SECTION: Features
Ideas from Actions, Alternative Anatomical Architectures
In this curation of his work, performance artist Stelarc, explains the process of extending his body and his self while exploring movement, sound, and autonomy.
By Stelarc
Magazine: Features
The Future of Technology for Cognitive Enhancement and Well-Being
The sense of smell, or olfaction, is probably the most underappreciated and the least understood and exploited in human-computer interaction. However, in the future, wearable devices will not only be able to sense and provide audio-visual cues but will also augment our sense of smell. How will this impact our interaction with technology? Does the future stink?
By Judith Amores
OPEN ACCESS
How Textiles Open Up Data as a Material in and on the Body
A designerly journey into textiles and HCI leads to thinking about data as a material for a cybernetic future.
By Troy Nachtigall
What Makes Wearable Technologies Socially Acceptable?
Novel wearable computing devices challenge our perception of what is socially acceptable. Research in human-computer interaction asks, "What makes a wearable socially acceptable?" and provides insights that may help designers and developers design for social acceptability.
By Marion Koelle
Accessible Parallel Embodiment of Multiple Robotic Avatars in a Cafe
Novel technological systems enabling people to control multiple robotic avatars simultaneously could support more accessible ways to multitask. An implementation of a parallel avatar system in a cafe shows that, leveraging their existing skills, remote workers with disabilities were able to utilize the system to control up to four robots, each with a different function, to assist customers in a cafe. The parallel avatar systems expand the agency and the capabilities of disabled workers, while also delivering better experiences to customers.
By Giulia Barbareschi, Midori Kawaguchi, Hiroaki Kato, Kazuaki Takeuchi, Masato Nagahiro, Yoshifumi Shiiba, Yoshifuji Ory, Kentaro Yoshifuji, Shunichi Kasahara, Kouta Minamizawa
During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Everyone Had a Head-up Display
A head-up display has been part of my daily life for more than two decades, and people often ask why I wear one. This article makes explicit some of the benefits of video conferencing and shows how a head-worn display provides similar benefits when physically co-present in a conversation.
By Thad Starner
Learning about VR in VR
After 20 years of teaching about VR, we finally taught in VR. This article describes lessons learned from 263 students who spent 10 weeks in virtual reality together and a total of 200,000 shared minutes "in headset."
By Cyan DeVeaux, Jeremy Bailenson
Designing eXtended reality experiences for the future of hybrid meetings
Hybrid meetings are challenging. They require interface solutions that support communication between both co-located and remote team members. However, recent research on extended reality points to interesting new directions for the future of these meetings.
By Jens Emil Grønbæk
OPEN ACCESS
The future of mixed reality is adaptive
In a future where we replace our smartphones and notebooks with mixed reality headsets, the way we create user interfaces will change drastically. Future interfaces will need to adapt automatically to users' context, guided by optimization-based methods and machine learning, to become beneficial for end-users.
By David Lindlbauer
XR tools and where they are taking us
This article reviews the significant growth in XR tools research over the past few years. It first identifies key dimensions to consider when assessing XR tools, then presents trends in XR research along these dimensions. The author concludes with three wishes for future research to foster the design of new XR authoring tools.
By Michael Nebeling
OPEN ACCESS
Designing for haptics
The emergence of extended reality has brought an influx of interest in designing good haptic experiences that enhance immersion and realism, but the question is how?
By Craig Shultz, Vivian Shen
XR needs "mixed feelings"
Haptic devices allow us to feel virtual worlds through touch and forces; yet they are incompatible with haptics present in our everyday life. This urges us to re-think how to engineer a wave of new haptic devices for extended reality.
By Shan-Yuan Teng, Pedro Lopes
Augmented human, extended machine
How can we trigger the process of digital embodiment and corporeality in human-robot collaboration through extended reality and digitally enhanced environments?
By Daniela Mitterberger
Magical multi-modal displays using acoustophoresis
Using sound to levitate objects for creating displays that can deliver visual, auditory, tactile, and gustatory experiences.
By Ryuji Hirayama, Sriram Subramanian
OPEN ACCESS
The future of experiential computing
In another decade smart glasses, and the networked infrastructure that will make them possible, will fundamentally alter all that we know. It is hard to fully anticipate the impact of such a profound change, but we can make a few predictions.
