Is the Image Crisis Over?

When Communications relaunched in July 2008, the issue included a "Viewpoint" column by Rick Rashid, entitled "Image Crisis: Inspiring a New Generation of Computer Scientists." Has anything changed in that regard in the last …

Moshe Y. Vardi

Pay For Editorial Independence

Though Moshe Y. Vardi's Editor's Letter "Open, Closed, or Clopen Access?" (July 2009) addressed the question of who pays the bills, we must also address the price of quality.

CACM Staff

In the Virtual Extension

Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.

CACM Staff

Computer Science Curriculum, Deceptive Advertising

Each issue of Communications publishes excerpts from selected BLOG@CACM posts to the Communications Web site. In this issue, Ramana Rao writes about the evolution of computer science curriculum and Greg Linden reflects on ethics …

Ramana Rao, Greg Linden

Internet Addiction: It's Spreading, but Is It Real?

The number of Internet addiction treatment centers is growing to treat behaviors worthy of a 12-step program. But neither the American Psychiatric Association's DSM nor theICD …

David Roman

Deep Data Dives Discover Natural Laws

Computer scientists have found a way to bootstrap science, using evolutionary computation to find fundamental meaning in massive amounts of raw data.

Gary Anthes

Electronic Paper's Next Chapter

The technological challenge for researchers working on the next generation of electronic paper is to render color as brightly as traditional paper, without increasing power requirements or end-user costs.

Kirk L. Kroeker

Implementing Electronic Medical Records

Despite a number of challenges, patients' medical records are slowly making the transition to the digital age.

Leah Hoffmann

Exploring New Frontiers

The Expeditions in Computing program provides scientists with the funding to work on ambitious, often multidisciplinary research.

Gregory Goth

Usable Security: How to Get It

Why does your computer bother you so much about security, but still isn't secure? It's because users don't have a model for security, or a simple way to keep important things safe.

Butler Lampson

Are Business Methods Patentable?

How the U.S. Supreme Court's forthcoming decision in the Bilski v. Doll case is expected to affect existing and future software patents.

Pamela Samuelson

The Broadband Price Is Not Right

Developing an effective pricing index is essential to understanding the value of broadband connectivity.

Shane Greenstein

On Public Service and Computer Science

Members of the computer science community should become more involved in public service by becoming program managers at federal agencies, the opportunities and benefits of which are outlined here.

Jonathan M. Smith

An Interview with Ping Fu

Ping Fu, CEO of the digital shape sampling and processing company Geomagic, discusses her background, achievements, and challenges managing a company during a period of dynamic growth.

Bob Cramblitt, Ping Fu

Communications Surveillance: Privacy and Security at Risk

As the sophistication of wiretapping technology grows, so too do the risks it poses to our privacy and security.

Whitfield Diffie, Susan Landau

Four Billion Little Brothers?: Privacy, Mobile Phones, and Ubiquitous Data Collection

Participatory sensing technologies could improve our lives and our communities, but at what cost to our privacy?

Katie Shilton

You Don't Know Jack About Software Maintenance

Long considered an afterthought, software maintenance is easiest and most effective when built into a system from the ground up.

Paul Stachour, David Collier-Brown

Scratch: Programming For All

"Digital fluency" should mean designing, creating, and remixing, not just browsing, chatting, and interacting.

Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Karen Brennan, Amon Millner, Eric Rosenbaum, Jay Silver, Brian Silverman, Yasmin Kafai

Why IT Managers Don't Go For Cyber-Insurance Products

Proposed contracts tend to be overpriced because insurers are unable to anticipate customers' secondary losses.

Tridib Bandyopadhyay, Vijay S. Mookerjee, Ram C. Rao

Turing Lecture: Model Checking: Algorithmic Verification and Debugging

Turing Lecture from the winners of the 2007 ACM A.M. Turing Award.

Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, Joseph Sifakis

Technical Perspective: Narrowing the Semantic Gap in Distributed Programming

In science, significant advances are often made when researchers from different communities join forces.

Peter Druschel

Declarative Networking

Declarative Networking is a programming methodology that enables developers to concisely specify network protocols and services, which are directly compiled to a dataflow framework that executes the specifications. 

Boon Thau Loo, Tyson Condie, Minos Garofalakis, David E. Gay, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Petros Maniatis, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Timothy Roscoe, Ion Stoica

Technical Perspective: Machine Learning For Complex Predictions

Interest in machine learning can be traced back to the early days of computer science. Alan Turing himself conjectured that some form of automatic learning would be required …

John Shawe-Taylor

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 …

Thorsten Joachims, Thomas Hofmann, Yisong Yue, Chun-Nam Yu

Puzzled: Covering the Plane

Welcome to three new puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is (as yet) unsolved. In each, the issue is how your intuition matches up with the mathematics.

Peter Winkler

Quantifying the Benefits of Investing in Information Security

Malicious attacks on enterprise IT infrastructures have become a serious threat with the growing importance of the Internet.

Lara Khansa, Divakaran Liginlal

iCare Home Portal: An Extended Model of Quality Aging E-Services

The quality of life of senior citizens is a critical issue around the world today. Scrutiny of the extant technologies for aging services reveals that they are invariably aimed at or electronic care (eCare), but overlook social …

Wei-Lun Chang, Soe-Tsyr Yuan, Eldon Y. Li

Computing Journals and Their Emerging Roles in Knowledge Exchange

Scholarly journals are reliable means of communicating knowledge and findings in a scientific discipline. This study addresses the interconnectedness of journals from four perspectives …

Aakash Taneja, Anil Singh, M. K. Raja

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 …

Rudy Hirschheim

And What Can Context Do For Data?

Common to all actors in today's information world is the problem of lowering the "information noise," both reducing the amount of data to be stored and accessed, and enhancing …

C. Bolchini, C. A. Curino, G. Orsi, E. Quintarelli, R. Rossato, F. A. Schreiber, L. Tanca

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 …

Frank McCown, Catherine C. Marshall, Michael L. Nelson

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 …

Ralph Westfall

Steering Self-Learning Distance Algorithms

The concept of distance expresses the distortion measure between any pair of entities lying in a common space. Distances are at the very heart of geometry, and are ubiquitous …

Frank Nielsen