Revisiting the Publication Culture in Computing Research

In my May 2009 Editor's Letter, "Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research," I addressed the publication culture of our field: "As far as I know, we are the only scientific …

Moshe Y. Vardi

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

Too Much Debate?

In his editor's letter "More Debate, Please!" (Jan. 2010), Moshe Y. Vardi made a plea for controversial topics on these pages, citing a desire to "let truth emerge from vigorous …

CACM Staff

Too Much Programming Too Soon?

Mark Guzdial and Judy Robertson discuss the role of programming in introductory computer science.

Mark Guzdial, Judy Robertson

Granting a Second Life

Almost 90% of what we learn comes from reading, estimates say, and the path that online information takes to your brain is less direct than most. TheCommunications Web site …

David Roman

CS and Biology's Growing Pains

Biologists can benefit from learning and using the tools of computer science, but several real-world obstacles remain.

Gregory Goth

Engineering the Web's Third Decade

As Web technologies move beyond two-way interactive capabilities to facilitate more dynamic and pervasive experiences, the Web is quickly advancing toward its third major upgrade.

Kirk L. Kroeker

Tracking Garbage

Researchers are focusing on the so-called "removal chain" in an attempt to save landfill space, improve recycling rates, and trim the flow of toxic materials into the environment.

Samuel Greengard

Katayanagi Prizes and Other CS Awards

Donald E. Knuth, Jon Kleinberg, Andrew Herbert, and other members of the computer science community were recently honored for their innovative research and service.

CACM Staff

Gaming Will Save Us All

How gaming, as the first media market to successfully transition toward media-as-a-service, is an exemplar for a similar evolutionary transition of content and entertainment.

Tim Chang

Only Technological Processes Are Patentable

The U.S. Supreme Court will narrow the universe of process innovations that can be patented to those that are "technological," but what will that mean for software?

Pamela Samuelson

The Ethics Beat

Surveying the increasing variety and nature of ethical challenges encountered by computing researchers and practitioners.

Rachelle Hollander

Orchestrating Coordination in Pluralistic Networks

Learning to build virtual teams of people of diverse backgrounds is an urgent challenge.

Peter J. Denning, Fernando Flores, Peter Luzmore

Hiring and Developing Minority Faculty at Research Universities

Emphasizing the importance of creating more programs and investing more funding toward the goal of developing minority faculty at research universities.

Richard Tapia

Making the Case For Computing

Seeking funding for current and future computing initiatives requires both a strong argument and a broad community of supporters.

Cameron Wilson, Peter Harsha

Privacy on the Data Web

Considering the nebulous question of ownership in the virtual realm.

Kieron O'Hara, Nigel Shadbolt

GFS: Evolution on Fast-Forward

Kirk McKusick and Sean Quinlan discuss the origin and evolution of the Google File System.

Kirk McKusick, Sean Quinlan

Toward Energy-Efficient Computing

What will it take to make server-side computing more energy efficient?

David J. Brown, Charles Reams

Global IT Management: Structuring For Scale, Responsiveness, and Innovation

To succeed on a global scale, businesses should focus on a trio of key elements.

Siew Kien Sia, Christina Soh, Peter Weill

Chasing the AIDS Virus

With no HIV vaccine in sight, virologists need to know how the virus will react to a given combination drug therapy.

Thomas Lengauer, André Altmann, Alexander Thielen, Rolf Kaiser

Virtual Computing Initiative at a Small Public University

Student participation and resulting expertise is as valuable as having the high-performance resource itself.

Cameron Seay, Gary Tucker

Making Decisions Based on the Preferences of Multiple Agents

Computer scientists have made great strides in how decision-making mechanisms are used.

Vincent Conitzer

Technical Perspective: A First Glimpse of Cryptography's Holy Grail

We all know how to protect our private or most valuable data from unauthorized access: encrypt it. Still, the use of encryption to protect valuable or sensitive data can be …

Daniele Micciancio

Computing Arbitrary Functions of Encrypted Data

Suppose that you want to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. This separation is possible: we describe a "fully homomorphic" encryption scheme that keeps data private, but that allows a …

Craig Gentry

Technical Perspective: Seeing the Trees, the Forest, and Much More

Bristling with cameras, microphones, and other sensors, today's portable phones are nevertheless essentially deaf and blind. How shall we go about building machines that can …

Pietro Perona

Using the Forest to See the Trees: Exploiting Context For Visual Object Detection and Localization

Recognizing objects in images is an active area of research in computer vision. However, most of the algorithms for detecting objects perform an exhaustive search across all locations and scales in the image comparing local image …

A. Torralba, K. P. Murphy, W. T. Freeman

Puzzled: Solutions and Sources

Last month (February 2010, p. 120) we posted a trio of brainteasers, including one as yet unsolved, concerning the breaking of a bar of chocolate.

Peter Winkler

Future Tense: The Primal Cue

Future Tense, one of the revolving features on this page, presents stories and essays from the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, their boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what …

Ari Juels

Business Continuity and the Banking Industry

There is renewed interest in emergency planning in both the private and public sectors. As managers realize the size of potential exposure to unmanaged risk, insuring "business continuity" is becoming a key task within all industrial …

Fabio Arduini, Vincenzo Morabito

A Framework For Health Care Information Assurance Policy and Compliance

As many as 400 people may have access to one's personal medical information throughout the typical care process. Patients (consumers) feel that it is critical that their medical information is held in confidence, otherwise they …

Sherrie Drye Cannoy, A. F. Salam

Is Stickiness Profitable For Electronic Retailers?

Is stickiness the Holy Grail for e-tailing? The conventional wisdom suggests that stickiness is crucial and can contribute to e-tailers' bottom lines considerably. However, the direct economic impacts of stickiness have not been …

Lin Lin, Paul Jen-Hwa Hu, Olivia R. Liu Sheng, Johnny Lee

User Participation in Software Development Projects

A recent industry survey observed that only 34% of IT projects were considered successful. Of the several potential factors contributing to this hard-to-achieve success, user involvement was noted as the most important one.

Ramanath Subramanyam, Fei Lee Weisstein, M. S. Krishnan

Practitioner-Based Measurement: A Collaborative Approach

The established philosophy within the software development industry is that an organization implementing a program to improve software quality can expect to recoup the cost of the implementation many times over. While organizations …

S. T. Parkinson, R. M. Hierons, M. Lycett, M. Norman

Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software: Barriers and Remedies

Perhaps the business case for adopting open source software is an easy sell. Less obvious than the cost savings but equally important are the barriers ("hidden costs") of adopting open source software.

Del Nagy, Areej M. Yassin, Anol Bhattacherjee

Aligning Undergraduate IS Curricula With Industry Needs

A paradox is becoming obvious to both information systems (IS) academics and executives: U.S. demand for IS graduates is increasing, but graduation numbers from university IS programs are flat or in decline, and many CIOs report …

John H. Benamati, Zafer D. Ozdemir, H. Jeff Smith

Agent-Oriented Embedded Electronic Measuring Systems

Agent-based systems, or multi-agent systems in general, are a contemporary paradigm for software development.

Hing Kai Chan