By Ken Perlin
OPEN ACCESS
Why you being WEIRD to me?
HCI researchers and practitioners of all backgrounds need to consider the role WEIRD-ness plays in HCI methods, research, and communities and the impact that has on marginalized communities.
By Leslie Coney
Queer in AI
Queer in AI is an organization that aims to combat the harms faced by queer researchers within AI. Several inclusion initiatives are outlined, including those centered on policy and financial aid.
By Hetvi Jethwani, Arjun Subramonian, William Agnew, MaryLena Bleile, Sarthak Arora, Maria Ryskina, Jeffrey Xiong
Asian-Americans, we must resign from our role as Silicon Valley's model minority mascot
This article interrogates the role of the "model minority" myth in the lives and careers of Asian Americans in tech. The author shares research as well as her own experiences and that of her peers to illuminate the harmful misconceptions and microaggressions that make up daily life. This article is particularly poignant as we mark the conclusion of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the United States.
By Raksha Muthukumar
OPEN ACCESS
Putting the disability in DEI through inclusive imagery
Disability representation---both the presence of people with disabilities and images depicting disability---is increasingly integrated into computing. But how do we make sure the processes we have for developing inclusive imagery are themselves inclusive?
By Emory James Edwards
OPEN ACCESS
Machine learning fairness in big tech
Auriel Wright talks about her work on advancing fairness and equity in computer vision at Google.
By Adinawa Adjagbodjou
OPEN ACCESS
Decoloniality in computing
This interview explores the relationship between social computing technology and decolonization and the relationship between coloniality and computing research.
By Jordan Taylor
OPEN ACCESS
Smart mobility
Transportation is an essential component of living in smart cities, but what would mobility in smart cities look like? This article is an overview of the opportunities and challenges presented by smart mobility.
By Arnav Choudhry
Benchmarking robots in smart cities
In order for robots to become integrated into society, we need to be able to prove that robots do their jobs reliably. Robot benchmarking competitions in smart cities offer a glimpse into our future.
By Matthew Studley, Valentina Presutti, Daniele Nardi, Sarah Carter
Technology to support independent navigation of people with visual impairments
Smart cities have the potential to improve mobility for people with disabilities, but only if their needs are considered up front and not as an afterthought. Prior research shows promising paths for real-world deployments and for new technological innovations.
By João Guerreiro
The challenges and future of navigation for people with disabilities
People with disabilities can pervasively obtain navigation services based on modern machine learning and 5G techniques.
By Jialong Zhou, Chen Qiu, Bin Guo, Zhiwen Yu
Non-IID spatio-temporal prediction in smart cities
Non-IID spatio-temporal prediction research points toward emerging directions and fundamental solutions to address various complexities from the perspective of both data couplings and heterogeneity. Delving into the non-IID challenge and opportunity of spatio-temporal prediction in smart cities, this article also addresses current solutions to bring some inspiration to future researchers.
By Siyuan Ren, Bin Guo, Qinfen Wang, Zhiwen Yu
Formal methods enhance deep learning for smart cities
Rigorous approaches based on formal methods have the potential to fundamentally improve many aspects of deep learning. This article discusses the challenges and future directions of formal methods enhanced deep learning for smart cities.
By Meiyi Ma
OPEN ACCESS
Safer together
A pioneer of digital contact tracing discusses the considerations that went into building the world's first national contact tracing app and ponders the future of the technology.
By Jason Bay
The principle of least sensing
With the worldwide emergence of data protection regulations, how to conduct law-regulated big data analytics becomes a challenging and fundamental problem. This article introduces the principle of least sensing, a promising sensing paradigm toward legally regulated big data analytics.
By Leye Wang
OPEN ACCESS
AI and essential labor
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, "essential work" became a calling card for the labor that kept the country running. But the activity of essential workers often occurs out of sight. For example, the products of waste workers are everywhere---clean floors, sanitized tables, objects made from recycled plastics---though workers themselves are often behind the scenes.
By Franchesca Spektor, Estefania Rodriguez, Samantha Shorey, Sarah Fox
OPEN ACCESS
Twitter, COVID-19, and disability
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, people looked to scientists and other leaders to understand the rate at which the virus spread. Much of this information, however, was not accessible to everyone.
