Search
Join ACM

Software Engineering and Programming Languages

Advertisement

Opinion

The Corollary of Empowerment

The unfilteredness of the Internet, while largely considered a plus, is taking some knocks. Abundant, easily accessible data sits side by side with "rumors, lies, and errors," and the victim is science, according to Michael Specter.
News

ACM’s Annual Report

It's been an exhilarating first year as President of ACM. At the close of FY09, ACM stood as the largest educational and scientific computer society in the world. After seven consecutive years of steady growth, ACM ended the fiscal year with membership at an all-time high.
Research and Advances

Domotic Technologies Incompatibility Becomes User Transparent

The potential of current technologies in smart automation has been largely unexploited. Pervasive computing vision is still far from being achieved, especially with regard to Domotics and home applications. In fact, even though many implementations have started to appear in several contexts, few applications have been made available for the home environment and the general public. This is mainly due to the segmentation of standards and proprietary solutions, which are currently confusing the market with a sparse offer of uninteroperable devices and systems. Although modern houses are equipped with smart technological appliances, still very few of these appliances can be seamlessly connected to each other. Moreover, inter-working capabilities are required beyond house boundaries, towards external services and towards other houses as nodes of a global network. Therefore, the main goal of this research is to find solutions to the problem of interoperability that will be in line with open and widely recognized standards. The result is a computing framework based on open communication standards, capable of abstracting the peculiarities of underlying heterogeneous technologies, and letting them co-exist and interwork, without eliminating their differences. Interoperability can thus be made potentially feasible between any domotic technology, both currently existing, and still to be defined. Currently, domotic technology vendors concentrate on building closed relationships with their customers, and leveraging their economic investments by establishing barriers against new manufacturers entering the market. Examples of current domotic protocols are X10, Konnex, LonWorks, UPnP, HAVi, and Jini supporting various communication standards (Ethernet, FireWire, Bluetooth, ZigBee, IrDA and proprietary buses). We believe that no domotic technology currently has the potential to actually play a leading role. Within this wide and heterogeneous framework, the market logic is to tie consumers to a particular domotic protocol, which then forces them to only purchase conforming devices in order to keep a consistent level of interoperability. In recent years several interesting and innovative solutions have emerged, with a reasonable level of scalability and dependability, providing interoperability among heterogeneous home systems. Twente University has proposed a solution that aims at supporting heterogeneous technologies (including legacy ones) with a "cluster cultures" approach. The architecture outlines a "touch and play" system which, at device registration time, enables a zero-configuration environment for the exchange of credentials among its gateways and to register device services in a hierarchical structure. The architecture provides a high level of security by using cryptographic algorithms. Waseda University have proposed a framework designed to easily enable the integration of legacy middleware and legacy services and clients, with a predefined path for the inclusion of new, future, middleware. This is accomplished mainly through the use of a Virtual Service Gateway. This connects one piece of middleware to another by exploiting a Protocol Conversion Manager, whose task is to convert the different middleware protocols into the specific internal protocol used by the Virtual Service Gateway. Information about the location and functions of services is provided by a Virtual Service Repository. Another interesting project is the "Domotic House Gateway." It implements an event-based mechanism which is used to exchange messages between the single device and the system. These events are internally converted into logical events so as to clearly separate the actual physical issues from the semantics that goes beyond the devices and their role within the house. One level of the architecture implements a rule-based core that can be dynam
, , and
Research and Advances

