This column was supposed to write itself. When Editor-in-Chief Moshe Vardi first asked me to tell readers how a typical issue of Communications comes together, I remember thinking "piece of cake."
February 2010 - Vol. 53 No. 2
Features
Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.
Connecting Women and Technology
Guest blogger Valerie Barr writes about highlights of the ninth Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, including keynote speeches by Megan Smith and Francine Berman.
Opinion CACM online
The vast Internet delivers only a sliver of the information the average American consumes each day, according to a recent report by the University of California, San Diego (http://hmi.ucsd.edu/howmuchinfo_research_report_consum.php).
Alternate Interface Technologies Emerge
Researchers working in human-computer interaction are developing new interfaces to produce greater efficiencies in personal computing and enhance miniaturization in mobile devices.
Type systems are moving beyond the realm of data structure and into more complex domains like security and networking.
Social networking, sophisticated imaging, and dual-use technologies promise improved disaster management, but they must be adopted by governments and aid agencies if more lives are to be saved in the wake of crises.
Opinion Privacy and security
Not Seeing the Crime For the Cameras?
Why it is difficult — but essential — to monitor the effectiveness of security technologies.
Opinion Inside risks
The Need For a National Cybersecurity R&D Agenda
Government-funded initiatives, in cooperation with private-sector partners in key technology areas, are fundamental to cybersecurity technical transformation.
Opinion Viewpoint
Open Access to Scientific Publications
In his July 2009 Communications editor's letter "Open, Closed, or Clopen Access?", editor-in-chief Moshe Vardi addressed the question of open access to this magazine and to ACM publications in general. Scientific publishing is undergoing major changes. One reason is the exponential increase in the number of scientific publications, which has turned this area into a serious business.
Opinion Kode Vicious
Taking Your Network’s Temperature
A prescription for capturing data to diagnose and debug a networking problem.
News Interview
An Interview with Michael Rabin
Michael O. Rabin, co-recipient of the 1976 ACM A.M. Turing Award, discusses his innovative algorithmic work with Dennis Shasha.
Power-manageable hardware can help save energy, but what can software developers do to address the problem?
Managing Contention For Shared Resources on Multicore Processors
Contention for caches, memory controllers, and interconnects can be eased by contention-aware scheduling algorithms.
Software Model Checking Takes Off
A translator framework enables the use of model checking in complex avionics systems and other industrial settings.
Research and Advances Contributed Articles
A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World
How Coverity built a bug-finding tool, and a business, around the unlimited supply of bugs in software systems.
Research and Advances Contributed Articles
Assessing the Changing U.S. IT R&D Ecosystem
The National Academy of Sciences recommends what the U.S. government should do to help maintain American IT leadership.
Research and Advances Review Article
Recent Progress in Quantum Algorithms
What quantum algorithms outperform classical computation and how do they do it?
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Strange Effects in High Dimension
In studying the genetic basis of a disease, it is now common to select a set of relevant genes G, and to measure how strongly they are expressed in cell samples from a group of patients. The size of G is frequently in the thousands, which makes the data high-dimensional by present standards.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Data represented geometrically in high-dimensional vector spaces can be found in many applications. The need to manipulate such data in huge corpora and to support various query types gives rise to the question of how to represent the data in a lower-dimensional space to allow more space and time efficient computation.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Want to Be a Bug Buster?
Microprocessor performance has increased exponentially. These chips with ever increasing complexity are not always fully functional on the first attempt, they need to be debugged quickly, bugs fixed, and reworked. Did you ever wonder about how it is done?
Research and Advances Research highlights
Post-Silicon Bug Localization For Processors Using IFRA
IFRA overcomes major challenges associated with a very expensive step in post-silicon validation of processors — pinpointing a bug location and the instruction sequence that exposes the bug from a system failure, such as a crash.
Opinion Last byte
Puzzled: Breaking Chocolate Bars
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.
Research and Advances Virtual Extension
Reversing the Landslide in Computer-Related Degree Programs
There is growing concern that a technologically educated workforce will not be available to meet the needs of the job market in information technology in the coming years, primarily because students are turning away from academic programs in computer-related disciplines. This lack of interest translates to a downward trend in the number of enrolled students and graduates for the foreseeable future.
Research and Advances Virtual Extension
Wireless Insecurity: Examining User Security Behavior on Public Networks
Wireless access points are increasingly serving as entry points to the Internet, increasing connectivity options and security concerns. Particularly significant are public access points, commonly known as hotspots, which are often located in heavily populated areas such as airports, coffee shops, and hotels, appealing to both business and casual users, but offering little or no security.
Research and Advances Virtual Extension
Taking a Flexible Approach to ASPs
In 2001, subscription-based application service providers (ASPs) represented the new paradigm for application deployment. It was anticipated that ASP spending would reach $7.8 billion by 2004. However, this turned out not to be the case. By 2004, spending on ASPs had increased only to $4.2 billion.
Research and Advances Virtual Extension
Informatics Creativity: A Role For Abductive Reasoning?
Despite the fact that creative problem solving is desirable at all levels, it is constantly in short supply. Part of the problem may be that while some technology trainers advocate the search for creative solutions, the learning side of the equation is little changed by a "be creative" lecture component.
Research and Advances Virtual Extension
Practical Intelligence in IT: Assessing Soft Skills of IT Professionals
What qualities make a successful IT professional? When companies hire IT professionals, their focus is often on the "hard" skills needed to perform the work, such as years of Java programming experience. However, there is a growing awareness that technical skills alone are insufficient for success in IT, particularly in today's dynamic, distributed and complex workplace.
Research and Advances Virtual Extension
Managing a Corporate Open Source Software Asset
We define
corporate open source
(COS) as applying the precepts and methodologies prevalent in the open source development community for creating industrial-strength software projects in a corporation for internal use. Our ongoing work demonstrates that under the right circumstances, corporations can benefit from open source development techniques.
Research and Advances Virtual Extension
It Takes Two to Tango: How Relational Investments Improve IT Outsourcing Partnerships
The IT outsourcing industry landscape is dotted with broken contracts - results of unsuccessful client-vendor (C-V) partnerships. Approximately 78% C-V partnerships fail in the long term, inflicting high transition costs on clients. The recent economic downturn has strined C-V partnerships further.