By Stephanie Valencia, Lynn Kirabo
EpiPolicy
COVID-19 brought along an increasing demand for research toward combating epidemics. A group at New York University Abu Dhabi developed a tool, EpiPolicy, to explore and visualize the effects and costs of intervention plans.
By Anh Le Xuan Mai, Miro Mannino, Zain Tariq, Azza Abouzied, Dennis Shasha
COVID-19 tracking apps
Dr. Elissa M. Redmiles shares her experience researching accurate contract tracing apps that respect the privacy concerns of users.
By Megan Hofmann
OPEN ACCESS
Addressing the root of vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic
As pressure continues to mount on social media platforms to address the spread of vaccine misinformation, we aim to look at solutions to the rise in vaccine hesitancy. But to truly address vaccine misinformation and hesitancy, we need to address the underlying issues with trust in large institutions and inequity in healthcare.
By Kolina Koltai, Rachel E. Moran, Izzi Grasso
Face masks are essential to prevent the spread of airborne diseases like COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic still affects us all. But how much can we rely on social distancing and face masks to protect ourselves?
By Simone Bianco, Sara Capponi
Beyond crisis couture
The practices and motivations of mask makers during the COVID-19 pandemic can teach us how to recognize our ability to individually and collectively design our futures.
By Mikayla Buford
The power of open-source hardware in crisis
Could open-source solutions provide a crucial layer of defense for the future of pandemic-ready and disaster-resilient supply chains?
By Alex Long
Live coding during lockdown
An inside look at developer advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic---from creating authenticity to keeping the social life around code alive while the world stayed home.
By Christine T. Wolf, Amanda L. L. Cullen
AmbiTeam
AmbiTeam is an ambient display designed to communicate contextual or background information in the periphery of the user's awareness and only requires the user's attention when it is appropriate or desired.
By Sarah Morrison-Smith, Lydia B. Chilton, Jaime Ruiz
OPEN ACCESS
"You're my best friend."
The COVID-19 pandemic was a time of unexpected isolation for many, as well as a time fraught with uncertainty. In this article, we explore how many turned to playful online communities across a number of social media platforms as a place of connection and support.
By Kathryn E. Ringland, Christine T. Wolf
OPEN ACCESS
Life goes on with Pokémon
Players envision how the future design of location-based games can support exploration, socializing, and improving physical and mental health in the post-pandemic new normal.
By Arpita Bhattacharya, Jin Ha Lee, Jason C. Yip, Julie A. Kientz
Designing technology that promotes users' digital wellbeing
Existing tools for digital self-control strongly rely on users' self-regulation strategies and capabilities. Recent work, however, highlights the importance of proactively assisting users in learning how to use technology through customizable and adaptable interventions.
By Alberto Monge Roffarello, Luigi De Russis
OPEN ACCESS
Using sensors to measure inbox stress
Email notifications are constantly calling for our attention, and the volume of emails is ever-increasing. A research group at the University of California, Irvine explores how managing the inbox affects stress for different working populations.
By Fatema Akbar
Sleep, health, productivity, and the double-edged sword of technology
While technology has traditionally impaired sleep, it also has the potential to enable and reframe sleep as a productivity and health booster.
By Stephen M. Mattingly
Current practices in mental health sensing
The ubiquity of smartphones and wearables makes it an attractive option to passively study human behavior. We explore the current practices of using passive sensing devices to assess mental health and wellbeing, including the limitations and future directions.
By Subigya Nepal, Weichen Wang, Bishal Sharma, Prabesh Paudel
Critical thinking of mobile sensing for health
What you need to consider before collecting, processing, and analyzing mobile data for health applications.
By Afsaneh Doryab
The role of online communities in supporting mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major effect on billions of lives, with online communities playing an active part in supporting people's mental health.
By Chengcheng Qu, Renwen Zhang
Integrating people-centered and planet-centered design
Exploring the many approaches and issues involved in developing technologies for wellbeing---from including environmental concerns to building long-lasting, transdisciplinary partnerships both inside and beyond the academy.
