Researchers are mining Twitter's vast flow of data to measure public sentiment, follow political activity, and detect earthquakes and flu outbreaks.
Software Engineering and Programming Languages
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Intellectual Amplification via Computing
As the recent performance of IBM's Watson system on the game show Jeopardy! illustrated, the combination of large-scale data, rich algorithm suites and powerful computing are opening new vistas. Vannevar Bush's 1940s vision of a Memex, a device capable of storing, indexing and retrieving data from a broad knowledge base, is now within our reach.
Finding Usability Bugs with Automated Tests
Ideally, all software should be easy to use and accessible for a wide range of people. However, software often falls short of these basic goals. We therefore need ways to help us discover usability and accessibility problems efficiently and effectively.
10 Scientific Problems in Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality was one of the 14 Grand Challenges identified as awaiting engineering solutions for the 21st century announced in 2008 by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Here, I explore 10 related open VR challenges.
What would it take for a true personal knowledge base to generate the benefits envisioned by Vannevar Bush?
DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study
While a large body of work exists on DRAM in lab conditions, little has been reported on real DRAM failures in large production clusters. In this paper, we analyze measurements of memory errors in a large fleet of commodity servers over a period of 2.5 years.
Technical Perspective: DRAM Errors in the Wild
In order to advance the field, knowledge of the types of memory errors at the system level, their frequencies, and conditions that exacerbate or are unrelated to higher error rates are of critical importance.
Jason Hong considers how software companies could effectively incorporate first-rate design into their products.
End of Days For Communications in Print?
The rise in online publishing raises a question about the durability of print publications and of the printed magazine version of Communications of the ACM. How long will it last?
Maurice Wilkes: The Last Pioneer
Computer science has lost not only a great scientist, but an important link to the electronic computing revolution that took place in the 1940s.
ACM Launches New Digital Library
More than 50 years of computing literature is augmented, streamlined, and joined to powerful new tools for retrieval and analysis.
Crowdsourcing is based on a simple but powerful concept: Virtually anyone has the potential to plug in valuable information.
The Growing Harm of Not Teaching Malware
Revisiting the need to educate professionals to defend against malware in its various guises.
Are the OECD Guidelines at 30 Showing Their Age?
This article briefly reviews the factors that led to production of the Guidelines on the Transborder Flows of Personal Data in the 1970s and some of the key points in them.
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.
Cyberterrorism is a concept that appears recurrently in contemporary media. This coverage is particularly interesting if one believes, as I do, that no act of cyberterrorism has ever yet occurred and is unlikely to at any time in the near future.
Google's Web Tables and Deep Web Crawler identify and deliver this otherwise inaccessible resource directly to end users.
With the amount of disk space available to the modern programmer, and the lack of parental supervision in most workplaces, the time for programmers to "clean your room!" and store their checkouts neatly never comes.
Technology, Conferences, and Community
Considering the impact and implications of changes in scholarly communication.
To ensure the timely publication of articles, Communications created the Virtual Extension (VE) to expand the page limitations of the print edition by bringing readers the same high-quality articles in an online-only format. VE articles undergo the same rigorous review process as those in the print edition and are accepted for publication on merit. The following synopses are from articles now available in their entirety to ACM members via the Digital Library.
ICPS Offers Major Research Venue
The ACM International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS) has recently being relaunched as a publication venue for research activities.
What ‘Beginning’ Students Already Know: The Evidence
Detailed data collection at ETH Zurich over eight years shows what entering computer science students already know in computer usage and programming.
Again: The One Sure Way to Advance Software Engineering
There is one proven way to improve the state of software, following the the airline industry's spectacular improvements of safety. The IT industry ignores it. Why?
It is time we extracted a sample of cultural DNA from computing's history and engineered a new generation of contemplative, informal workshops. After gestation, ideas conceived at those workshops might even find their way into technical reports. Imagine that.
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.
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