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My Scientific Big Data Are Lonely
From BLOG@CACM

My Scientific Big Data Are Lonely

Although there are daunting technical challenges posed by big data in science and engineering, the social and economic challenges are just as difficult, though...

Possible Hadoop Trajectories
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...

­Using 'Averages' While Thinking About Social Behavior? That's Probably Wrong!
From BLOG@CACM

­Using 'Averages' While Thinking About Social Behavior? That's Probably Wrong!

Using "averages" as a metric while thinking about Social Systems is probably wrong.

NITRD 20: A Day in Your Life
From BLOG@CACM

NITRD 20: A Day in Your Life

Progress in information technology over the past 20 years has dramatically changed our lives — in our daily routine, at play, and at work. 

COLT/ICML Open Problems and ICML Instructions
From BLOG@CACM

COLT/ICML Open Problems and ICML Instructions

Open problems will be presented in a joint session in the evening of the COLT/ICML overlap day. If you have a difficult, theoretically definable problem in machine...

Research Data Sustainability and Access
From BLOG@CACM

Research Data Sustainability and Access

The dramatic growth of research data, the collaborative nature of international research, expectations for economic returns, and disciplinary differences all make...

From BLOG@CACM

John McCarthy

The contributions and personality of John McCarthy, one of the pioneers of computer science.

What We Owe Google, and What Google Owes ­Us
From BLOG@CACM

What We Owe Google, and What Google Owes ­Us

We rely on online information sources—maybe too much. What is our responsibility to make sure that they're accurate, and what responsibility do the sources have...

Research Directions For Machine Learning and Algorithms
From BLOG@CACM

Research Directions For Machine Learning and Algorithms

An in-depth discussion of near-term research directions for machine learning and algorithms.

Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations
From BLOG@CACM

Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations

That picture of you at a family reunion, squinting into the sun, can rarely be delimited by a physical location once it is placed on the web. Instead, information...

Embracing Noise or Why Computer Scientists Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Errors
From BLOG@CACM

Embracing Noise or Why Computer Scientists Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Errors

Precision is not required in everything or even most things.  Failures are best handled by expecting them all the time, not treating them as exceptions.  We should...

Explaining Science and Engineering
From BLOG@CACM

Explaining Science and Engineering

As I have followed the international news regarding the Japanese disaster, I have been struck by the challenges each news organization has faced in explaining technical...

Intellectual Amplification via Computing
From BLOG@CACM

Intellectual Amplification via Computing

As the recent performance of IBM's Watson system on the game show Jeopardy! illustrated, the combination of large-scale data, rich algorithm suites and powerful...

Works in Progress: MIA
From BLOG@CACM

Works in Progress: MIA

It is time we extracted a sample of cultural DNA from computing's history and engineered a new generation of contemplative, informal workshops. After gestation,...

To Videolecture or Not
From BLOG@CACM

To Videolecture or Not

Should conferences cover the cost of a videolecture or not?  I say "yes."

HPC and the Excluded Middle
From BLOG@CACM

HPC and the Excluded Middle

Betwixt and between ubiquitous consumer software and the ethereal realm of ultra-high-performance computing, lies the excluded middle, the world of day-to-day computational...

How Should Peer Review Evolve?
From BLOG@CACM

How Should Peer Review Evolve?

A simmering debate on peer review processes threatens to boil to the surface of various discussion forums for the scientific communities and the public at large...

Technology Transfer: A Contact Sport
From BLOG@CACM

Technology Transfer: A Contact Sport

The success or failure of technology transfer depends on many factors. No single mechanism is guaranteed to succeed, though there are many mechanisms that are likely...

Mind Meld in Group Decision Making
From BLOG@CACM

Mind Meld in Group Decision Making

Social computing remains a hot research topic, and basic research on understanding group decision making and conditions under which crowdsourcing can lead to advantages...

In Vivo, In Vitro, In Silico
From BLOG@CACM

In Vivo, In Vitro, In Silico

These “grand challenges” of systems biology encompass almost every aspect of modern computing, from numerical and symbolic methods through data management and analytics...
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