acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

BLOG@CACM


bg-corner

From BLOG@CACM

John McCarthy

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

Why We Compute
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...

Password Policies Are Getting Out of Control
From BLOG@CACM

Password Policies Are Getting Out of Control

 At least 9 characters long. No repeated characters. At least 1 number, 1 special character, and 1 capital letter. Cannot be same as last 10 passwords. Must change...

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...

Algorithm Visualizations and Community Building
From BLOG@CACM

Algorithm Visualizations and Community Building

If you’re interested in using or developing algorithm visualizations (AVs), you should visit AlgoViz.org, a portal dedicated to creating a repository of AVs and...

TeachScheme! U­sing Mathematics to Teach Programming
From BLOG@CACM

TeachScheme! U­sing Mathematics to Teach Programming

Matthias Felleisen and a team of computer scientists have developed the TeachScheme! Project, which provides high school teachers with courseware and other tools...

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...

2010 Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach Awards
From BLOG@CACM

2010 Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach Awards

This year, I again had the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the IEEE Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, both of which were presented...

Welcome to SC10: Opening Keynote, Top500 List
From BLOG@CACM

Welcome to SC10: Opening Keynote, Top500 List

SC10—the premier conference for supercomputing—has begun. This post touches on a few highlights from the first day of the full technical program, including the...

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...

Grace: A Manifesto For a New Educational Object-Oriented Programming Language
From BLOG@CACM

Grace: A Manifesto For a New Educational Object-Oriented Programming Language

At SPLASH 2010, Andrew Black, Kim B. Bruce, and James Noble presented their manifesto for a new educational object-oriented programming language called Grace.  

Can Randomly Generated Code Fix Software Bugs?
From BLOG@CACM

Can Randomly Generated Code Fix Software Bugs?

Can the principles of evolution be applied to software code and used to improve it? Stephanie Forrest thinks so—and has some encouraging data to prove it.  

Fixing the Process of Computer Science Refereeing
From BLOG@CACM

Fixing the Process of Computer Science Refereeing

There is a simple way to make refereeing better, almost overnight. It takes a bit of courage, but it would restore honesty and quality to the process.

­UIST 2010: Ending Keynote
From BLOG@CACM

­UIST 2010: Ending Keynote

UIST 2010 has concluded with Jaron Lanier's inspiring and profound keynote after another set of paper presentations demonstrating innovative UI technology.

­UIST 2010: Cursors Rock
From BLOG@CACM

­UIST 2010: Cursors Rock

Two papers about enhanced mouse cursors quickly drew my attention today. I briefly introduce these papers among other interesting topics of the second day of UIST...

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...

Managing Scientific Data: Coping with a Multidisciplinary World Grace Hopper Talk
From BLOG@CACM

Managing Scientific Data: Coping with a Multidisciplinary World Grace Hopper Talk

This is a report on a talk by Claudia Bauzer Medeiros on Managing Scientific Data.

Better Game Playing ­Using Parallel Algorithms
From BLOG@CACM

Better Game Playing ­Using Parallel Algorithms

Innovations in playing the game "Go" using Monte Carlo Tree Search and parallel algorithms.

Remembering Internet Dogs
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,...

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...
Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account