Search
Join ACM

Research and Advances

Advertisement

Dec 1 2009

ThinSight: A Thin Form-Factor Interactive Surface Technology

ThinSight is a thin form-factor interactive surface technology based on optical sensors embedded inside a regular LCD. These augment the display with the ability to sense a variety of objects near the surface, including fingertips and hands, to enable multitouch interaction.
Computing Applications
Dec 1 2009

Security in Dynamic Web Content Management Systems Applications

The processes behind corporate efforts to create, manage, publish, and archive Web information has also evolved using Web Content Management Systems (WCMS). WCMS allow teams to maintain Web content in a dynamic fashion through a user friendly interface and a modular application approach. This dynamic "on-the-fly" content creation provides Web site authors several advantages including access to information stored in databases, ability to personalize Web pages according to individual user preferences, and the opportunity to deliver a much more interactive user experience than static Web pages alone. 11 However, there are distinct disadvantages as well. Dynamically generating Web content can significantly impact Web server performance, reduce the scalability of the Web site and create security vulnerabilities or denial of service. 11 Organizations are adopting information technology without understanding such security concerns. 1 Moreover, as Mostefaoui 7 points out, even though many attempts have been made to understand the security architecture, a generic security framework is needed. Recent research amplifies the concerns and benefits of security in open source systems. 2 However, there is a need for organizations to understand how to evaluate these open source systems and this paper highlights how an evaluation technique in terms of security may be used in an organization to assess a short list of possible WMCS systems. This article focuses on security issues in WCMS and the objective is to understand the security issues as well as to provide a generic security framework. The contributions of this paper are to: 1. Integrate the goals of security with eight dimensions of WCMS, 2. Specify how to secure the eight dimensions of WCMS, 3. Formulate a framework of security using this integrated view of security goals and security dimensions, and 4. Address the security of the Web architecture at WCMS software application level using the framework and evaluate security features in popular WCMS used in the industry.
and
Computing Applications
Dec 1 2009

Why Did Your Project Fail?

We have been developing software since the 1960s but still have not learned enough to ensure that our software development projects are successful. Boehm suggested that realistic schedule and budgets together with a continuing steam of requirements changes are high risk factors. The Standish Group in 1994 noted that approximately 31% of corporate software development projects were cancelled before completion and 53% were challenged and cost 180% above their original estimate.
and
Computing Applications
Dec 1 2009

Visual Passwords: Cure-All or Snake-Oil?

Users of computer systems are accustomed to being asked for passwords — it is as universal as it is frustrating. In the past there was little tolerance for the problems experienced remembering passwords. Latterly there is more understanding of the problems experienced by users, especially since the "password conundrum" has reached epidemic proportions for Web users, who are asked for passwords with unrelenting predictability.
and
Computing Applications
Dec 1 2009

Positive Externality, Increasing Returns, and the Rise in Cybercrimes

The meteoric rise in cybercrime has been an issue of pressing concern to our society. Internet-related frauds accounted for 46% of consumer complaints made to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2005. Total losses of Internet fraud victims reporting to FTC increased from $205 million in 2003 to $336 million in 2005. This paper offers an economic analysis to explain cybercrimes' escalation.
Computing Applications
Nov 1 2009

Predicting Structured Objects with Support Vector Machines

Machine Learning today offers a broad repertoire of methods for classification and regression. But what if we need to predict complex objects like trees, orderings, or alignments? Such problems arise naturally in natural language processing, search engines, and bioinformatics. The following explores a generalization of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for such complex prediction problems.
, , , and
Computing Applications
Nov 1 2009

Why Web Sites Are Lost (and How They’re Sometimes Found)

The Web is in constant flux — new pages and Web sites appear daily, and old pages and sites disappear almost as quickly. One study estimates that about two percent of the Web disappears from its current location every week. To automate recovering lost Web sites, we created a Web-repository crawler named Warrick that restores lost resources from the holdings of four Web repositories.
, , and
Computing Applications
Nov 1 2009

If Your Pearls of Wisdom Fall in a Forest . . .

The idea of doing things that can improve something is an extremely popular concept in American culture. For example, I found the phrase, make a difference , in 129 million Web pages in a Yahoo! search in July 2009. The concept typically applies to impacts at local levels because, until recently, few people had opportunities to do things that could positively affect substantial numbers of people throughout the country in which they live or even throughout the world. After dot com bubble burst, many investors found that the slogan that "the Internet changes everything" did not apply to many of the requirements for having a successful business. However the Internet really does provide opportunities for those who create knowledge to share it with more people who can use it to advantage, and share it more quickly than through other means. Of course, this potential capability to share materials is limited by people's abilities to find useful information in the billions of pages on the Internet. Yahoo reported indexing over 19 billion pages in 2005. (Perhaps responding to criticism of the estimates,1 the leading search engine companies no longer publish counts of pages indexed. Although no one really knows how big the "haystack" is, the simile about "finding a needle" is quite applicable to the Internet.) Nevertheless there are two aspects of innovative materials that work in favor of their being found: • The goals of search engine companies. • The nature of knowledge.
Computing Applications
Nov 1 2009

Offshoring and the New World Order

Outsourcing as a means of meeting organizational information technology (IT) needs is a commonly accepted and growing practice; one that is continually evolving to include a much wider set of business functions: logistics, accounting, human resources, legal, and risk assessment.3 Today firms of all sizes are rushing overseas to have their IT work performed by offshore vendors. Such change — the pundits argue — is merely the natural progression of first moving blue-collar work overseas followed by whitecollar work. IT jobs are most visible to us in the IT field, but the same is happening to other business functions/processes. With labor costs in India well below the U.S. and technical skills equal or better, the argument for offshoring is compelling. (Offshoring refers to the migration of all or a significant part of the development, maintenance and delivery of IT services to a vendor located in another country, typically in the developing world like India and China. The service provider hires, trains and manages the personnel. Alternatively, an organization might set up IT operations offshore but still controlled by the organization's management2). Here, I seek to analyze some of the arguments underlying the notion of offshoring and implications for the IT field from a U.S. perspective. While I am aware that such an undertaking is unquestionably a thorny proposition, I feel that too little 'serious' thought has been given to this issue. Currently, we are plagued by hype (both positive and negative) but little critical reflection. Hopefully, this paper can begin to reverse this trend and shed light on the challenges we face.
Computing Applications

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 Involved

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.

Learn More