Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2009
From Putting People First
Arianna Huffington and Peter Thiel on the digital revolution
And still two more video rushes on the site of Digital Revolution. Arianna Huffington interview – USA Arianna Huffington is the co-founder of the influential news blog The Huffington Post. Aleks Krotoski and the Digital Revolution…
From Putting People First
Tim Berners-Lee and Einar Kvaran on the digital revolution
More video rushes on the site of Digital Revolution (working title), an open source documentary, due for transmission on BBC Two in 2010, that will take stock of 20 years of change brought about by the World Wide Web. Tim Berners…
From Return 42;
The Other Side of the Table: David Heinemeier Hansson
It has been a while since the last post of this blog series. Though, it is not over and today's post will definitely not be the last one. Previous participants have mainly been people working on the more theoretical side of computing…
From Computational Complexity
FOCS Day 2
After an early morning injection of much needed caffeine, Team Northwestern was ready for the next round of talks. Today's program consisted of talks more related to our interests than the previous days. In the morning, 2 papers…
From BLOG@CACM
The Power of Abstraction–Barbara Liskov's OOPSLA Keynote
Barbara Liskov is the Turing Award winner for 2008 for her pioneering work in programming languages. She was the keynote speaker in OOPSLA 2009 and talked about the power of abstraction. An exceptional keynote indeed.
From BLOG@CACM
The Rise of Empirical Software Engineering (II): What We Are Still Missing
One obstacle is hampering the progress of empirical software engineering: we are still missing a culture of reproducibility
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Become Independent of Peer Review
When I asked the director of a large—and successful—British software house his most serious problem, he said without hesitation “how to prevent clusters of incompetence from emerging”. I was reminded of that when I noticed the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Flocking Methods for Clustering
For a proposed project I am examining flocking methods to build spatial clusters. Flocking/Herding is the regularly observable activity of animals like birds gathering in groups. Birds likely do not form flocks by doing strategic…
From Putting People First
A Synchronicity, a book by Julian Bleecker and Nicholas Nova
A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing by Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova Available as a print-on-demand book from lulu.com. Click here to order. Available as a free download here. The Situated Technologies…
From Putting People First
Data mines and ideas of time
The boys at design consultancy BERG are prolific this week: Toiling in the data-mines: what data exploration feels like by Tom Armitage “There are several aspects to this post. Partly, it
From The Eponymous Pickle
Squeezing Knowledge from a Pixel
Alex Williams of RedWriteWeb talks to IBM about ' ... developing analytics platforms to help companies better understand how multiple pieces of information fit together to create rich forms of business intelligence ... ' . Includes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Human-Computer Interaction
A good overview of the recent Human-Computer Information Retrieval HCIR workshop this past week. This is such an important topics and it is good to see increasing interest in this topic. My own strong sub interest, of course,…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
The Underlying Foundation of Professional Development
If I were to ask the question: "What should be the underlying foundation of every professional development opportunity?" many of you would immediately have an answer. Some of you might say it has to be interesting. While others…
From BLOG@CACM
Taming the Clouds at OOPSLA
OOPSLA 2009 workshops started yesterday (Sunday Oct 25th) and featured two workshops on Cloud Computing. The presence of a diverse audience led to many interesting discussions and healthy debates on the future of Cloud computing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Add this to Your RSS Feed
If you like what you read here take the time to add this blog to your RSS feed. Don't use RSS? Its a great way to make your Web reading more efficient. More about that here. I use Google Reader, but there are many options. In…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Len Kleinrock and the Internet
Len Kleinrock on the 40th annoversary of the Internet in IEEE Computer: A Revolution Forty Years in the Making. -
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-10-26
From The Eponymous Pickle
Flare Data Visualization for the Web
Of interest, the Flare library, from the UC Berkeley Visualization Lab. Contains a number of visualization capabilities, an example is the Job Voyager, demonstration here, which does a stacked visualization of job titles over…
From The Noisy Channel
HCIR 2009: Human-Human Interaction
On Friday, I had the privilege of seeing just how much the annual Workshop on Human-Computer Information Retrieval has grown up since I conceived it in the summer of 2007. Back then, my co-conspirators and I worried about attracting…
From Schneier on Security
CIA Invests in Social-Network Datamining
From Wired:
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement…From Computational Complexity
FOCS Day 1
From The Noisy Channel
Google Experimenting With Social Search
Google may be an also-ran in the social networking market with its Brazil-centric Orkut service, but that hasn’t stopped the search giant from adding social features to its products.
From Putting People First
Stop your search engines
Peggy Orenstein forced herself offline, and reflects in the New York Times Magazine whether this is the path to true knowledge: “Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior…
From Putting People First
Memory and forgetting in the digital age
Yadin Dudai writes in the New Scientist on two books on memory and forgetting in the digital age — Total Recall: How the e-memory revolution will change everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, and Delete: The virtue of forgetting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neuroscience and Workplace Systems
An interesting example of what goes on in workplace contexts and how people interact with artificial systems like computers and avatars. What would this imply for virtual worlds? Managing with the Brain in MindNeuroscienceDavid…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Unilever Consumer Contact Center
In Consumergoods Magazine: ' Unilever Unveils Online Self-Service Platform Unilever goes live with the Astute Solutions' RealDialog Self-Service solution on its sixth brand Web site since June 2009 -- extending the company's…
From Computational Complexity
FOCS Day 0
Alas, I'm not in Atlanta but in New York City for another meeting. Something different this time--FOCS through the eyes of two Northwestern students, Michele Budinich and Michael Lucas, both attending their first major theory…
From BLOG@CACM
Cray and Fernbach Award Winners
This year, I have the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, which recognize outstanding contributions to high-performance computing, in honor of two early leaders…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marketing Neuromarketing
Influencing the Decisionmaker with Neuromarketing. Short PR piece from Zenzi.
From Return 42;
The Way Nature Designs, Or Doesn't
Often, I do not feel like agreeing with Linus Torvalds. This is not because he is not right, but because of the very opinionated, sometimes even stubborn way he brings his message(s) across. To me one of his most interesting…