By Xuhai Xu
Toward a more empathic relationship between humans and computing systems
How might computing support us in becoming our better, more emotionally resilient selves? We explore this in an interview with the team from Microsoft Research's Human Understanding and Empathy group.
By Xuhai Xu, Karan Ahuja, Jasmine Lu, Mary Czerwinski, Jina Suh, Gonzalo Ramos
Assessing the mental health of college students by leveraging social media data
The mental health of college students is a growing concern and gauging the mental health needs of this group is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. The ubiquity and widespread use of social media, particularly among young adults, provides opportunities for various stakeholders to proactively assess the mental health of college students and provide timely and tailored support.
By Koustuv Saha, Munmun De Choudhury
OPEN ACCESS
Scaling biodiversity monitoring for the data age
Technological advances have made it possible to collect massive amounts of biodiversity data. How can analysis efforts keep up?
By Sara Beery
OPEN ACCESS
An upcycled IoT
An upcycled approach uses everyday objects as design material for IoT systems by enabling users to make their "dumb" objects "smart." Adopting this approach, IoT Codex realizes a new socially informed, context-aware computing and end-user programming.
By Kristin Williams, Jessica Hammer, Scott E. Hudson
AI for conservation
How deep neural networks can process millions of weather radar data points to help researchers monitor continental-scale bird migration.
By Zezhou Cheng, Subhransu Maji, Daniel Sheldon
OPEN ACCESS
Flexible computing for intermittent energy
How flexible computing can help speed the adoption of inflexible renewables.
By Jennifer Switzer
OPEN ACCESS
Envisioning alternative relationships with the environment through computational design
Climate change is one symptom reflecting a larger problem of how we humans view ourselves as separate from the environment. How can computation and design help us expand our perception so we can better attend to the natural world?
By Malika Khurana
OPEN ACCESS
Making with a sustainable purpose
This interview presents insights into Dr. Mauriello's research projects in user-centered design to promote energy literacy within residential households.
By Jiayi Li, Karan Ahuja
OPEN ACCESS
An interview with Owen McCall from TREECYCLE
Is cryptocurrency necessarily energy-consuming? Can we use blockchain to facilitate sustainable development? This interview presents insights into an investment project rooted in sustainability, bridging finance and ecology.
By Jiayi Li, Yingfei Wang
OPEN ACCESS
The environmental impact of research communities
As sustainability chairs for key computing conferences, we explore the environmental impact of research conferences, reflect on the complexities of making physical and virtual conferences sustainable, and discuss the environmental consequences of computing research itself.
By Kristin Williams, Bridget Kane, Chris Clarke, Kelly Widdicks
On the future of computer science
Gabriele Kotsis, ACM President and full professor in computer science at Johannes Kepler University, shares her personal experiences and suggestions to shape the future of computer science.
By Elizabeth Churchill, Nova Ahmed
Stories from an autodidact
What does it mean to have a career that has been shaped by luck and learning? With no formal training in the software industry, the author shares a personal story of the ups, downs, and sometimes sideways moments in her career.
By Lisa Long
The women bricoleurs of technology
Understanding the value of reaching from theory to practice by revisiting the contributions of women before us and our assumptions about how we create valuable impact for the future.
By Deborah Schultz
Man on the moon (1969), women on the web (1991 and still going strong)
Whatever you do in your life, you can bring it all together to find your place. This is a story about the twists and turns of life---from architecture to HCI.
By Jeni Paay
Socializing the web
Though today we think of the web and social media as nearly synonymous, the technology of the early web made social interaction difficult. The author discusses her work creating some of the web's earliest social applications and asks why our interfaces for seeing and communicating with each other online are still so primitive.
By Judith Donath
Music, industry, and researching your own hidden curriculum
Whether working in academia, industry, or entertainment building a career means navigating a variety of challenges. The authors revisit a number of lessons learned while building systems (or records), how to transfer those lessons to new domains, how to turn your research skills on what you haven't learned yet, and build an extra curriculum for yourself.
By Henriette Cramer, Avriel Epps-Darling
The shape of our feminisms
Understanding agency and empowerment outside the Global North.
By Maryam Mustafa
HCI education of choice
This article is from the perspective of an Egyptian HCI educator who explores "designing" inclusive designers, and how decolonial thinking can address inclusion in HCI education as one possible critical lens.
