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 Computing Community Consortium Blog
Highlights: “What Makes Paris Look Like Paris?”
We all identify cities by certain attributes, such as building architecture, street signage, even the lamp posts and parking meters dotting the sidewalks. Now there’s a neat study by computer graphics researchers at Carnegie…
From Computational Complexity
Fellow blogger Abie Flaxma named Top Innovator!
(Guest post from William Heisel, Assistant Director for External Relations, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, 2301 5th Avenue, Suite 600,Seattle, WA 98121)Abraham (Abie) Flaxman who writes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mobile Telepresence
A slick looking idea that combines a robotic base with the telepresence idea. How practical is unclear. We examined a warehouse tracking idea that used Segways and video cameras to display inventory in a large space. Not the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tablets and Service Flexibility
Obvious feature. Having a mobile device with a larger screen that's easy to show and to the workplace, makes selling and service easier to do. It also makes it easier to share an interaction that maps a business process and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality Contact Lenses
Taking the idea of augmented vision away from glasses and into the contact lens. In the Financial Post. " ... Innovega is developing a contact lens called the iOptik lens that will provide the crucial step necessary to perceive…
From Schneier on Security
Help Cryptanalyze Gauss
Kaspersky is looking for help decrypting the Gauss payload.
From Putting People First
The first Informal Economy Symposium in Barcelona – October 12, 2012
HOW WILL the informal economy impact the global business landscape? The landscape of the Informal Economy is vast – from street vending to P2P networks, from piracy to ad-hoc businesses – it is the fastest growing sector of both…
From The Noisy Channel
Matt Lease: Recent Adventures in Crowdsourcing and Human Computation
Today we had the pleasure of hosting UT-Austin professor Matt Lease at LinkedIn to give a talk on his “Recent Adventures in Crowdsourcing and Human Computation“. It was a great talk, and the slides above are full of references…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dancing on the Edge of Truth
David Carr in the NYT: On recent plagiarism events. As 'journalists' we all aggregate, combine, co-create and sit on the work of those that have come before us. It is not always possible to assign the detail of credit…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 20 August 2012
Back from vacation and trying to catch up with things. I had over 450 unread email messages in spite of doing some triage over the vacation so if I haven’t gotten back to you yet I will soon. I did collect a few links to share…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pricing Strategy in a Recession
An Interesting Article on P&G's Pricing Strategy and options in a post recessionary period. " ... The Wall Street Journal has reported that Procter & Gamble Co.’s new CEO, Robert McDonald, is “slashing prices” and warns of…
From Schneier on Security
Passive Sensor That Sees Through Walls
A new technology uses the radiation given off by wi-fi devices to sense the positions of people through a one-foot-thick brick wall.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
The Promise Behind Khan's Computer Science Offerings
I haven't tried them yet. I thought it would be interesting to reflect on the latest addition to Khan Academy before I actually did the tutorials, and then see how my opinion differed afterwards. If the write-up by John Resig…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Outsourcing Services Expand
Slide show from a Gartner report on the expansion of the need for outsourcing services. I have also noted this in my own personal experience.The needs for services like data visualization and business analytics continue to grow…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mobilizing the Field Force
A topic that I have had to think about recently. Its naturally being done for issues of research, compliance and enhanced understanding of the consumer and their retail and service environment. But how can be most efficiently…
From The Noisy Channel
WTF! @ k: Measuring Ineffectiveness
At SIGIR 2004, Ellen Voorhees presented a paper entitled “Measuring Ineffectiveness” in which she asserted: Using average values of traditional evaluation measures [for information retrieval systems] is not an appropriate methodology…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
“The Algorithm That Runs the World”
New Scientist published a great story last week describing the history and evolution of the simplex algorithm — complete with a table capturing “2000 years of algorithms”: Its services are called upon thousands of times a second…
From Schneier on Security
The View from an Israeli Security Checkpoint
This is an extraordinary (and gut-wrenching) first-person account of what it's like to staff an Israeli security checkpoint. It shows how power corrupts: how it's impossible to make humane decisions in such a circumstance.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Peer Reviewed Places
In Wired: Proposing a Facebook for scientists designed to keep them from making mistakes early in their work. Not peer reviewed, but peer supported interaction. But will this support intellectual ownership? " ... Part of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scenario Planning
A new book on scenario planning. A method we experimented with in the enterprise as establishing guides to alternative futures. I often found it good, useful, but it did not pay enough attention to the increasing amount of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rail and Shale
Rail industry benefits. From MJ Perry. There will be other consequences to the broader US supply chain, and new jobs in the industry.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Robotics and Automation, the Future of Manufacturing
New York Times‘ tech writer John Markoff has penned a feature in today’s newspaper describing recent advances in robotics and automation, what they mean for the future of manufacturing and distribution, and the overall impact…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data, Smaller
In Wired: Dremel vs Hadoop in big data exploration and leverage. Good read. " ... Dremel is a way of analyzing information. Running across thousands of servers, it lets you “query” large amounts of data, such as a collection…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tesco Linking Loyalty to Facebook
More innovative things from the big retailer: " ... Savvy online shoppers will have the chance to earn double Clubcard points by using Facebook to like, share and buy products with Tesco direct as part of an innovative new four…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On the Cost of Logos
I have watched as large enterprises have re-done their branding over the years, in part by an urge for new creativeness, and even motivated by outside threats. That experience made me very skeptical about the process. Creative…
From The Eponymous Pickle
About Mobile Data and Analytics Delivered
In GigaOM: It is making us reconsider many aspects of the interaction between people and process. Further, it should make us think about where the analytics will reside. I am thinking about how the following will improve the…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Does time fix all?
As an graduate, finding useful references was painful. What the librarians had come up with were terrible time-consuming systems. It took an outsider (Berners-Lee) to invent the Web. Even so, the librarians were slow to adopt…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Mozilla and NSF Teaming Up to Build Apps for the Future;Idea, App Challenges Offering $500K in Prizes; Deadline Soon
The following is a special contribution to this blog by Will Barkis, Gigabit Developer Evangelist at Mozilla Foundation. As the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) noted back in June, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Analyzing Voice Emotions
Related to work we did trying to understand how people react to new products. A form of non conscious, neuromarketing analysis. But now proposed via a smart phone. Another example of phone based, non conscious context, biometric…
From Wild WebMink
How Open Source Forced Microsoft’s Hand
Even if you’re not using LibreOffice, you owe it a debt of gratitude because it (and its ancestors) forced Microsoft to interoperate, have a stable file format and innovate. I explain more in this week’s InfoWorld column.