The nudges of libertarian paternalism have insights for computing education.
BLOG@CACM
Advertisement
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.
According to wikipedia: e-Government is a diffused neologism used to refer to the use of information and communication technology to provide and improve government services, transactions and interactions with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government.
The Impact of APCS on Undergraduate CS Enrollment
The critics and detractors of the Advanced Placement exam in Computer Science (APCS) are many. But the flaws of APCS most likely have no effect on undergraduate CS enrollment. Fixing APCS, however, could have a big impact.
In February, President Obama pegged Melissa Hathaway of the National Security Council to do a 60-day review of the nation’s cybersecurity policy. Midway through the 60 days, her office called me at the National Science Foundation asking me to reach out to the academic community of researchers and educators for their input.
Speech-Activated User Interfaces and Climbing Mt. Exascale
The Communications Web site, cacm.acm.org, features 13 bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish excerpts from selected posts, plus readers' comments. Tessa Lau discusses why she doesn't use the touch screen on her in-car GPS unit anymore and Daniel Reed considers the future of exascale computing.
As more information moves to the Web, we need better tools to manage it. Today's tools focus on static Web pages. However, I claim that the Web is becoming a platform for applications, and tools that track user activity with these applications are needed.
Webopedia defines robotics as: The field of computer science and engineering concerned with creating robots, devices that can move and react to sensory input. Robotics is one branch of artificial intelligence.
Helping Younger People Protect Themselves from Security Attacks
One potentially disturbing trend that came out in a recent eCrime meeting is that younger people 18-24 years old seem to be more susceptible to phishing attacks, roughly by a factor of three. It's likely that this translates into other kinds of security attacks as well. At this point, our understanding of young people and security is still murky, and it will require more work to understand the problem so that we can devise appropriate solutions.
Only the Developed World Lacks Women in Computing
The developing world has lots of women in computing. Great talks at this week's NCWIT meeting explain why the difference.
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.
Learn More