Association For Computing Machinery Research Articles

Computing for the social good

Computing for the social good is a movement that aims to broaden participation in computing by offering opportunities to apply computer science to social causes in higher education (Buckley, Nordlinger, & Subramanian, 2008; Goldweber et al., 2011). We have extended this movement to K-12, and added perspectives from Latina/o critical race theory, an analytic tool to critically examine how power relations shape Latino's educational experiences (Yosso, 2006). Our focus is on Latinos, who are the fastest growing ethnic minority population in the United States (U.S. Census, 2010), but are vastly underrepresented in computer science (CS). They are 16% of AP test takers, but only 1% of the AP Computer Science test takers; those that took it scored far below their peers (College Board, 2011). Although Latinos make up 19% of all US college students ages 18--24 (Lopez & Fry, 2013), the Computer Research Association's 2013 Taulbee Survey found that Latinos earned just 6% of CS bachelors degrees, and less than 2% of students who enrolled or completed a PhD in CS were Latino/a. And in 2010, Latinos made up only 4.6% of computer and information scientists in the labor force (National Science Foundation, 2014). In this abstract, we describe CSteach, an after school program that aims to get Latino/a students on a pathway to computing courses and careers beginning in elementary school. In CSteach, near-peers (local high school students) teach computing skills and concepts to 5 th graders using a social justice lens. CSteach addresses three key barriers in K-12 to recruiting and retaining Latinos in computing: 1) a lack of instrumental support to learn about and generate informed interest and confidence in CS; 2) few opportunities to take classes that will prepare them for high school and college-level CS; and 3) few programs that connect CS to the values of the students and their families. The CSteach program builds on research that suggests we can engage Latino/a students in CS by increasing the social relevance of computing. For example, Latino students are more likely than other groups to say that the message "Computing empowers you to do good" is very appealing (Association for Computing Machinery, 2009). Doing good is connected to family obligation, and family needs (often financial) serve as motivators for Latino/a students to pursue higher education and succeed on behalf of their families and communities (Cooper et al., 2005). When asked about their career goal and why they want to pursue it, most Latino/a 5 th grade students describe a helping profession (e.g., doctor, police), and say they want to help their community (Denner, Cooper, Dunbar, & Lopez, 2005). Truly engaging Latino/a youth involves building connections to their identity and culture by addressing the needs of the community, not just the individual (Solórzano, Villalpando, & Oseguera, 2005). This research formed the basis for the CSteach approach, which addresses some of the reasons why Latino students' interest in computing does not transfer into the attainment of degrees and participation in the CS workforce.

Towards a Historical Notion of ‘Turing—the Father of Computer Science’

In the popular imagination, the relevance of Turing's theoretical ideas to people producing actual machines was significant and appreciated by everybody involved in computing from the moment he published his 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers’. Careful historians are aware that this popular conception is deeply misleading. We know from previous work by Campbell-Kelly, Aspray, Akera, Olley, Priestley, Daylight, Mounier-Kuhn, Haigh, and others that several computing pioneers, including Aiken, Eckert, Mauchly, and Zuse, did not depend on (let alone were they aware of) Turing's 1936 universal-machine concept. Furthermore, it is not clear whether any substance in von Neumann's celebrated 1945 ‘First Draft Report on the EDVAC’ is influenced in any identifiable way by Turing's work. This raises the questions: (i) When does Turing enter the field? (ii) Why did the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) honor Turing by associating his name to ACM's most prestigious award, the Turing Award? Previous authors have been rather vague about these questions, suggesting some date between 1950 and the early 1960s as the point at which Turing is retroactively integrated into the foundations of computing and associating him in some way with the movement to develop something that people call computer science. In this paper, based on detailed examination of hitherto overlooked primary sources, attempts are made to reconstruct networks of scholars and ideas prevalent in the 1950s, and to identify a specific group of actors interested in theorizing about computations in computers and attracted to the idea of language as a frame in which to understand computation. By going back to Turing's 1936 paper and, more importantly, to re-cast versions of Turing's work published during the 1950s (Rosenbloom, Kleene, Markov), I identify the factors that made this group of scholars particularly interested in Turing's work and provided the original vector by which Turing became to be appreciated in retrospect as the father of computer science.

