August 2009 - Vol. 52 No. 8

Features

Opinion Professions board letter Aug 1 2009

A year ago, this publication was stripped to the studs and rebuilt, with everything from the content to the cover art revisited, rethought, and revitalized.

Steve Bourne and Bryan Cantrill

Computing Applications

Steve Bourne of Eldorado Ventures and Bryan Cantrill of Sun Microsystems

Opinion Publisher's corner Aug 1 2009

Responding to the Blogosphere

In the July issue of Communications, Moshe Vardi addressed ACM's access model in his Editor's Letter, which has since been picked up in the blogosphere by John Dupuis. Dupuis raised some interesting questions that I believe deserve response.

Scott E. Delman

Computing Applications

Opinion Letters to the editor Aug 1 2009

Why Invention and Innovation Diverge

My compliments on the article "One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality" by Kenneth L. Kraemer et al. (June 2009). It is incredibly valuable for the ACM community to understand the profound difference between invention and innovation.

CACM Staff

News In the virtual extension Aug 1 2009

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

BLOG@CACM blog@CACM Aug 1 2009

An ICT Research Agenda, HPC and Innovation, and Why Only the Developed World Lacks Women in Computing

Jeannette M. Wing writes about the need for a comprehensive research agenda, Daniel Reed discusses high-performance computing, and Mark Guzdial shares insights about women in computing.

Jeannette M. Wing, Daniel Reed, and Mark Guzdial

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion CACM online Aug 1 2009

The New Searchers

Behind Google's simple search box are a complex set of algorithms. Search experts say they are updated constantly, but the same old search page and the listed results don't hint at the work being done to improve search.

David Roman

Computing Applications

News Aug 1 2009

Just For You

Recommender systems that provide consumers with customized options have redefined e-commerce, and are spreading to other fields.

Don Monroe

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

clusters of movies discovered by a computer algorithm

News Aug 1 2009

Face Recognition Breakthrough

By using sparse representation and compressed sensing, researchers have been able to demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy over traditional face-recognition techniques.

Kirk L. Kroeker

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

News Aug 1 2009

IT Drives Policy – and Vice Versa

Technologists discuss government policies affecting broadband, patent reform, privacy — and President Obama's effect on it all.

Tom Geller

Computing Applications

News Aug 1 2009

Learning Through Games

Electronic games can inspire players to explore new ideas and concepts. By gaining a better understanding of the dynamic between player and game, researchers hope to develop more interesting and effective approaches.

Leah Hoffmann

Computing Applications

News Aug 1 2009

U.S. Unveils Cybersecurity Plan

'Intent and timing' may help the federal cyberspace initiative work better than previous blueprints.

Gregory Goth

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Aug 1 2009

Economic and Business Dimensions: Entrepreneurship During a Slump

A contrarian's perspective on how entrepreneurial opportunities and innovation can thrive during an economic crisis.

Tim Draper

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Aug 1 2009

Education: Alice 3: Concrete to Abstract

The innovative Alice 3 programming environment, currently in beta testing, teaches students to program with Alice and Java software.

Wanda Dann and Stephen Cooper

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Aug 1 2009

Privacy and Security: An Ethics Code For U.S. Intelligence Officers

Debating and arguing the points of a proposed code of behavior to provide guidance in making choices can produce the most effective ethics training.

Brian Snow and Clinton Brooks

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Aug 1 2009

Viewpoint: Time For Computer Science to Grow Up

As the computer science field has evolved, so should the methods for disseminating computing research results.

Lance Fortnow

Computing Applications

Practice Aug 1 2009

The Pathologies of Big Data

Scale up your datasets enough and your apps come undone. What are the typical problems and where do the bottlenecks surface?

Adam Jacobs

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Practice Aug 1 2009

Browser Security: Lessons from Google Chrome

To shield the browser from attacks, Google Chrome developers eyed three key problems.

Charles Reis, Adam Barth, and Carlos Pizano

Computing Applications

Practice Aug 1 2009

CTO Roundtable: Cloud Computing

The age of cloud computing has begun. How can companies take advantage of the new opportunities it provides?

Mache Creeger

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2009

A Blind Person’s Interactions with Technology

Meaning can be as important as usability in the design of technology.

Kristen Shinohara and Josh Tenenberg

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2009

Revitalizing Computing Education Through Free and Open Source Software For Humanity

The humanitarian focus of socially useful projects promises to motivate community-minded undergrads in and out of CS.

Computing Applications

Trinity College HFOSS program students and faculty

Research and Advances Review articles Aug 1 2009

Boolean Satisfiability: From Theoretical Hardness to Practical Success

Satisfiability solvers can now be effectively deployed in practical applications.

Sharad Malik and Lintao Zhang

Computing Applications

Propositional Satisfiability illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2009

Technical Perspective: Maintaining Quality in the Face of Distributed Development

It was a problem that should not have taken three weeks to solve. The documentation claimed that if a function was called from a command line with particular parameters, it would return values of particular state variables.

James Herbsleb

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2009

Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality?: An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista

Existing literature on distributed development in software engineering and other fields discusses various challenges, including cultural barriers, expertise transfer difficulties, and communication and coordination overhead.

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2009

Technical Perspective: Where the Chips May Fall

The traditional approach to circuit design has been to build chips that work correctly at extreme-case process corners, thereby guard-banding them against process variations.

Sachin S. Sapatnekar

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2009

Statistical Analysis of Circuit Timing Using Majorization

Future miniaturization of silicon transistors following Moore's Law may be in jeopardy as it becomes harder to precisely define the behavior and shape of nanoscale transistors.

Michael Orshansky and Wei-Shen Wang

Architecture and Hardware

distribution of dopant atoms in a transistor

Opinion Last byte Aug 1 2009

Puzzled: Probability and Intuition

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

Peter Winkler

Computing Applications