By Shaimaa Lazem
Digital development in a remote paradise
International exposure impacts your views on technology, design, consumption, and adoption, and sometimes technology is not even the direct solution. Building a digital ecosystem entails the right policy mix to support the expansion of mobile broadband coupled with complementary policies to boost affordability and digital skills for underserved groups.
By Jimena Luna
Data protection in Hong Kong
How does a law turn society on its head? How does technology keep a movement alive? Through the lens of her home, Hong Kong, the author discusses legal loopholes in a new national security law that might bring about a dystopian reality, and how tomorrow's secure and private tech can fight back.
By Glacier Kwong
Max Schrems' European Court of Justice odyssey
How one privacy activist took on Facebook, the European Commission, and the United States to protect the rights of European citizens, and prevailed.
By Mihir Kshirsagar, Ross Teixeira
From individual consent to collective refusal
Big tech companies have been found to misuse personal data, often collected without consent. What can the public do to change unjust collection and use of their personal data, and what role can computer scientists play in these efforts?
By Jonathan Zong
Automating the censorship arms race
Evading oppressive internet censorship is possible, but discovering how is difficult and time-consuming for humans. Geneva is a genetic algorithm that automatically discovers and implements censorship circumvention strategies---many of which were long thought impossible.
By Kevin Bock, Dave Levin
Past, present, and past as present in India's predictive policing
In India, law enforcement's use of big data to thwart crime has instead amplified the discriminatory presence of caste, religion, gender, and other social markers within a system that is supposedly objective and neutral.
By Shivangi Narayan
'Anti-blackness is no glitch'
The conversation around and application of computer science often reinforces neoliberal ideals of what pathways students should take. Computer science education is said to be the great equalizer for marginalized youth. We grapple with how this can never be true in an educational system grounded in anti-Blackness.
By Stephanie T. Jones, Natalie Melo
How data can support equity in computing education
Data has historically been a tool of oppression. But if we consider how its interpretations and uses affect minoritized groups, data-driven tools could support diversity, equity, and inclusion in computing education and beyond.
By Benjamin Xie
iNethi: locked down but not locked out
A community-driven network seeks to overcome the digital divide in South African education by delivering e-learning to bandwidth-constrained learners.
By Andre van Zyl, David Lloyd Johnson
How machine learning can help tackle climate change
Climate change poses a major threat to society, requiring rapid action from all corners. Machine learning can be a potentially useful tool for addressing climate change, when applied in coordination with policy, engineering, and other areas of action.
By Priya Donti
Battery-free subsea internet of things
How a scalable underwater sensor network, which is entirely battery-free, has the potential to monitor the world's oceans.
By Sayed Saad Afzal
Everything you should know about online voting
Online voting has been presented as the means to ensure faster, clearer results, mainly in close races. What complexities lie behind this claim? Will we ever replace paper-voting with a technological solution?
By Matt Bernhard
How to tame your chatbot
The best way to stop a bad chatbot spreading misinformation may be a good chatbot providing facts. But how can we deploy these bots on short notice without compromising quality and user privacy?
By Fiete Lüer
Detecting deepfakes using crowd consensus
Deepfake videos are becoming more and more believable, outpacing fake detection methods. As a research community, we must embrace a wider variety of detection tactics to keep up and quell the spread of misinformation.
By Eleanor Tursman
OpenGPT-2
When OpenAI released its billion-parameter language model GPT-2, their attempts to withhold the model inspired two researchers to use open research practices to combat the misuse of machine learning.
By Vanya Cohen, Aaron Gokaslan
The bad news game
Given the rising amount of fake news on the web, it is imperative to understand whether people can become immune to fake news and what steps can help achieve this goal. This interview presents insights into the definition of fake news, current research, and the future of fake news education.
By Diane Golay
An 'infodemic' infested world under lockdown---
With a sea of misinformation surrounding COVID-19, fake news and rumors on social media have run amok. We need to flatten the curve of this infodemic and flatten the curve of COVID-19.
By Ankuran Dutta
The context in discourse analysis
Inquiring about discourse can be an activity that is as specific as addressing its structure or as wide as analyzing discourse as an expression of culture considering its context in its minimal version as "what surrounds" or in the complexities of "to weave together."
