Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2012
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Computer Controversies For Fun and Discussion
I love a good discussion. Pros and cons and honest and hopefully friendly discussion of issue with different opinions make for good learning experiences. One of the things I would like to do should I ever get a full-time advanced…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Don’t Panic
The other day I was looking through the analytics for this blog to see what sort of searches people were doing that let them here. Mostly I was seeing things I expected to see but one stuck out. Someone had searched for the string…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of September 17
September 19 Markup: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will review pending legislation, including a concurrent resolution expressing the sense of Congress that the current Internet multistakeholder governance model should…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pepsi Goes Native in Silicon Valley
In AdAge: An idea we tried as well. Its a useful idea, but think it is more useful to embed silicon valley into your own contexts to get better ideas and testable innovations. In general we know more about them than they…
From Wild WebMink
FLOSS UK AGM
I’ll be talking about “What’s Driving Open Source” after the Annual Meeting for FLOSS UK in London on Thursday.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
“Improving Our Depth Perception in Augmented Reality”
The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Science Nation has featured the work of Mississippi State University computer scientist J. Edward Swan II today, describing how his efforts to improve depth perception are critical to future…
From Computational Complexity
Imagining Imaginary Probabilities
In the year 4000BC my great-great-...-great grandmother tried to solve (in today's terms) the equation
x2 + 2x + 2 = 0She discovered that if it had a solution then there would be a number a such that a2=-1. Since there clearly…
From Schneier on Security
Diamond Swallowing as a Ruse
It's a known theft tactic to swallow what you're stealing. It works for food at the supermarket, and it also can work for diamonds. Here's a twist on that tactic:
Police say he could have swallowed the stone in an attemptMr…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
From GPS and Virtual Globes to Spatial Computing-2020
The following is a special contribution to this blog from the organizing committee of the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) visioning workshop on spatial computing – From GPS and Virtual Globes to Spatial Computing-2020 –…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Users of Big Data
On the Human component of Big Data in HBR. This is not discussed as much as it should be. How do people interact with the data and the analytics that come from having more and richer data? I have discussed several recent…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 17 September 2012
From my point of view the first week of this blog at this location has good well. I realize that I’ve posted a number of longish posts about some of my own thoughts and ideas that were not technical. I hope that has been as good…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
The Future is Now
Here's a cool idea for a lesson to get students thinking about the impact of technology on their lives and on their futures.
Checkout the 75 references on this year's Beloit College Mindset List (www.beloit.edu/mindset/2016/)…From The Eponymous Pickle
Recommender Systems
ACM sponsored Webinar on Recommender systems, the power of personalization.Thursday, September 20, 2012 at 12:00 PM EDT/11:00 AM CDT/9:00 AM PDT/4:00 PM UTC Personalization is the key to helping guide users through the morass…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Campbell Soup Innovation Center
Always interested in the concept of contextually rich innovation centers. Here is a new one by Campbell Soup / Pepperidge Farm. Looking for more detailed descriptions of approaches used there. Want to talk about methods to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of the Phone
In the Atlantic. What is the future of the smart phone? Obvious things like the integration of wallet functions. But beyond that. More intelligence and integration with our daily needs? It is hard to predict. I am not…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retailers Take to Shopper Marketing
In Supermarket News. The retailer continues to take a stronger handle to the integration of shopper behavior and purchase. The data and the analytics continue to make this connection easier to do.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Languages of Innovation
Thoughts on a language of innovation. All innovation exists in a context. In our innovation centers we started to seek a means to simulate innovation in both actual and virtual spaces. Then combine the real and virtual spaces…
From My Biased Coin
Student Bragging....
Always worth bragging about my students...Justin Thaler's paper "Cache-Oblivious Dictionaries and Multimaps with Negligible Failure Probability" (with me, Michael Goodrich, Dan Hirschberg) was accepted to TAPAS 2000 (now called…
From The Noisy Channel
LinkedIn Presentations at RecSys 2012
LinkedIn showed up in force at the 6th ACM International Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2012)! Here are the slides from all of our presentations. Daniel Tunkelang: Content, Connections, and Context Mario Rodriguez…
From Putting People First
Book: Economy of Experiences
Today Albert Boswijk, founder and CEO of the European Centre for the Experience Economy, contacted us about his new book “Economy of Experiences”. Boswijk co-founded the Centre, a structure affiliated with the University of Amsterdam…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retailers Don't Recognize the Solution
As early as 2000 we actively researched the ability of RFID technologies to solve key retail cost and operational issues. We expected the solutions to be in place a long time ago. In RFID Journal, " ... Retailers Recognize…
From Putting People First
UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience
UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience Sari Kujala (a), Virpi Roto (b), Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila (a), Evangelos Karapanos (c), Arto Sinnelä (a) a) Tampere University of Technology, Finland b) Nokia Research…
From Putting People First
Luxury brands need luxury retail experiences, even in the online space
Jonathan Ross, business development director at FACT-Finder, discusses the steps luxury brands can take to ensure a more rewarding online retail experience for consumers. “A recent study by McKinsey and Altagamma, the Italian…
From Putting People First
PARC ethnographer on the power of observation
In an article for GigaOM, Ellen Isaacs (personal site), a user experience designer and ethnographer for PARC, explains the benefits of using ethnography to develop better mobile products. “Ethnographic studies likely save businesses…
From Putting People First
Should we focus on user experience?
This article by my compatriot Koen AT Claes claims that our current notion of UX design mistakenly focuses on experience, and that we should go one step further and focus on the memory of an experience instead “Studies of behavioral…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Quantum Repetition
Aram Harrow and Gil Kalai debate “Conjecture 1″ William Wootters and Wojciech Zurek were office-mates in 1979 as graduate students at U.T. Austin in John Wheeler’s group. A paper by Nick Herbert of the Fundamental Fysiks Group…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Observation
Ethnographer at PARC speaks: " ... I spend a lot of time observing ordinary people going about their business — in hospitals, shopping malls, living rooms, even in parking lots. This practice helps me uncover real, but hidden…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Senior Care Robotics
Eldercare robotics. A direction pioneered in Japan that that we saw demonstrated at a major manufacturer. This approach designed for seniors with cognitive impairment.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
“Big Data’s Management Revolution”
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT have posted an interesting entry to the Harvard Business Review Blog about big data and corporate management: Big data has the potential to revolutionize management. Simply put, because…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Making Little Decisions from Big Data
An overview of predictive analytics in Information Management. Reasonably good overview of analytics today. It is all about utilizing data we are gathering today. Though I have my usual disagreement quarrels with the aspects…