Display ALL Posts in Computing & Technology

The New York Times, September 26, 2019
By Davey Alba and Adam Satariano

“Despite increased efforts by internet platforms like Facebook to combat internet disinformation, the use of the techniques by governments around the world is growing, according to a report released Thursday by researchers at Oxford University. Governments are spreading disinformation to discredit political opponents, bury opposing views and interfere in foreign affairs.”

Communications of the ACM, August 2019
By Emilio Ferrara

“In this article, I will briefly review the history of digital spam: starting from its quintessential incarnation, spam emails, to modern-days forms of spam affecting the Web and social media, the survey will close by depicting future risks associated with spam and abuse of new technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (e.g., Digital Humans).”

Communications of the ACM, March 2019
By Andrew A. Chien

“It is time for the computing community to face up to computing's growing environmental impact—and take responsibility for it! And further, to undertake research, design, and operations to reduce this growing impact.”

Communications of the ACM, March 2019
By Judea Pearl

“Unlike the rules of geometry, mechanics, optics, or probabilities, the rules of cause and effect have been denied the benefits of mathematical analysis.” “…the art of automated reasoning.”

Communications of the ACM, March 2019
By Ofir Turel

“For many years we have emphasized the positive aspects of computing technologies because we believed in their contribution to humanity. Nevertheless, there is a growing body of evidence in support of a technology duality view. That is to say, we have started realizing and quantifying the notion that many of the technologies we develop can also be harmful, especially when used excessively.”

Directed by: Karim Amer & Jehane Noujaim
Writing Credits: Karim Amer, Erin Barnett & Pedro Kos
Worldwide release by Netflix July 24, 2019

“Explore how a data company named Cambridge Analytica came to symbolize the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Communications of the ACM, March 2019
By Advaith Siddharthan, Kapila Ponnamperuma, Chris Mellish, et al.

“The Blogging Birds system shows that raw satellite tag data can be transformed into fluent, engaging, and informative texts directed at members of the public and in support of nature conservation.”

Idle Words
By Maciej Cegłowski

“For the purposes of this essay, I'll call it "ambient privacy" – the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.”

MIT Technology Review, July/Aug 2019

“It’s part of our ethos that technology can and should be a force for good. Our annual list of 35 innovators under 35 is a way of putting faces on that idea. ”

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Vinton G. Cerf

“We collectively owe much to the foresight and nuanced decisions taken by the leadership of [National Science Foundation’s] Computer, Information Systems and Engineering Directorates (CISE) and its Division of Computer and Network Systems.” [Without that, there would be no Internet as we know it today.]

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Benjamin Treynor Sloss, Shylaja Nukala, Vivek Rau

“One of the most important choices in offering a service is which service metrics to measure, and how to evaluate them. The difference between great, good, and poor metric and metric threshold choices is frequently the difference between a service that will surprise and delight its users with how well it works, one that will be acceptable for most users, and one that will actively drive away users—regardless of what the service actually offers. … What follows are the types of metrics the Google SRE team has adopted for Google services. These metrics are not particularly easy to implement, and they may require changes to a service to instrument properly. It has been our consistent experience at Google, however, that every service team that implements these metrics is happy afterward that it made the effort to do so.”

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Pat Helland

“The fascinating thing about identifiers is that while they identify the same "thing" over time, that referenced thing may slide around in its meaning. Product descriptions, reviews, and inventory balance all change, while the product ID does not. Reservations, orders, and bookings all have identifiers that do not change, while the stuff they identify may subtly change over time. Identity and identifiers provide the immutable linkage. Both sides of this linkage may change, but they provide a semantic consistency needed by the business operation. No matter what you call it, identity is the glue that makes things stick and lubricates cooperative work. … The judicious use of ambiguity and interchangeability lubricates distributed, long-running, scalable, and heterogeneous systems.”