Recent developments in high‐performance computing and simulation: distributed systems, architectures, algorithms, and applications

Recent developments in high‐performance computing and simulation: distributed systems, architectures, algorithms, and applications

Recovering uncaptured citations in a scholarly network: A two‐step citation analysis to estimate publication importance

The citation relationships between publications, which are significant for assessing the importance of scholarly components within a network, have been used for various scientific applications. Missing citation metadata in scholarly databases, however, create problems for classical citation‐based ranking algorithms and challenge the performance of citation‐based retrieval systems. In this research, we utilize a two‐step citation analysis method to investigate the importance of publications for which citation information is partially missing. First, we calculate the importance of the author and then use his importance to estimate the publication importance for some selected articles. To evaluate this method, we designed a simulation experiment—“random citation‐missing”—to test the two‐step citation analysis that we carried out with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library (DL). In this experiment, we simulated different scenarios in a large‐scale scientific digital library, from high‐quality citation data, to very poor quality data, The results show that a two‐step citation analysis can effectively uncover the importance of publications in different situations. More importantly, we found that the optimized impact from the importance of an author (first step) is exponentially increased when the quality of citation decreases. The findings from this study can further enhance citation‐based publication‐ranking algorithms for real‐world applications.

Keynote

The most compelling ideas in systems are abstractions such as virtual memory, sockets, or packet scheduling. Algorithmics is the servant of abstraction, allowing system performance to approach that of the underlying hardware, sometimes by using efficient algorithms but often by simply leveraging other aspects of the system. I will survey the trajectory of network algorithmics starting with a focus on speed and scale in the 1990s to measurement and security in the 2000s. While doing so, I will reflect on my experiences in choosing problems and conducting research. I will conclude by describing my passion for the emerging field of network verification and its confluence with programming language research. George Varghese worked at DEC designing DECNET protocols before obtaining his Ph.D. in 1992 from MIT. He worked from 1993-1999 at Washington University and from 1999 to 2012 at UCSD, both as professor of computer science. He joined Microsoft Research as a Principal Researcher in 2012. He won the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1996, and was elected to be a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2002. He helped design the 40 Gbps forwarding engine for Procket Networks, subsequently acquired by Cisco Systems. His book "Network Algorithmics" was published in December 2004 by Morgan-Kaufman. He co-founded NetSift Inc. in May 2004. NetSift was acquired by Cisco in 2005. He was the 2014 winner of the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award

Patient engagement in the inpatient setting: a systematic review.

To systematically review existing literature regarding patient engagement technologies used in the inpatient setting. PubMed, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Xplore, and Cochrane databases were searched for studies that discussed patient engagement ('self-efficacy', 'patient empowerment', 'patient activation', or 'patient engagement'), (2) involved health information technology ('technology', 'games', 'electronic health record', 'electronic medical record', or 'personal health record'), and (3) took place in the inpatient setting ('inpatient' or 'hospital'). Only English language studies were reviewed. 17 articles were identified describing the topic of inpatient patient engagement. A few articles identified design requirements for inpatient engagement technology. The remainder described interventions, which we grouped into five categories: entertainment, generic health information delivery, patient-specific information delivery, advanced communication tools, and personalized decision support. Examination of the current literature shows there are considerable gaps in knowledge regarding patient engagement in the hospital setting and inconsistent use of terminology regarding patient engagement overall. Research on inpatient engagement technologies has been limited, especially concerning the impact on health outcomes and cost-effectiveness.

Health Social Networks asOnlineLife Support Groups for Patients With Cardiovascular Diseases

The number of patients who use the internet in search for information that might improve their health conditions has increased. Among them, those looking for virtual environments to share experiences, doubts, opinions, and emotions, and to foster relationships aimed at giving and getting support stand out. Therefore, there is an increasing need to assess how those environments can affect the patients' health.This study was aimed at identifying scientific studies on the proliferation and impact of virtual communities, known as health social networks or online support groups, directed to cardiovascular diseases, which might be useful to patients with certain conditions, providing them with information and emotional support. A systematic review of the literature was conducted with articles published from 2007 to 2012, related to cardiovascular diseases and collected from the following databases: PubMed; Association for Computing Machinery(ACM); and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Four articles meeting the inclusion criteria were selected.The results were interesting and relevant from the health viewpoint, identifying therapeutic benefits, such as provision of emotional support, greater compliance to treatment, and information sharing on diseases and on life experiences.

