Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2012
From The Eponymous Pickle
High Tech SuperMarkets
Nothing very new here. But in Mashable, a list and vendor overview of advanced, often mobile tech being seen increasingly often in the supermarket. Though most of these ideas have been seen for years, the retailers and vendors…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
AAMAS, CCC Running Challenges and Visions Track
In cooperation with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to invite submissions to a Challenges and Visions Track at AAMAS 2013,…
From Schneier on Security
Overreaction and Overly Specific Reactions to Rare Risks
Horrific events, such as the massacre in Aurora, can be catalysts for social and political change. Sometimes it seems that they're the only catalyst; recall how drastically our policies toward terrorism changed after 9/11 despite…
From Putting People First
Book: UX Best Practices
UX Best Practices – How to Achieve More Impact with User Experience Helmut Degen & Xiaowei Yuan (Eds.) McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2011 ISBN-10: 007175251X, ISBN-13: 978-0071752510 304 pages (Amazon) Helmut Degen, Ph.D., works…
From Putting People First
Ethnography for user experience
In three essays John Payne, Principal of Moment’s Experience Design practice, reflects on his workshop, Ethnography for User Experience, and their field research with Occupy Wall Street. Payne was recently asked by IxDA NY’s…
From Putting People First
Intel’s futurist envisions life in 2022
Brian David Johnson gets paid to predict the future. He is the first, the one, and the only futurist at Intel, charged with envisioning how people will interact with technology a decade from now. Currently, Johnson’s task is…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Transforming Engineering Education
Correspondent David Goldberg points me to the BigBeacon blog. A movement to transform engineering education ... Which also syndicates some of his writing on the subject. Always interested in passing along some useful information…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Michigan Coding, Complexity, and Sparsity Workshop
Lion tracks in Wolverine territory Anna Gilbert and Martin Strauss are experts in many aspects of mathematics and its relationship to fundamental questions of computer science. They are professors in the Department of Mathematics…
From Schneier on Security
Court Orders TSA to Answer EPIC
Year ago, EPIC sued the TSA over full body scanners (I was one of the plantiffs), demanding that they follow their own rules and ask for public comment. The court agreed, and ordered the TSA to do that. In response, the TSA…
From The Eponymous Pickle
No Boss Environments
Wharton examines the no-boss environment. An unachievable utopia? Or the future of a strong social, but also measurable environment?
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Online Education: Is it All it's Cracked Up To Be?
MOOC's —Massive Open Online Courses — are all the rage these days. These are systems that allow hundreds of thousands of learners from around the world to take classes complete with video lectures and robo-grading, completely…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Behavior vs Technology
In Fastcompany: A useful thought, which we used with regard to setting and testing contexts that changed behavior. " ... Behavior is the unknowable variable in every innovation, and it is the variable that most determines the…
From Schneier on Security
Hotel Door Lock Vulnerability
The attack only works sometimes, but it does allow access to millions of hotel rooms worldwide that are secured by Onity brand locks. Basically, you can read the unit's key out of the power port on the bottom of the lock, and…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Construct 2 - the HTML5 game maker
I’ve been experimenting with Construct 2 from Scirra the last few days. Construct 2 is a program from creating HTML 5 games. What really got my interest was that there is the ability to create Windows 8 games using ConstructThe…
From Apophenia
Participatory Culture: What questions do you have?
Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito, and I have embarked on an interesting project for Polity. Through a series of dialogues, we’re hoping to produce a book that interrogates our different thoughts regarding participatory culture. The goal…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Pictures and Big Insight
In Google Research: Big Pictures with big messages. How do we deliver big data onto a palette that makes the the message clear? Easier with geographical maps than it is with more abstract layouts, but always worth considering…
From Computational Complexity
MOOCs
I haven't posted in about a month. A combination of traveling, vacation, moving to Atlanta and getting started as chair. I appreciate why Michael Mitzenmacher stopped blogging as he became department head. I'll try to post once…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Judea Pearl’s Turing Award Lecture at AAAI-12
Judea Pearl received the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” In this guest post, Douglas Fisher,…
From Schneier on Security
Profile on Eugene Kaspersky
Wired has an interesting and comprehensive profile on Eugene Kaspersky. Especially note Kaspersky Lab's work to uncover US cyberespionage against Iran, Kaspersky's relationship with Russia's state security services, and the …
From The Noisy Channel
Hiring: Taking It Personally
As a manager, I’ve found that I mostly have two jobs: bringing great people onto the team, and creating the conditions for their success. The second job is the reason I became a manager — there’s nothing more satisfying than…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAS on Big Data
Alison Bolen of the SASCom Blog aggregates a number of good thoughts and posts about the topic of big data.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advancing Google Wallet
Google Wallet now accepts many card options. We move closer to the electronic wallet. Near universal capability is key. " ... The newest version of Google Wallet now sports a feature that makes paying with a cellphone that…
From Schneier on Security
Lone Shooters and Body Armor
The new thing about the Aurora shooting wasn't the weaponry, but the armor:
What distinguished Holmes wasn't his offense. It was his defense. At Columbine, Harris and Klebold did their damage in T-shirts and cargo pants. Cho…From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Names New Connect & Develop Leader
On P&G's site ... more information here, including links to get your own ideas used by P&G:" ... Connect+Develop, the program that’s brought consumers a series of breakthrough products including Swiffer Dusters, Mr. Clean Magic…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G's CIO and CEO : Digitizing the Enterprise
In CIO: Relationship between P&G's CEO and CIO in the big enterprise. An interview, the whole thing is instructive to read:" ... McDonald’s understanding of how technology can transform the business (it is no coincidence that…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
IBM, IEEE Challenge Students to “Make the World a Better Place”
IBM and IEEE have partnered to launch the Smarter Planet Challenge, seeking ”creative team-based student projects that can help students at any level learn about applying engineering, science, and other disciplines to solve real…
From Schneier on Security
On Soft Targets
Stratfor has an interesting article.
From Putting People First
Design principles for eating sustainably
“Design Principles for Eating Sustainably: Bridging the Gap Between Consumer Intention and Action” is the title of an ethnographic research driven service design project by Canadian design and innovation firm Cooler Solutions…
From Putting People First
Don Norman: John Maeda and I failed to connect
As part of its Power of 10 lecture series, PARC Forum invited John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design, and Don Norman, Co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, last week for a dialogue on design and innovation…
From Putting People First
The ethnographer’s reading list
Ethnography Matters has embarked on a new series called “The Ethnographer’s Reading List” with UX professionals discussing their summer reading. Here are the latest three instalments: Nicolas Nova Nicolas Nova, who holds a PhD…