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Michael E. Caspersen, Judith Gal-Ezer, Andrew McGettrick, Enrico Nardelli

“The emphasis of the report is on informatics education, with informatics seen as the science underpinning the development of the digital world—a distinctive discipline with its own scientific methods, its own ways of thinking, and its own technological development.”

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Steffen Staab, Susan Halford, Wendy Hall

“For the past decade, Web Science has been building the interdisciplinary expertise to face the challenges and realize the value of this rapidly growing and diversifying Web. This task transcends the work of any single academic discipline. While our universities continue—overwhelmingly—to be organized in siloes established in the 20th century, or much earlier, the Web demands expertise from computer science, sociology, business, mathematics, law, economics, politics, psychology engineering, geography, and more. Web Science exists to integrate knowledge and expertise from across fields, integrating this into systematic, robust, and reliable research that provides an action base for the future of the Web.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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."

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.”

Communications of the ACM, June 2018
By Ricardo Baeza-Yates

“Bias on the Web reflects both societal and internal biases within ourselves, emerging in subtler ways. This article aims to increase awareness of the potential effects imposed on us all through bias present in Web use and content. We must thus consider and account for it in the design of Web systems that truly address people's needs.”

Communications of the ACM, June 2018, Vol. 61 No. 6, Pages 18-19
By Logan Kugler

“Facebook and Google lead the way in this arena. Facebook allows users to customize their personal profile to their liking and indicate their interests by engaging with content. Every reaction a user has to a post teaches Facebook's algorithms his/her preferences; these algorithms then serve more content that even better matches the user's preferences.

The result? The user visits and revisits the site, staying for longer, making them a richer target for advertising."

Communications of the ACM, June 2018, Vol. 61 No. 6, Pages 13-14
By Chris Edwards

“The secret to deep learning's success in avoiding the traps of poor local minima may lie in a decision taken primarily to reduce computation time.”

Wired.com, February 18, 2019
By James Vlahos

“Reaching position zero requires a wholly different strategy than conventional SEO. The importance of putting just the right keywords on a web page, for instance, is declining. Instead, SEO gurus try to think of the natural-language phrases that users might say—like “What are the top-rated hybrid cars?”—and incorporate them, along with concise answers, on sites. The hope is to produce the perfect bit of content that the AI will extract and read aloud.”

MIT Technology Review, February 21, 2019
By Sean Dorrance Kelly

"The capacity for genuine creativity, the kind of creativity that updates our understanding of the nature of being, is at the ground of what it is to be human."

MIT Technology Review, Feb. 15, 2019
By David Rotman

"In other words, AI’s chief legacy might not be driverless cars or image search or even Alexa’s ability to take orders, but its ability to come up with new ideas to fuel innovation itself."

Communications of the ACM, June 2018
By Susan Landau

"The road to the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal is strewn with failures. There's the failure to protect users' privacy, the failure to protect voters, and the failure to uncover the actions and violations of laws that may well have affected the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election."

"WIRED Top Stories – Your essential guide to what’s next, delivering the WIRED take on the intersection of technology, science, business, and culture."

“Communications of the ACM is the leading print and online publication for the computing and information technology fields. Read by computing's leading professionals worldwide, Communications is recognized as the most trusted and knowledgeable source of industry information for today’s computing professional.”

“ACM, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. ACM provides the computing field's premier Digital Library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources.”

By Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry Lewis, & Wendy Seltzer

“Blown to Bits, Second Edition is the brilliant, plain-English guide to digital technology, how it’s changing the world, and what you need to know to survive in tomorrow’s digital world. A best-seller when it was first published in 2010, the issues it addresses are more crucial than ever. ”

Communications of the ACM, April 2018
By Daniel A. Reed

“Then there is the woefully obsolete nature of the governing law – the Communications Act of 1934. Yes, you read that right – 1934! There have been updates, most recently the Telecommunications Act of 1996, but twenty years is a geologic eon at Internet speed.”

“The inside story of how America’s enemies launched a cyber war against us-and how we’ve learned to fight back...”

