Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2014
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorems: Unique Games
Michel Goemans and David Williamson made a splash in the 90's using semidefinite programming to give a new approximation algorithm for the max-cut problem, a ratio of 2θ/(π(1-cos(θ)) minimized over θ between 0 and π, approximately…
From Putting People First
The user experience of enterprise technology
Most big businesses globally are locked into some kind of reliance on enterprise technology. Unfortunately such systems are not only fiendishly difficult to install and maintain, but often equally challenging for the workforce…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
ACM Report Urges States to Expand Computer Science Education
Citing the rapid growth of computing jobs in virtually every industry sector in the United States, ACM today issued a report urging states to provide more opportunities for students to gain the skills and knowledge needed to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Limits of Decision Models and Analytical Systems
A favorite topic. On the benefits and limits. Limits are a particularly important aspect that is often not considered. How do you effectively integrate them with analytical systems? How does Big Data fit in to their use?n…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Analytics in the Oilfield
The latest March/April issue of Analytics Magazine: " ... Articles in this issue features commentary and contributed content from several industry leaders, including Mu Sigma CEO Dhiraj Rajaram and Oversight Systems CEO Patrick…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Tal Rabin Named 2014 Women of Vision by the Anita Borg Institute
Tal Rabin, Manager of the Cryptography Research Group at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, has won the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision ABIE Award for Impact. From …
From Putting People First
De l’importance de l’ethnographie appliquée aux technologies
For once a post in French! Hubert Guillaud of InternetActu describes some examples – mostly from the recent EPIC conference – of the great contribution of ethnography in focusing our gaze on real life practices, in pointing out…
From Putting People First
Campaign: Mobile card set of facilitation and training techniques
Are you a trainer? Do you facilitate meetings? Help the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (an Experientia client) to develop a mobile card set of 60 participatory knowledge sharing methods…
From Putting People First
Designers Toolkit: Capturing research | Using video in research
Lauren Ruiz of Cooper in San Francisco has published two new instalments of the Designers Toolkit: A Primer On Capturing Research How you choose to conduct and capture your research will greatly impact your outcomes, and ultimately…
From Putting People First
Experientia’s mini-doc for the UN’s International Labour Organization
The first destination: The path to decent work in rural economies Experientia’s short documentary for the UN’s International Labour Organization It’s always a pleasure to work on a project that is out of the ordinary. Experientia…
From Putting People First
Has privacy become a luxury good?
Julia Angwin, a senior reporter at ProPublica, writes in the New York Times about how it takes a lot of money and time to avoid hackers and data miners. “In our data-saturated economy, privacy is becoming a luxury good. After…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facial Recognition Apps for Glass
Facial recognition app that matches strangers to online profiles. " .... See someone on the train you'd like to date? NameTag, an upcoming app for Android, iOS, and Google Glass uses facial recognition technology to match passersby…
From Putting People First
Reflecting on anthropology and design
A few weeks back I wrote that Rachel Carmen Ceasar (@rceasara) is running a short series on Savage Minds that features interviews with design researchers, ethnographic hackers, and field work makers with their take on anthropology…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Video Ads on Mobile
In ClickZ: This came up in a recent discussion about how video ads are particularly distracting. In fact how they give the implication that you are in the wrong place when accessing mobile information. This piece covers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data as Killer Cloud App
In GigaOM:Maybe big data is the killer app for Google’s cloudHadoop is popular and so is cloud computing, so it comes as no surprise that a battle would break out to establish the best place for running Hadoop. Lately, Google…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Successful Applications of Customer Analytics
It has been a while since I have looked at the Wharton Customer analytics (WCAI) site. I had the pleasure to give several talks there. They are about to hold a conference, which is worth taking a look at:SUCCESSFUL APPLICATIONS…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Excel Tips
Despite all the new packages out there, you are going to have to deal with existing systems written in Excel. So it's very useful to understand how it works. Here a set of simple tips for using it efficiently. Useful, but…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predicting Net Promoter Scores with Text Mining
Attended the UC data mining symposium a few weeks ago, will be posting some things of interest that came from that. A rep from SAS described work they had done with text mining. Text is interesting because it is called 'unstructured'…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Drones are Joining the Robots in 3D
In IEEE Spectrum: The drone empire of the future? Robotics will, more commonly, be operating in 3D. " ... Small unmanned aerial vehicles are changing from toys into tools, as businesses worldwide awaken to their importance…
From Computational Complexity
Why are there so few intemediary problems in Complexity? In Computability?
There are thousands of natural PC problems. Assuming P NE NP how many natural problems are there that are in NP-P but are NOT NPC? Some candidates are Factoring, Discrete Log, Graph Isom, some in group theory, and any natural…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Workshop Report: Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education
The following is a special contribution to this blog from Douglas H. Fisher, Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crowdsourcing at Lego
In Innovation Excellence: How Lego is using social crowdsourcing for engagement. Where the audience seems to be in control, with good effect. Of course Lego starts with being a fun product that begs for engagement" ... Too…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Science Book
An introduction to Vincent Granville's new data science book. Worth a look, his work is usually very well done. Not available until April. " ... This book is a type of “handbook” on data science and data scientists, and contains…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Can Plants Do Arithmetic?
The computational power of plants Martin Howard and Alison Smith are research scientists at the John Innes Centre (JIC) in Norwich, England. JIC was founded as a horticultural institution by the philanthropist John Innes in 1910…
From Geeking with Greg
More quick links
More of what caught my attention recently: Cool new tech, especially for mobile, detecting gesture movements from the changes they make to ambient wireless signals, uses a fraction of the power of other techniques ([1] [2] [3]…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Promising Privacy from Big Data
A promise is given to vet big data's impact on privacy. Will await the results.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automating Price Tracking
In Retailwire: An obvious thing that can be done online. Amazon, with its size and breadth, is the obvious target. How should they respond? " ... Amazon's ability to continually adjust prices daily to undercut competitors…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Data Portals and Data Value for Future Analytics
The breadth of what is happening here is interesting. The problem here is that the data is often not in the right form, or is incomplete, for specific uses. Big Data approaches being adopted may mean that saved data will"…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Short Data Science Tutorials
Data Science Central always has interesting items to examine. Here a number of short data science tutorials and templates. The first one in the list points to a number of templates for R. Particularly useful for those that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fujitsu Palm Scanning
In Computerworld: Saw an early example of this in research labs a few years ago. Was unclear how much better and reliable it was than fingerprint approaches then. Could clearly work well with larger formats like tablets.