A Scientrometric Study of Computer Science With Special Reference to Literature Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

A Scientrometric Study of Computer Science With Special Reference to Literature Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

The computer boys take over: computers, programmers, and the politics of technical expertise (ensmenger, n.l.; 2010) [Book Review

The book describes the origins of computer programming and the competing interests that shaped its practice. It is about the growth of a practice - of programming or of software engineering - and about differing views of it as a craft, a profession, or a technology, and about the periodic crises that seemed to characterize the activity and its products. It is also about the masculinization of an activity in which women initially had a large role. One of the strengths of the book is its showing how what we may take as "obvious," such as the basic character of computer science as an academic discipline, emerges from multiple claims to define the field. Indeed, it was not obvious at the start that there should be such a field - new technologies often don't give rise to new disciplines. Academics who worked in computing wanted an intellectual foundation for programming, employers wanted educational standards, and computing workers wanted their activity to have professional standards. The major academic computing organization, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), also had non-academic members, but when it developed the first computer science curriculum standard, it was heavily theoretical and mathematical, and in the view of many in computing occupations, gave too little attention to practical data processing. The book is not primarily about academic computer science, though in its discussion of the ways in which women became excluded from the programming profession, it might have added something on university departments.

Special issue on parallel architectures and bioinspired algorithm: guest editors message

This special issue includes the extended version of selected papers presented at the fourth Parallel Architectures and Bioinspired Algorithms Workshop held in Galveston Island (TX, USA) on October 14, 2011 in conjunction with Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT). This workshop follows the success of the three previous workshops held in conjunction with PACT 2008 in Toronto, Canada [1], PACT 2009 in Raleigh, USA [2], and PACT 2010 in Vienna [3], Austria and the two previous Workshops on Parallel Bioinspired Algorithms [4] held in Oslo, 2005, (together with IEEE International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP)) [5] and London, 2007 (together with Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (Gecco) 2007) [6]. These series of workshops has shown that knowledge fields such as parallel computer architectures and Parallel and Distributed Computing and Bioinspired Algorithms, which could seem quite different in a first approach, are able to find transversal elements that enrich them. Bioinspired Algorithms comprise a set of heuristics that can help to optimize a wide range of problems, including many tasks faced by parallel architectures designers, such as balancing computer load, fault-tolerance and dependability, thermal-aware design, and NoC design. In addition, Bioinspired Algorithms may help in finding solutions related to compilation and resource sharing issues, which are interesting problems for parallel architectures. Parallel architecture designers may also propose infrastructures that allow the improvement of computing performance of Bioinspired Algorithms, which usually face real-world problems that manage huge amounts of data. Alternatives to the classical sequential solution are needed by this community. Therefore, topics such as P2P, cluster and grid computing, cloud computing, and Graphics Processing Unit (GPUs) implementation of Bioinspired Algorithms are very interesting to this field. We have therefore considered this opportunity to give a broader view on the application of nature inspired computing techniques to hardware design and parallel architectures problem solving. We have also considered the interest of including an overview of the available bioinspired techniques based tools that have been used so far to solve problems related to automatic hardware design. We thus invited Professors Oscar Garnica and Juan Lanchares to work with us with this aim. Therefore, this special issue includes the paper entitled A review of bioinspired CAD tools for parallel architectures and hardware design [7] together with four papers carefully selected for

David L. Waltz, in Memoriam

David L. Waltz (1943–2012), was director, Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS), Columbia University, and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. Waltz served as Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) president from 1997 to 1999, was a Fellow of AAAI and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a senior member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and former chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART). Prior to joining CCLS, he was president of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, and from 1984–1993 was director of Advanced Information Systems at Thinking Machines Corporation and a professor of computer science at Brandeis University. A celebration of his life was held in the spring of 2012, and a symposium in his honor was held September 23, 2012, at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Problems in Choosing Tools and Methods for Teaching Programming

