Generally covering the broad topics of computing and related technology.
Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Dirk Lewandowski
“A proposal for building an index of the Web that separates the infrastructure part of the search engine—the index—from the services part that will form the basis for myriad search engines and other services utilizing Web data on top of a public infrastructure open to everyone.”
The Web Is Missing an Essential Part of Infrastructure: An Open Web Index Read More
Communications of the ACM, July 2019
By CACM Staff
“RICHARD MCDONALD: Questions come up as to who actually owns those records, who looks after them, and who needs to have access to them.”
Access Controls and Healthcare Records: Who Owns the Data? Read More
Communications of the ACM, July 2019
By Thomas A. Limoncelli
“In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote an article predicting, ‘Software will eat the world.’ By that he meant two things: First, many traditional businesses are being replaced by software companies. Second, all other companies are finding the value they deliver is increasingly a result of software.
When Andreessen wrote his article none of the 10 biggest companies (by market value) were in software-driven businesses. Today, six of the 10 biggest companies are primarily driven by software. The others are ripe for a transformation.”
The Top 10 Things Executives Should Know About Software Read More
Communications of the ACM, July 2019
By David Nordfors, Chally Grundwag, V. R. Ferose
“Powerful technologies are today ready to open the door to a new paradigm of work: instead of squeezing people into existing job slots, companies can tailor work that fits individuals’ unique skills, talents, and passions, matching them with inspiring teams and offering them a choice of meaningful tasks. This has tremendous benefits for both the employee and employer by creating a “long-tail labor market” in which diversity brings competitive advantage.”
A New Labor Market for People with ‘Coolabilities’ Read More
Communications of the ACM, July 2019
By Susan J. Winter
“This column uses the case of smart cities to illustrate the ethical dilemmas created by an otherwise innocuous-seeming issue. … Cui bono, which means “who benefits?” … Cui bono? In principle, everyone. But a closer look at the smart cities rhetoric shows the benefits focused on a subset of the total.”
MIT Technology Review, June 26, 2019
By Chuck Klosterman. Illustration by Keith Rankin.
“The rock era and the space age exist on parallel time lines. The Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957, the same month Elvis Presley hit #1 with “Jailhouse Rock.” The first Beatles single, “Love Me Do,” was released 23 days after John F. Kennedy declared that America would go to the moon (and not because it was easy, but because it was hard). Apollo 11 landed the same summer as Woodstock. These specific events are (of course) coincidences. Yet the larger arc is not. Mankind’s assault upon the heavens was the most dramatic achievement of the 20th century’s second half, simultaneous with rock’s transformation of youth culture. It does not take a deconstructionist to see the influence of the former on the latter.”
The Sounds of Silence: In salute to landing on the moon 50 years ago Read More
Wired, May 14, 2019
By Paul Ford
“I was exceptionally lucky to be born into this moment. I got to see what happened, to live as a child of acceleration. The mysteries of software caught my eye when I was a boy, and I still see it with the same wonder, even though I’m now an adult. Proudshamed, yes, but I still love it, the mess of it, the code and toolkits, down to the pixels and the processors, and up to the buses and bridges. I love the whole made world. But I can’t deny that the miracle is over, and that there is an unbelievable amount of work left for us to do.”
Why I Still Love Tech Read More
Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Matt Fata, Philippe-Joseph Arida, Patrick Hahn, Betsy Beyer
“Until recently, our virtual desktops were hosted on commercially available hardware on Google’s corporate network using a homegrown open source virtual cluster-management system called Ganeti. Today, this substantial and Google-critical workload runs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This article discusses the reasons for the move to GCP, and how the migration was accomplished.”
Corp to Cloud: Google’s Virtual Desktops Read More
Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Diomidis Spinellis
“When the going gets tough, the programmer should humbly fall back on the systematic process instead of randomly poking the software trying to pinpoint the fault through sheer luck.”
Modern Debugging: The Art of Finding a Needle in a Haystack Read More
Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Yutong Lu, Depei Qian, Haohuan Fu, Wenguang Chen
“High-performance computing (HPC) plays an important role in promoting scientific discovery, addressing grand-challenge problems, and promoting social and economic development. Over the past several decades, China has put significant effort into improving its own HPC through a series of key projects under its national research and development program. Development of supercomputing systems has advanced parallel applications in various fields in China, along with related software and hardware technology, and helped advance China’s technological innovation and social development.
To meet the requirements of multidisciplinary and multidomain applications, new challenges in architecture, system software, and application technologies must be addressed to help develop next-generation exascale supercomputing systems.”
