have been limiting problems they tackle, but they are hopeful as result of First Conference on Computational Sustainability. But funds and politics are still problematic.
Cornell Economist Says Disaster Relief Workers Need AI Tools
Economist Christopher B. Barrett has been developing decision trees to help CARE relief workers analyze conditions in disaster zones. They need more efficient and simple ways to decide what type of aid is best for survivors, and they must make choices under daunting conditions. He requested AI researchers' expertise.
More on Bridging the Gap Between Ecologists and Computer Scientists
At the First Conference on Computational Sustainability, Cornell's Evan Cooch, evolutionary ecologist, describes what happened in the past when he asked an engineer to collaborate on an ecology problem. We need to find ways to engage the smart people to work with us, says Cooch, and reconvene next year.
Low-Cost Sensors Help People Turn ‘Green’
University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon researchers are building sensors for phones and homes that give people feedback on their habits and encourage them to save resources.
Matching Digital Photos to Identify Wildlife
Dutch Scientists create digital "collective intelligence" system to compare photos of animals' markings.
Framing the Right Problem For Water Fowl
U.S. Geological Survey scientists describe their work, outlining complexity.
There is an old joke in the high-performance computing community that begins with a question, “How do you make a small fortune in high-performance computing?” There are several variations on the joke, but they all end with the same punch line, “Start with a large fortune and ship at least one generation of product. You will be left with a small fortune.” Forty years of experience, with companies large and small, has confirmed the sad truth of this statement.
Scientists Convene at First Computational Sustainability Meeting
Keynote Address at the First Computational Sustainability Meeting by Carla Gomes.
With the Web delivering richer content to our desktops, why don't today's applications let us seamlessly create that content?
A call to the computer science community for what a research agenda might look like for the role of information and communications technologies in energy, the environment, climate science, and more broadly, sustainability.
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