communications of the acm
Departments
5;ACM’s;Chief;Operating;Officer;Letter
A Tour of ACM’s HQ
By Patricia Ryan
6;Letters;to;the;Editor
Workflow Tools for
Distributed Teams?
8;In;the;Virtual;Extension
10 BLOG@CACM
The Chaos of the Internet
as an External Brain; and More
Greg Linden writes about the
Internet as a peripheral resource;
Ed H. Chi discusses lessons learned
from the DARPA Network Challenge;
and Mark Guzdial asks if there
are too many IT workers or too
many I T jobs.
12;CACM;Online
Interact Naturally
By David Roman
29 Calendar
116;Careers
Last;Byte
118;Puzzled
Solutions and Sources
By Peter Winkler
120;Future;Tense
How the Net Ensures
Our Cosmic Survival
Give adolescent wonder
an evolutionary jolt.
David Brin
Association for Computing Machinery
Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession
News
13 Straightening Out Heavy Tails
A better understanding of
heavy-tailed probability distributions
can improve activities from
Internet commerce to the design
of server farms.
By Neil Savage
16 Beyond the Smart Grid
Sensor networks monitor residential
and institutional devices, motivating
energy conservation.
By Tom Geller
18 Mine Your Business
Researchers are developing new
techniques to gauge employee
productivity from information flow.
By Leah Hoffmann
20 Robin Milner:
The Elegant Pragmatist
Remembering a rich legacy
in verification, languages,
and concurrency.
By Leah Hoffmann
22 CS and Technology Leaders Honored
By Jack Rosenberger
about the cover:
“Dreams of perfection, for
a scientist, mean avenues
for exploration,” said Robin
Milner in an interview
shortly before his death
on March 20, 2010 at age
76. Photographer Roland
Eva captured Milner, a
renowned CS theorist and
recipient of the 1991 ACM
A. M. Turing Award, in one
of his favorite places—the
classroom. Josie Jammet
used that picture as
inspiration for this month’s cover. For more on Jammet,
see http://www.heartagency.com/artist/JosieJammet/
Viewpoints
24;Privacy;and;Security
Myths and Fallacies of “Personally
Identifiable Information”
Developing effective privacy protection
technologies is a critical challenge.
By Arvind Narayanan
and Vitaly Shmatikov
27;Inside;Risks
Privacy By Design: Moving
from Art to Practice
Designing privacy into systems at the
beginning of the development process.
By Stuart S. Shapiro
30;The;Profession;of;IT
The Resurgence of Parallelism
Parallel computation is making
a comeback after a quarter
century of neglect.
By Peter J. Denning and Jack B. Dennis
33;Kode;Vicious
Plotting Away
Tips and tricks for visualizing
large data sets.
By George V. Neville-Neil
35;Law;and;Technology
Intel’s Rebates: Above Board
or Below the Belt?
Over several years, Intel paid billions of
dollars to its customers. Was it to force
them to boycott products developed
by its rival AMD or so they could sell its
microprocessors at lower prices?
By François Lévêque
38 Viewpoint
Institutional Review Boards
and Your Research
A proposal for improving the review
procedures for research projects
that involve human subjects.
By Simson L. Garfinkel
and Lorrie Faith Cranor
41 Interview
An Interview with Ed Feigenbaum
By Len Shustek