Will Supercomputers Be Super-Data and Super-AI Machines? Read More
Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Elliott Zaagman
“China plans to become the world’s high-tech leader, and quickly. In 2015, the Chinese government’s State Council approved “Made in China 2025,” an initiative designed to position China as a world leader in fields such as robotics, aviation, advanced information technology, and new-energy vehicles in less than a decade. In support of this governmental initiative, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released a three-year action plan to drive growth in areas including smart drones, facial recognition, AI-supported medical diagnosis, speech recognition, and language translation. If successful, the initiative would grow China’s AI industry to a size of $150 billion by 2020, approximately 100 times its size in 2016. As China pushes AI forward, here are a few names, trends, and technologies to watch.”
China’s Computing Ambitions Read More
Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Samuel Greengard
“When the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25, 2018, it represented the most sweeping effort yet to oversee the way businesses collect and manage consumer data. The law, established to create consistent data standards and protect EU citizens from potential privacy abuses, sent ripples—if not tidal waves—across the world.”
Weighing the Impact of GDPR Read More
“The Internet Society supports and promotes the development of the Internet as a global technical infrastructure, a resource to enrich people’s lives, and a force for good in society.
Our work aligns with our goals for the Internet to be open, globally-connected, secure, and trustworthy. We seek collaboration with all who share these goals.”
Internet Society Read More
Wired.com, December 13, 2018
By Klint Finley
“The future depends on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars to telemedicine and mixed reality to as yet undreamt technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier will require high-speed, always-on internet connections.
To keep up with the explosion of new connected gadgets and vehicles, not to mention the deluge of streaming video, the mobile industry is working on something called 5G—so named because it’s the fifth generation of wireless networking technology.”
The WIRED Guide to 5G Read More
Wired.com, February 1, 2018
By: Tom Simonite
“Artificial intelligence is overhyped—there, we said it. It’s also incredibly important. Superintelligent algorithms aren’t about to take all the jobs or wipe out humanity. But software has gotten significantly smarter of late.”
The WIRED Guide to Artificial Intelligence Read More
28th Chaos Communication Congress: Behind Enemy Lines, December, 2011
By Cory Doctorow
“The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race. The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world.”
28c3: The coming war on general computation Read More
Communications of the ACM, November 2018, Vol. 61 No. 11, Pages 30-33
By C. Liaskos, A. Tsioliaridou, et al.
“This Viewpoint introduces an approach that could tame and control these [multipath and other undesirable] effects, producing a wireless environment with software-defined electromagnetic behavior. We introduce the novel idea of HyperSurfaces, which are software-controlled metamaterials embedded in any surface in the environment.”
Using Any Surface to Realize a New Paradigm for Wireless Communications Read More
Communications of the ACM, January 2019
By Yolanda Gil, Suzanne A. Pierce, et al.
“Many aspects of geosciences pose novel problems for intelligent systems research… A recently launched Research Coordination Network on Intelligent Systems for Geosciences followed a workshop at the National Science Foundation on this topic. This expanding network builds on the momentum of the NSF EarthCube initiative for geosciences, and is driven by practical problems in Earth, ocean, atmospheric, polar, and geospace sciences. Based on discussions and activities within this network, this article presents a research agenda for intelligent systems inspired by geosciences challenges.”
Intelligent Systems for Geosciences: An Essential Research Agenda Read More
Communications of the ACM, May 2018
By Björn W. Schuller
“Communication with computing machinery has become increasingly ‘chatty’ these days: Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and many more dialogue systems have hit the consumer market on a broader basis than ever, but do any of them truly notice our emotions and react to them like a human conversational partner would? In fact, the discipline of automatically recognizing human emotion and affective states from speech, usually referred to as Speech Emotion Recognition or SER for short, has by now surpassed the “age of majority,” celebrating the 22nd anniversary after the seminal work of Daellert et al. in 1996—arguably the first research paper on the topic. However, the idea has existed even longer, as the first patent dates back to the late 1970s.”
Speech Emotion Recognition: Two Decades in a Nutshell, Benchmarks, and Ongoing Trends Read More
Wired.com, January 21, 2019
By Zeynep Tufekci
“Here’s one you probably haven’t seen—and its absence from your life speaks to why the promise of the early web seems increasingly out of reach: “402 Payment Required.”
That’s right: The web’s founders fully expected some form of digital payment to be integral to its functioning, just as integral as links, web pages, and passwords. After all, without a way to quickly and smoothly exchange money, how would a new economy be able to flourish online? Of course there ought to be a way to integrate digital cash into browsing and other activities. Of course.”
Shouldn’t We All Have Seamless Micropayments By Now? Read More