ACADEMIA

September issue reports on open-access mandates for research, the path of silicon chips into 3D, finding and fixing buggy software, and conversations with ACM Turing Award winners

The emergence of cloud supercomputing is transforming the way organizations purchase and manage computing resources, offering lower IT capital expenditures and operating costs. To realize these and other benefits, small and large organizations alike need to need use their IT-related capabilities to leverage cloud-provided resources, according to a study published in the September cover story of Communications of the ACM (CACM) http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/9. Three information management professors describe the importance of trust between client organization and cloud provider to gain advantage in a competitive market. The group, which includes professors from Belmont University, Kyungpook National University, and Baylor University, collected data from a global sample of more than 300 companies in various industries. Their results reflected the importance of technical, managerial, and relational capabilities to maximize the likelihood of deployment success and competitive advantage for cloud supercomputing.

Also in this issue, CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi addresses the recent debate over proposed legislation that prohibits open-access mandates for U.S.-funded research, which has raised a lot of passion among ACM members. He urges consideration of this issue in the context of ACM’s overall purpose in advancing computing as a science and a profession, and its portfolio of programs in education, professional development, public policy, internationalization, electronic community, conferences, and award recognition. ACM, he says, is not an abstract entity, but an association of computing professionals with democratically elected leadership.

Communications, the flagship publication of ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery), acm.org offers readers access to this generation’s most significant leaders and innovators in computing and information technology, and is available online in digital format.

Other Communications highlights:

• Contemplating the end of Moore’s Law, writer Gary Anthes traces the path of silicon chips into the third dimension. He concludes that 3D chips will find application virtually everywhere but will be especially attractive in mobile devices.
• Like death and taxes, buggy code is an unfortunate fact of life, writes Emery D. Berger of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He surveys the obstacles to finding and fixing bugs in deployed software, and offers some alternatives based on an analogy with car safety features like bumpers, seatbelts, and airbags.
• Science writer Paul Hyman reports from ACM’s Turing Centenary Celebration in June on this unique event. He recounts the stories he heard not only from many of the 32 Turing Award laureates who attended, but from some of the computing luminaries who attended the event as well. The Turing Centenary celebration webcast is available for viewing at http://bit.ly/JrDHs7
• University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee professor Thomas Haigh observes that most journalists are interested in stories about people, not stories about technologies. He reflects on the “bad history” that marks V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, the self-proclaimed “inventor of email,” and the lessons learned from this bizarre episode about public attitudes toward computer history.
• Researchers from Virginia Tech and the University of Texas at Dallas studied the revolution in video games that introduced the use of three-dimensional user interface (UI). Citing Nintendo’s introduction of the Wii Remote in console gaming, they describe the use of natural motions, allowing anyone to easily join in. These unprecedented levels of interaction fidelity in UI design, they conclude, must still be designed carefully.
• In a Q&A session, writer Leah Hoffman talks to Harvey Mudd College president Maria Klawe about her success in increasing the number of women who study computer science. Klawe, a former ACM president, changed the introductory CS course from learning to program in Java to a course about computational approaches to problem solving.

Blog @CACM blogger Bertrand Meyer asks why too many research agencies seem obsessed with funding only groundbreaking projects.
For more information on Communications of the ACM, click on cacm.acm.org