Communications of the ACM
Refine your search:
From BLOG@CACM
Star Trek@50: Inspiring Discovery and Innovation
Star Trek has inspired generations to pursue science and technology careers, not a few of whom have transformed part of it into technological and commercial fact...
From BLOG@CACM
Through A Google Glass, Darkly
I have been wearing Google Glass as both a technical assessment of utility and as a social study in human dynamics and expectations.
From BLOG@CACM
Deferred Maintenance on the Future
Over-worked and sleep-deprived drivers are steering many of our vehicles of discovery on balding tires across potholed roads. Stripping away the metaphor, we are...
From BLOG@CACM
Leaping the Exascale Chasm
The global race is on to build ever-faster supercomputers, fueled by a combination of scientific and engineering needs to simulate phenomena with greater resolution...
From BLOG@CACM
Simplifying Communication
How often have you picked up a scholarly journal in a discipline far removed from your expertise, only to be stymied and mystified by the disciplinary jargon? We...
From BLOG@CACM
HPC, Big Data and the Peloponnesian War
We need a concord and strategic research investment plan that recognizes the shared importance of HPC and big data. Both warrant investments in basic research,...
From BLOG@CACM
Research {Preposition} Infrastructure
Computing research and advanced computing infrastructure–each is dependent on the other in a myriad of subtle and complex ways, yet each is profoundly different...
From BLOG@CACM
Online Higher Education
The higher education community is abuzz with debates regarding massive open online courses (MOOCs). This feels like a time of profound change, when the confluence...
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...
From BLOG@CACM
No, Maybe, Yes, Obviously: Telling the Future the Past
The Kubler-Ross model of the stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — is sometimes an apt description of the culture change required...
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
Planting Seeds in the Field of Knowledge
In these challenging economic times, universities are under great stress--economically, politically, and socially. It is tempting for those of us in computing to...
From BLOG@CACM
Why We Compute
Why do we, as researchers and practitioners, have this deep and abiding love of computing? Why do we compute? I suspect it is a deeper, more primal yearning, one...
From BLOG@CACM
Being Bilingual: Speaking Technology and Policy
How do we cross the intellectual divide, providing technical advice to policy experts in ways that they find useful and actionable? Equally importantly, how do...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
From BLOG@CACM
Remembering Internet Dogs
An iconic cartoon by Peter Steiner, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1993, captured the nature of the nascent Internet. It shows a dog seated at a computer,...12