By Germán Alejandro Miranda Díaz
Democratizing AI?
The societal implications of computing are far-reaching. Whether it is building technologies that might save lives in the medical sector, intuitive apps that can transform personal routines at scale, or enterprise systems that ease and enhance the everyday experiences of workers, many are drawn to computing because of its potential to improve the human experience. This article considers the relationship between technology and societal transformation by looking at the topic of accessibility.
By Christine T. Wolf
View source
Can developers make communication software more usable for at-risk users they are never likely to meet?
By Mariel García-Montes
Bioleft
How can the ideals of the open source movement be applied to living, self-replicating organisms? Bioleft explores how to pursue a fair system for conserving, developing, and trading seeds working with public sector breeders and farmers hand in hand.
By Almendra Cremaschi, Patrick van Zwanenberg, Anabel Marin, Marcela Basch, Vanesa Lowenstein
"View source"
View source code is a statement about open access to knowledge. Even though you are not able to modify it, or even understand code, it is an invitation to learn and the key for balancing control and power among users and developers. In this article, we explore the potential of software to enable new practices and transform old ones.
By Lila Pagola
Libera Tu Radio
Just as corporations manage the media, large companies, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, dominate the internet. How can we liberate the digital territory? With this in mind, Red de Radios Comunitarias y Software Libre was born to offer radio stations a free and secure operating system distribution.
By Clara Elena Robayo Valencia
Sulá Batsú
How can solidarity shape technology? We explore the Costa Rican cooperative Sulá Batsú's feminist vision on technology, rooted in a politics of life based on care and solidarity with each other, our communities, and our planet.
By Firuzeh Shokooh Valle
Community and freedom
This article reflects on approaches to community making, recounting the experience of a group of activists running two workshops in a prison in Argentina, working from a free software and free culture perspective.
By Carolina D'Amelio, Federico Ternavasio, Martín Morales
Never again an internet without us
Wikipedia in its content, and as a community, remains highly masculine. Many women worldwide are working to reduce the gender gap. This article narrates one of the strategies that women of Latin America and Spain have been applying during the past five years to make this a reality.
By Carmen Alcázar
Gender, diversity, and inclusion in open source communities
Hidden social hierarchies keep the doors of open source closed for some. How do we overcome them?
By Mariana Fossatti
Will digitization harm or help workers in healthcare?
Some worry that digitization leads to replacement of human labor in healthcare, thus leading to a decline in the demand for medical personnel's skills. What lessons can we draw from previous waves of automation?
By Sofia Hernnäs
Technostress in digital healthcare environments
The introduction of information and communication technology has changed the working style of healthcare managers, often leading to stress. This article discusses the different implications of digitization and proposes some ideas for sustainable technology.
By Magdalena Stadin
Data work and digitization
As technology and healthcare continue to commingle, data work is being redistributed as powerful professions discard unwanted tasks and other occupations are transformed.
By Claus Bossen
Designing self-monitoring data for chronic care
When a self-monitoring tool is developed and implemented in chronic care nurses' work, it changes the way nurses accomplish their work, creating new requirements. This article is based on a design ethnographic study that helps us understand the implications of these changes.
By Kateřina Černá
Time utilization and psychosocial work environments in primary care
Swedish primary care staff spend a limited proportion of their work time directly with patients, leaving staff to suffer under heavy administration workloads using poorly designed IT systems. How can their time utilization experience be improved?
By Eva Anskär
Digitization in the healthcare industry
The steady advancement of information technology can be observed in many different industries, one example being healthcare. What impacts are expected and how can work life be improved? A hackathon specifically about this topic might give some answers.
By André Kochanke
Thermalytix
Using artificial intelligence, and an oft-ignored modality, an Indian startup develops an affordable, accessible, and non-invasive breast cancer screening solution.
By Siva Teja Kakileti, Himanshu Madhu, Thara Subramoni, Geetha Manjunath
The usability and digitalization of healthcare
As interaction researchers strive to make sense of the forest, they should not lose sight of the trees.
By Christofer Rydenfält, Johanna Persson
Gerontechnology, digitalization, and the silver economy
Digitalization in healthcare is posed to change the way the older population is treated, the way health workers relate to them, and the participation of computing professionals in the mix.