The paper analyses the problems in selecting and integrating tools for delivering basic programming knowledge at the university level. Discussion and analysis of teaching the program- ming disciplines, the main principles of study programme design, requirements for teaching tools, methods and corresponding languages is presented, based on literature overview and author's expe- rience. A pressure from labor market, students and other sources to emphasize practical skills over deeper, long-term programming concepts is described. A model of teaching introductory program- ming disciplines at a higher logical level, using C#, is presented as a summary of the accomplished analysis, and also taking into account the recommendations of the ACM (Association for Com- puting Machinery) association for typical teaching programs. Also, design principles for building introductory programming courses, aligned with such teaching approach, are presented. This model has already been trialed at Vytautas Magnus University.

SIGMM award for outstanding technical contributions to multimedia computing, communications and applications

The 2012 winner of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Dr. HongJiang Zhang. He is currently Chief Executive Officer at Kingsoft. He also holds guest professorships at Tsinghua University and Harbin Institute of Technology. The ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement award, given in recognition of outstanding contributions over a researcher's career, cites Dr. Zhang's "pioneering contributions to and leadership in media computing including content-based media analysis and retrieval, and their applications." The SIGMM award will be presented at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2012 that will be held Oct 29 -- Nov 2 2012 in Nara, Japan.

A Framework for the Construction of Ontology for ICT Experts

Systems that help to find answers to suitable experts have received the attention of many researchers. Pioneer researchers on the development of search system for experts emphasized the importance of a search system that required returning a list prioritizing the names of individuals. Among the issues raised related to locating experts are, the critical problem of maintaining up-to-date information in the expert database and the inadequacy in expert finding systems in returning search results that are expected to account for not only the list of the names of the experts, but any information related to the experts and those involved with them. In the last decade, researchers have examined the search for experts from various research perspectives such as expert tracking system and construction of expert profiles involving ontology. This paper aims to describe a new approach in designing a framework for the construction of ontology that will be used in the directory of ICT experts. The researchers propose to incorporate thesaurus in their construction of ontology on ICT experts by providing a profile of the experts including their social profile and whatever concerns that may be associated with the expert. The researchers constructed the ontology on ICT experts by extracting information from sources such as their resumes and personal web sites to obtain the index glossary of words that characterized experts to be used in the directory of experts system. In this study, the standards contained in the Performance Evaluation System of the National University of Malaysia are used to extract information on the academicians in the Faculty of Information Science and Technology. The researchers employed the index glossary, metadata of experts and integrate appropriate taxonomy, thesaurus and classification schemes; such as Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) taxonomy, web classification schemes such as Standard Industrial Classification (SIC), North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) to enrich the ontology of ICT expertise. The proposed framework aims at helping users find information on the expert they require and at the same time obtain other information related to the experts from various perspectives encompassing research, consultancy, links with research partners, other interest related to a particular field and other resources. With a semantically driven directory of ICT experts, matters related to ICT can be referred to the right experts. The framework will be validated by developing the directory of ICT experts prototype and by involving domain experts to evaluate the content of the ontology constructed. In addition, the researchers will evaluate the search results of users who will use the prototype to search for ICT experts.

Interview with Simon Harper

Simon Harper is Chair of ACM SIGWEB, a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Manchester, a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Chair of the W3C WAI Research and Development Working Group, and research lead for the Web Ergonomics Laboratory, in Manchester. He is interested in how users interact with the Web and how the Web, through its design and technology, enables users to interact with it. Indeed, Simon is primarily looking at the Web from a technical human factors (ergonomics) perspective, and feels a real affinity for hypertext and the human aspects behind its inception.

