Among the goals highlighted in the previous issue was the launching of a new blog to give voice to student concerns, interests, and opinions. To that end we're delighted to announce the XRDS blog has been live since May with feature editor Shawn A Freeman's coverage of the ICPC World's undergraduate programming competition. We are currently featuring five bloggers who span continents and fields. Lea Rosen recently graduated from Rutgers School of Law with a J.D. She will be writing about the connections between technology, law, and civil and human rights issues. Lea has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the National Lawyers Guild among other organizations.

Wolfgang Richter is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon in computer science focusing on distributed computing Systems. Wolf is developing technologies that will enable new applications in cloud computing. Dimitris Mitropoulos is a Ph.D. candidate at Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece. He has authored numerous open source software libraries and worked on research projects in information security and software engineering.

Lora Oehlberg is a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work extends design theory and methodology for engineers building on, incorporating, and pushing the bounds in human-computer interaction. She has worked at Apple and Autodesk among other places. Finally, Matthew Kay will be writing about Ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp). He is a Ph.D. student working on health sensing and feedback at the University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering Department.

We'd like to welcome all of our readers to check out the fascinating blog posts that these contributors have already posted and join the conversation online by leaving comments for each post. Going forward, you'll find a few compelling posts in each print edition of the magazine. In that light we've decided to feature the introductory posts from each of the bloggers in this issue. We hope you find them as diverse and informative as we do. By the time this issue is in your hands there should be even more posts from each of the bloggers up on the website and maybe even some new faces there as well.

We're continuing to expand the blog as well, so please write in and let us know what you think. Nominate a blogger or give feedback at [email protected]. In the coming months we'll be reaching out to ACM student chapters at universities worldwide. If you're involved with one of these and would like to partner with XRDS, please reach out.

Finally, we're searching for help with promoting XRDS content on social networks and external blogs and news sites. If you have any interest in helping out, definitely get in touch! Strong candidates will have a background in computer science or technology and business or marketing. We'd love to hear from you!

—Peter Kinnaird and Inbal Talgam-Cohen

©2012 ACM  1528-4972/12/0900  $15.00

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