ACM China Council
The goal of ACM China Council is threefold: to increase the number of high-quality ACM activities, to raise ACM's visibility, and to contribute to advancing computing as a science and profession. We can report significant progress …
Yunhao Liu, Vincent Shen
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the editor
The Beauty of Simplicity
I was disappointed by Robert Green's and Henry Ledgard's emphasis in "Coding Guidelines: Finding the Art in the Science" (Dec. 2011) on "alignment, naming, use of white space, use of context, syntax highlighting, and IDE choice …
CACM Staff
Pages 6-7
DEPARTMENT:
[email protected]
The Power of Computing; Design Guidelines in CS Education
Daniel Reed writes about how computing systems increase human intellect and abilities. Mark Guzdial discusses the need to avoid polarized and extreme positions in education and the trend toward design-based research.
Daniel Reed, Mark Guzdial
Pages 8-9
COLUMN:
News
Preserving Digital Data
Scientific data is expanding at an unprecedented rate. While new tools are helping preserve this data, funding must be increased and policy coordination needs improvement.
Gregory Goth
Pages 11-13
Talking to Machines
Voice recognition programs like Siri are now capable of understanding spoken commands, recognizing a conversation's context, and answering questions in a personable manner.
Tom Geller
Pages 14-16
Open For Business
Should academic articles be available for free on the Web?
Leah Hoffmann
Pages 17-19
COLUMN:
Technology strategy and management
Can Services and Platform Thinking Help the U.S. Postal Service?
How the U.S. Postal Service might improve the efficiency of its delivery platform.
Michael A. Cusumano
Pages 21-23
COLUMN:
Emerging markets
Information Technology and Gross National Happiness
Connecting digital technologies and happiness.
Richard Heeks
Pages 24-26
COLUMN:
Kode Vicious
The Network Protocol Battle
A tale of hubris and zealotry.
George V. Neville-Neil
Pages 27-28
COLUMN:
Broadening participation
Improving Gender Composition in Computing
Combining academic and industry representation, the NCWIT Pacesetters program works to increase the participation of girls and women in computing.
Jill Ross, Elizabeth Litzler, J. McGrath Cohoon, Lucy Sanders
Pages 29-31
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
Reading CS Classics
Revisiting required reading.
Selma Tekir
Pages 32-34
Is Human Mobility Tracking a Good Idea?
Considering the trade-offs associated with human mobility tracking.
Daniel Soper
Pages 35-37
SECTION:
Practice
Why LINQ Matters: Cloud Composability Guaranteed
The benefits of composability are becoming clear in software engineering.
Brian Beckman
Pages 38-44
Interactive Dynamics For Visual Analysis
A taxonomy of tools that support the fluent and flexible use of visualizations.
Jeffrey Heer, Ben Shneiderman
Pages 45-54
CPU DB: Recording Microprocessor History
With the open CPU DB database, you can mine microprocessor trends over the past 40 years.
Andrew Danowitz, Kyle Kelley, James Mao, John P. Stevenson, Mark Horowitz
Pages 55-63
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Sample Size in Usability Studies
Magic numbers are strictly hocus-pocus, so usability studies must test many more subjects than is usually assumed.
Martin Schmettow
Pages 64-70
What Agile Teams Think of Agile Principles
Even after almost a dozen years, they still deliver solid guidance for software development teams and their projects.
Laurie Williams
Pages 71-76
SECTION:
Review articles
Probabilistic Topic Models
Surveying a suite of algorithms that offer a solution to managing large document archives.
David M. Blei
Pages 77-84
Putting the 'Smarts' Into the Smart Grid: A Grand Challenge For Artificial Intelligence
A research agenda for making the smart grid a reality.
Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Perukrishnen Vytelingum, Alex Rogers, Nicholas R. Jennings
Pages 86-97
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Building Robust Dynamical Simulation Systems
Computational power has been widely used to predict the behavior of dynamical systems using computer simulations, which are often used as an adjunct to or substitute for a dynamical system when a simple closed form analytic …
Dinesh Manocha
Page 101
Asynchronous Contact Mechanics
Physicists have long observed physical phenomena and developed mathematical models to describe them. The advent of computers has allowed us to implement these models as software in a computational environment, launching the …
David Harmon, Etienne Vouga, Breannan Smith, Rasmus Tamstorf, Eitan Grinspun
Pages 102-109
Technical Perspective: Who Knows?: Searching For Expertise on the Social Web
It is difficult to remember what people had to do to find the answer to a question before the Web. One option might be to call a friend who might know the answer. This instinct to call someone is baked into the DNA of Aardvark …
Ed H. Chi
Page 110
Searching the Village: Models and Methods For Social Search
With Aardvark, a social search engine, users ask a question, either by IM, e-mail, Web input, text message, or voice. Aardvark then routes the question to the person in the user's extended social network most likely to be able …
Damon Horowitz, Sepandar D. Kamvar
Pages 111-118
COLUMN:
Last byte
Future Tense: The Deadline Paradox
Prepare for the past ahead of time.
Brian Clegg
Pages 120-ff