Mobile Web 2.0 With Multi-Display Buttons

User-Generated Content (UGC) IS A BURGEONING social phenomenon being watched in today's world with keen interest. UGC is an online new-media content created by users rather than by conventional media such as broadcasters. A typical example would be Flickr, an online photo-sharing site with 37 million images, to which its 1.2 million members add up to 200,000 images daily. UGC is shifting the paradigm of Internet use away from the one-way propagation of media content by companies towards the creation and sharing of media content by and among ordinary users. The mobile phone is an especially important means of promoting user generation and exchange of media content. Many mobile phones now have built-in digital cameras and inherent network connectivity. These features have greatly facilitated the creation and sharing of media content. For instance, users can immediately upload photos on Flickr with their mobile phones as well as access Flickr and browse other people's media content. However, the constraints of a typical mobile phone---its small display and limited number of buttons---make use of mobile UGC services challenging. Only a few studies have investigated hardware or software alternatives to address these problems. This article presents a new user interface (UI) for mobile phones, one that makes use of UGC services easier and more efficient. The new interface has two key characteristics: one pertaining to content structure, and another to content visualization. More specifically, the new UI employs two major mobile Web 2.0 technologies, the tag and the tag cloud, and multi-display buttons increase the display size and flexibility of individual buttons. The interface is dedicated specifically towards supporting exploratory browsing within mobile UGC services, because users of such services are likely to focus on exploratory browsing and serendipitous discovery and be more inclined toward entertainment rather than utility. Here, we describe the new interface and investigate whether it aids in enhancing exploratory browsing within mobile UGC services.
Research and Advances

Security Constructs For Regulatory-Compliant Storage

In response to a growing body of electronic records legislation, the storage community has enhanced data stores to include privacy, auditability, and a "chain-of-custody" for data. There are currently over 4,000 federal, state, and local regulations that govern the storage, management, and retrieval of electronic records. Most notably, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which regulates corporate financial records. Storage vendors provide "compliance" platforms that store and manage data in accordance with regulations, which aids customers in meeting compliance guidelines. Examples include: EMC Centera Compliance Edition,™ NetApp SnapLock,™ and IBM Tivoli Security Compliance Manage.™ Many of these platforms add storage management policy to existing systems. Vendors start with systems that manage versions of files or volumes. They add immutability to past versions by preventing writes by policy. They also enforce data retention guidelines by not allowing the deletion of protected files. Enhanced metadata allows users and auditors to examine the store at any point-in-time and investigate the manner in which data have changed throughout their history. While these features aid organizations in complying with regulations, they do not provide strong evidence of compliance. By following storage management policies, data are versioned and retained for mandated periods. However, there are many opportunities and motivations to subvert such storage policies. In fact, the file system owner represents the most likely attacker. For example, a corporation might alter or destroy data after the corporation comes under suspicion of malfeasance. The shredding of Enron audit documents at Arthur Anderson in 2001 provides a notable paper analog. Similarly, a hospital or private medical practice might attempt to amend or delete a patient's medical records to hide evidence of malpractice. In policy-based storage systems, past data may be altered or destroyed by reverse engineering file system formats and editing the file data on disk--a common and well understood data forensics task. We assert that these features need to be cryptographically strong, providing irrefutable evidence of compliance with regulations. This can be achieved for data retention and chain of custody. A storage system commits to a version history so that, at a later time, an auditor may access past data and gain conclusive evidence that the data have been retained and are unmodified. Further, all data should be bound to the users that modify, create, or delete that data. Such constructs improve the evidentiary value of electronic records within the courts, increase an auditor's confidence in the veracity of the information on which they report (and for which they are responsible), and enhance an organization's quality of data management. To these ends, we review three security constructs for versioning file systems. Digital audit trails allow a file system to prove to an independent auditor that it stored data in conformance with regulated retention guidelines. Fine-grained, secure deletion allows a system to efficiently delete individual versions of files to meet confidentiality requirements, limit liability, and allow data to be redacted. Per-block authenticated encryption adds authenticity guarantees to the confidentiality provided by encryption. We also include a distillation of requirements based on a review of relevant legislation and a brief characterization of the performance impact of these techniques based on their implementation within the ext3cow file system.
and
Research and Advances

Think Big For Reuse

Many organizations are successful with software reuse at fine to medium granularities — ranging from objects, subroutines, and components through software product lines. However, relatively little has been published on very large-grained reuse.  
and
News

How Search Engines Cope With Real-Time Data

Twitter addiction feeds the growing belief that real-time search is a necessity, but the gush of real-time data completely changes the way the Web is indexed. It also challenges search engines to identify and rank valuable content while filtering out noise.
News

Ready For a Web OS?

The hegemony of the traditional desktop operating system is starting to fracture with the emergence of a new generation of Web browsers that may finally herald the long-awaited convergence of Web and OS.

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