Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2012
From Wild WebMink
Open Source Enables Innovation
Without it, Ubuntu for Android would probably never have happened. My article for InfoWorld this week includes a video demonstration of it in action, and reflects a little on how open source removes obstacles so that innovation…
From Schneier on Security
Facial Recognition of Avatars
I suppose this sort of thing might be useful someday.
In Second Life, avatars are easily identified by their username, meaning police can just ask San Francisco-based Linden Labs, which runs the virtual world, to look up a particular…From Computer Science Teachers Association
Contests Can Benefit Both Students and Teachers
CSTA Board member Shirley Miranda with her students Namrata Das and Noa Glaser.
Recently I attended NCWIT's Aspirations in Computing Southern California Awards Ceremony in Santa Ana, CA. Two students from my COSMOS (California…From The Eponymous Pickle
Analytics is not that Complex
In Forbes: I agree, it is not rocket science. It is, in its best form, as simple as possible. Best if originally sketched out on the back of an envelope. Or on a tablet with a concept or process mapping program, after an…
From BLOG@CACM
Microsoft Research, New York City
Yahoo! laid off people. Unlike every previous time there have been layoffs, this is serious for Yahoo! Research.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Journaling Productivity
Using a journal to increase productivity.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alan Turing Bio
An interview with the biographer of Alan Turing. A pioneer of computer science, artificial intelligence, codebreaking and the modeling of biological systems. All topics of interest that will continue to improve our knowledge…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Targeting Men in Retail
Retailers and manufacturers react to increasing percentage of men shopping. Nielsen stats and the establishment of 'Man Aisles'.
From Wild WebMink
Going to OSCON
My proposal has been accepted for OSCON in Portland this July, so I’m planning on attending once again – I’ve been to most of them since 2000 when Sun created the OpenOffice.org project (now LibreOffice). I’ll be leading a session…
From Putting People First
Experientia at EPIC Europe meeting
Experientia partner in charge of user research, Michele Visciola, will be one of the speakers at the EPIC Europe one-day meeting at the Elisava Design School in Barcelona next week, on 11 May 2012. The European meeting is the…
From Computational Complexity
Microsoft saves the Yahoo NY Researchers
I started working with David Pennock on prediction markets back when we both were at the NEC Research Institute in New Jersey a decade ago. After a major reorganization the dropped basic research from their mission, I went back…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality on Tablets
A dated article that came up recently, how the augmented reality (AR) company Metaio is looking at the use of AR on tablets. See their site for interesting recent applications of AE. Initially I thought of the ideal context…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Myths of Predictive Analytics
With brief registration, a reasonable look at the topic. I would prefer first a better definition of the topic as well. All analytics aims to be predictive, but like any forecast, it is not perfect. It has been done for many…
From Putting People First
How companies like Amazon use big data to make you love them
Businesses now sit on data goldmines, but very few leverage the data to improve customer service. Ziba’s creative director Sean Madden suggests three ways forward. “Big Data has gotten a lot of attention over the past 18 months…
From Putting People First
Social TV and the second screen
Social TV is a major disruption in the rapidly changing television industry. In the free report “Social TV and the second screen“, Stowe Boyd, acclaimed futurist, managing director of World Talk Research, and a researcher-at-large…
From Putting People First
How to win the UX war within your organization
When companies don
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Waterman Awardees to Present to National Science Board Today
Scott Aaronson
From Schneier on Security
Criminal Intent Prescreening and the Base Rate Fallacy
I've often written about the base rate fallacy and how it makes tests for rare events -- like airplane terrorists -- useless because the false positives vastly outnumber the real positives. This essay uses that argument to demonstrate…
From Apophenia
Microsoft Research opens New York City lab
I am giddy with pleasure to share Jennifer Chayes’ announcement that Microsoft Research is opening a new lab in New York City that will be filled with computational social science types. The New England lab that I call home combines…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Enemies and Innovation
Enemies sparking innovation. Martin Lindstrom writes an interesting piece about competition producing the need to innovate. Coke - Pepsi and Apple - Microsoft are covered as examples of this kind of hyper competitiveness…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Big Data: A
Calling data “a transformative new currency for science, engineering, education, and commerce,”
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Awards Can Be a real Boost for Students and Teachers
Recently I attended NCWIT's Aspirations in Computing Southern California Awards Ceremony in Santa Ana, CA. Two students from my COSMOS (California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science) cluster on "Computers in Everyday…
From Schneier on Security
Al Qaeda Steganography
The reports are still early, but it seems that a bunch of terrorist planning documents were found embedded in a digital file of a porn movie.
Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
ACM Announces Distinguished Service, Doctoral Dissertation Awardees
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Discovery
Data discovery is not a term I have heard much recently. We experimented with the topic as part of a broader artificial intelligence program. It linked well with what was also called 'case based reasoning' and 'associativeGood…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Open Source Courses
Students respond to yet another example of free online courses. This prototype example from MIT on Electrical Engineering. The knowledge is starting to spread, the form of education is changing. But can only the elite well…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Operationalizing Business Analytics
A piece from the SAS blog on operationalizing business analytics. An important topic I am just working with " ... Business analytics is maturing
From Schneier on Security
Cybercrime as a Tragedy of the Commons
Two very interesting points in this essay on cybercrime. The first is that cybercrime isn't as big a problem as conventional wisdom makes it out to be.
We have examined cybercrime from an economics standpoint and found a story…From Wild WebMink
Standards and Telecoms
A key insight into the UK Open Standards Consultation is that some of the opposition to truly open standards – ones without restrictions on implementation – comes from another industry where “open standards” means something different…
From BLOG@CACM
Possible Hadoop Trajectories
Hadoop has spread rapidly in the last few years as a platform for parallel computation in Java, but we believe a lot of improvement will be required for serious production use in the science domain of a large national laboratory…