10th Anniversary Special Issue: From Fringe to Mainstream—We Have Come a Long Way

10th Anniversary Special Issue: From Fringe to Mainstream—We Have Come a Long Way

Reinforcing and Enhancing Understanding of Students in Learning Computer Architecture

Introduction Computer Engineering studies combine two different fields of knowledge: hardware and software. Computer Engineering deals mainly with computer architecture and begins with the hardware-software hierarchy level of abstraction from digital logic, whereas Electrical Engineering deals with hardware below this level of abstraction--from silicon layers, to transistors, logic gate implementation, and digital logic. The border between the two is rarely dealt with. In the integrative concept, one wishes to strengthen the synergism between these two worlds, and to emphasize the importance of studying Computer Architecture to studies, and especially Assembly Language. Curriculum development requires that the developers engage in analysis and decision-making concerning the required number of software and hardware courses studied and concerning the dependency between the two. This is essential in order to define the proper order in acquiring knowledge. As the ACM--Association for Computer Machinery (2004) declared in ACM/IEEE Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula, Students need to understand computer architecture in order to structure a program so that it runs more efficiently on a real machine. In selecting a system to use, they should be able to understand the trade off among various components, such as CPU clock speed vs. memory size. The aim of the research presented here was to review the curriculum in order to improve its coverage, with the goal of better preparing graduates to pursue a wider range of professional careers, as recommended by McGettrick et al. (2003). The paper in organized as follows: the rest of this section presents the program of a newly founded Engineering program and focuses on the characteristics of computer architecture topics and teaching approaches. The next section describes the goal of the research and the experimental framework and the third section details the methodology. The results are presented in the fourth section. The final section summarizes the conclusions and examines the perspectives. Computer Engineering Undergraduate Studies In this section, the authors present the concept of a new Computer Engineering (CE) program that was implemented in the newly founded School of Engineering at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. The concept includes a description of the basic ideas concerning the structure of the CE Department, its organization, the CE curriculum, issues concerning teaching and research, the infrastructure of the laboratories, ideas of assessment, and organization of the final project. Establishing a new Engineering Department has always been considered as a challenge. In particular, regarding a Computer Engineering (CE) Department, this challenge is even greater for a number of reasons: (a) the high prestige of computer-related professions in today's society; (b) rapid development of new information technologies and the appearance of corresponding innovative teaching strategies and new learning environments including laboratory infrastructures; (c) the great influence of the modern high-tech industry on the content of the engineering curriculum. At the same time, the challenge is also motivated by the need to distinguish the CE studies from the Computer Science studies, which are widely known and have been intensively developed during the last decades. More specifically, two main dilemmas have to be resolved when developing a new Computer Engineering Curriculum. 1) The Theory vs. Practice dilemma that deals with a compromise between fundamental studies, which are oriented toward basic academic subjects based on classical science and engineering university studies, and industry oriented studies based on rapidly changing computing and information innovations. 2) The Programming vs. Designing dilemma that deals with the compromises between programming as the main computing skill and designing as the more subject-oriented professional skill. …

QUALITY ANALYSIS OF DOMAIN-DEPENDENT INTERNET ARCHIVES

Web archives are powerful sources of data, providing access to a wealth of information applicable in a very wide variety of disciplines. This article presents ways in which web search quality can be improved by a fuller use of Internet archive capabilities based around a scientific conference information retrieval system accustomed to accessing current and archived data. Verification of this application was then carried out on the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conference portals. In the second part of this article, quality metrics are defined which allow monitoring of archive repository past web content. Metrics were then calculated for three “mainstream” generally accessible World Wide Web (WWW) portals. The article concludes by demonstrating the degree to which utilization of past web pages can significantly improve search-and-browse Internet quality.

Incorporating ethics into the computer science curriculum

Professional organizations in computer science demand that computer professionals adhere to a strict code of ethics. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) promulgates commitment to the ACM ...

Perceived Importance and Resource Constraints of Graduate Information Systems Courses in Turkey

Education is an expensive process and the quality of an education program is largely affected by resources devoted to it. Availability of qualified instructors and physical amenities such as labs are the most important resources that determine the educational quality. Based on the graduate Information Systems curriculum recommendation of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Association for Information Systems (AIS) this article investigates the perceived importance of each course taught in graduate Information Systems programs in Turkey. The perceived importance is also compared with the availability of instructor and technological resources for each course to get an insight into educational resources and constraints.