By Peter Anderberg
Decolonizing design through the perspectives of cosmological others: Arguing for an ontological turn in design research and practice
A closer attention to cultural and cosmological difference as the basis for thinking about how we redesign our own modern technological infrastructures may be the way to decolonize design research.
By Ahmed Ansari
Havana's StreetNet: Innovation from necessity
In Havana, technology enthusiasts have designed StreetNet, a community network that serves as an alternative to the worldwide web. This article describes the deeply relational practices that go toward the maintenance of StreetNet, highlighting elements of struggle that accompany innovative strategies that result from necessity.
By Michaelanne Dye
The past and present: A push toward the good life
In this article, we contemplate how African communities, based on their unique experiences and backgrounds, can increasingly become producers and participants in the technology development process; a step beyond just being end-users.
By Cynthia Habonimana, Moses Namara
Finding the local in locations: Working with GPS non-use in Nairobi
The Nairobi Accident Map crowdsourced traffic accident reports on social media and geocoded them using the landmarks and road names mentioned in social media posts. In doing so, the project centered the agency and local practices of Kenyan social media users.
By Elizabeth Resor
How technology converses with local languages
The relationship between technology and language use is situated in social and historical factors. Considering the meaning of language use in technology design is essential for supporting diverse language preferences.
By Naveena Karusala
Protibadi: Starting the fight against sexual abuse
The story of how a group of Bangladeshi volunteers used technology to address the country's sexual abuse problem.
By Nova Ahmed
Africa's social contract with AI
The ethics of artificial intelligence in Africa should come from the social contract theories and ethical frameworks developed by African philosophers. But if AI researchers fail to incorporate cultural differences, they risk perpetuating the same injustices witnessed during colonial times.
By Ezinne Nwankwo, Belona Sonna
Artificial intelligence policies in Africa over the next five years
As Africa embraces and interacts with AI, what policies are relevant to foster its development? This article highlights some domains where AI is being applied and will be beneficial given Africa's unique context and culture.
By Micheal Nayebare
Cyber security in Africa: The boring technology story that matters
Cybersecurity involves protection of computer systems from theft, damage, or manipulation to the hardware, software, or the data contained on them. A limitless cyberspace, little to no boundaries, and eroding national borders is making Africa vulnerable to cyber threats and potential harms. Cybersecurity represents serious economic and national security challenges, which need to be properly defined and contextualized.
By Hood Mukiibi
The one about resilience, energy, culture, and crafting
Joreen Arigye, a data analyst at Fenix International, shares her perspective on the importance of culture in the workplace. Having grown up directly connected to the typical Fenix customer, she has the ability to contribute knowledgeably to validating results from models, analysis, recommendations, and intervention strategies.
By Lynn Kirabo
OPEN ACCESS
Toward a universal quantum programming language
Quantum computing may be more powerful than classical computing, but it has a radically different programming model. While current languages are in their infancy and future languages are likely to be different, now is a great time for language designers and implementers to try new ideas.
By Jens Palsberg
Rolling dice at the nanoscale
Can emerging devices allow us to overcome the inherent determinism of digital logic?
By Xiangyu Zhang, Ramin Bashizade
Batteries not included
Getting things done amid frequent power failures, batteryless intermittent research is rethinking how we build computing systems and paving the way to a sustainable and scalable digital future. The next trillion devices might be a little weird.
By Josiah Hester, Jacob Sorber
Lighting the way to wireless efficiency
The ubiquity of light makes it an attractive option for both illumination and wireless communication. We explore the future of visible light communication, including next-generation devices, groundbreaking applications, and open challenges.
By Charles J. Carver, Tianxing Li, Xia Zhou
In-body devices: The future of medicine
In the "near" future, devices inside the body will help with endoscopies, biopsies, and even treatment of cancer and Parkinson's disease. What does it take to create such tiny devices fit for operation inside the human body?
By Deepak Vasisht, Guo Zhang
Evolving intelligent devices for the future via named data networking
As the numbers and capabilities of networked devices continue to grow, they will play an increasingly important role in daily life. Ensuring security and usability will be the first and foremost challenge; Named Data Networking can help address this challenge through localized trust, usable security, and autoconfiguration.