Includes links to:

• “The Lawfare Podcast: John Carlin on 'Dawn of the Code War'“ by Jen Patja Howell. Saturday, November 24, 2018.

• A discussion on responses to national security threats in cyberspace from the Department of Justice, featuring John P. Carlin, Former Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division; and John C. Demers, Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division, on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

• John Carlin on “Stay Tuned with Preet” Dec. 4, 2018.

“SILICON VALLEY tells the story of the pioneering scientists who transformed rural Santa Clara County into the hub of technological ingenuity we now know as Silicon Valley. The film spotlights the creativity of the young men who founded Fairchild Semiconductor and in particular the brilliant, charismatic young physicist Robert Noyce.”

Communications of the ACM, January 2019
By Thomas Haigh

“Letting Silicon Valley steal the term "moonshot" for projects with quite different management styles, success criteria, scales, and styles of innovation hurts our collective ability to understand just what NASA achieved 50 years ago and why nothing remotely comparable is actually under way today at Google, or anywhere else."

Presentation by Steve Blank, Dec. 2007 & Nov. 2008

Premise of “The Secret History of Silicon Valley” is that WWII was the First Electronic War and it was the wartime urgency combined with required secrecy to create systems to counter the threat of Nazi Germany that primarily lead to the development of what is known today as Silicon Valley. The point being that popular culture and history does not include this aspect in the history of Silicon Valley, but it is nonetheless important to know this history. Further, the projects that Mr. Blank outlines were conducted in plain sight.

Explore the many aspects of Fiber Optic Cable & Submarine Cable Systems. Global networks of hair-thin strands of highly refined silicone over which most all our data travels. Go ahead, geek out a bit. You might learn something.

Wired.com, December 1, 1996
By Neal Stephenson

“The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.”

Communications of the ACM, February 2019
By Logan Kugler

"A core challenge for democratic governments will be continued adherence to the rule of law, where restrictions on individual liberty that flow from use of this technology must be justified by necessity, legitimate purpose, and use of the least restrictive means available."

Communications of the ACM, February 2019
By Carl Landwher

“Innovation has its downside and loss of privacy is not easy to remedy. “

Communications of the ACM, February 2019
By Dror G. Feitelson

“Someone did not tighten the lid, and the ants got into the honey again. This can be prevented by placing the honey jar in a saucer of water, but it is a nuisance, occupies more counter space, and one must remember to replenish the water. So we try at least to remember to tighten the lid.

In the context of security, the software industry does not always tighten the lid. In some cases it fails to put the lid on at all, leaving the honey exposed and inviting.”

The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2018
Opinion by Margaret O’Mara

“In the fall of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration announced a plan to consolidate hundreds of federal databases into one centralized National Data Bank. It was meant as an efficiency move to make the Great Society even greater.”

Wired.com, Nov 13, 2018.
By Tom Simonite

“The age of homebrew AI may not be all sweetness and light. Nor will it be all darkness and porn. Meet some of the pioneers showing what happens when the masses can teach computers new tricks.”

“Software has been around since the 1940s. Which means that people have been faking their way through meetings about software, and the code that builds it, for generations. Now that software lives in our pockets, runs our cars and homes, and dominates our waking lives, ignorance is no longer acceptable. The world belongs to people who code. Those who don’t understand will be left behind.”

“This issue comprises a single story devoted to ­demystifying code and the culture of the people who make it. There’s some technical language along with a few pretty basic mathematical concepts. There are also lots of solid jokes and lasting insights. It may take a few hours to read, but that’s a small price to pay for adding decades to your career.”

Communications of the ACM, October 19, 2018
By Judy Robertson

“There’s a mismatch between what we teach children about computing at school and what they want to know. More than a decade ago computer science educators coined the phrase computational thinking to refer to the unique cleverness of the way computer scientists approach problem solving. "Our thinking is based on abstraction, decomposition, generalization, and pattern matching", we said, "and everyone will find it useful to think like this in their everyday lives. So please stop asking us to fix your printer."