By Zhiyi Zhang, Edward Lu, Yu Guan, Tianxiang Li, Xinyu Ma, Zhaoning Kong, Lixia Zhang
Protecting privacy and open competition with Almond: An open-source virtual assistant
Will Alexa and Google Assistant become the duopoly platforms on which consumers reach web services and IoTs verbally? With open and collaborative research, we can build the best open-source virtual assistant to ensure choice, privacy, and open competition.
By Monica S. Lam, Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, Michael Fischer, Mehrad Moradshahi
Future assistive devices: What's at stake for you or me?
In the future, small portable devices will be available for all kinds of purposes, not least as a support for people with different kinds of impairments. But is this purely a good development or are there possible dangers? In the latter case, how can we find a proper balance?
By Lars Oestreicher
Toward decentralization: Democracy for devices
As more and more devices are connected to one another, there is a growing shift to decentralized independent operation without the need of a central controller. We look into the aspects of collective operation, resilience, security, and peer-to-peer economy in a decentralized network, analyzing the benefits and challenges of introducing "democracy" among devices.
By Nitin Shivaraman
Future of IOT: Design and deployment challenges
The article touches upon the various design considerations for IoT devices, and discusses the various challenges faced in the design and deployment of such devices.
By Prashant Ravi
Health, fun, and engagement: Computing technologies that support physical activity
More and more interactive systems accompany us when we engage in physical activity. But can technologies actually make sports more fun? Or perhaps we will become better at sports through technology?
By Paweł W. Woźniak, Pascal Knierim, Matthias Hoppe
Computing technologies to increase access to physical activity for people with visual impairments
Understanding how to develop technologies that make exercise more accessible to people with visual impairments, particularly in the form of body-based movement and public spaces.
By Kyle Rector
Running Wheel: How an exergame can motivate people to perform repetitive, tedious exercises
Running on a treadmill or cycling on an exercise bike are often monotonous and hard-to-keep habits. Comparatively, social relationships in team sports play an important role to motivate participants. What happens when you combine both activities into one virtual environment?
By Luciana Nedel, Rodrigo Moni, Mateus Nunes
The past, the present, and the future of fitness tracking
The gym of the future will be the quintessence of truly invisible ubiquitous technology that automatically recognizes and tracks the workout progress of each person
By Rushil Khurana
Body-positive computing as a means to counteract normative biases in fitness trackers
Fitness trackers are rigidly defining what it means to be healthy and who "counts" as healthy. Body-positive computing can provide an alternative that allows people to engage with technologies more on their terms.
By Katta Spiel
Superhuman sports --- a testing ground for augmenting our senses
This article reviews recent developments in superhuman sports with regard to extending the human body and augmenting the playing field, and gives an outlook on future research directions.
By Kai Kunze, Stephan Lukosch
Sports and machine learning: How young people can use data from their own bodies to learn about machine learning
In order to foster interest in machine learning among young people, presented are simple and effective ways to engage kids using sensors on their own bodies.
By Abigail Zimmermann-Niefield, R. Benjamin Shapiro, Shaun Kane
Data in motion: Supporting youth interest in athletics through multimodal data analytics
Engagement in STEM learning using athletics and data analytics allows young people to use customizable technological devices to analyze performance.
By Melissa Perez, Stephanie Jones, JaCoya Thompson, Marcelo Worsley
Esports as a catalyst for connected learning: the North America Scholastics Esports Federation
Collegiate esports' rising popularity has created a host of new educational and research opportunities, ranging from understanding and modeling these communities to expanding programs beyond college into high-school learning environments.
By Je Seok Lee, Constance Steinkuehler
Explaining explainable AI
How good are you at explaining your decisions? Are you better than a machine? Today, AI systems are being asked to explain their decisions. This article explores the challenges in solving this problem and approaches researchers are pursuing.
By Michael Hind
"But why?" Understanding explainable artificial intelligence
Opaque algorithms get to score and choose in many areas using their own inscrutable logic. To whom are said algorithms held accountable? And what is being done to ensure explainability of these algorithms?
By Tim Miller
Trustworthy machine learning and artificial intelligence
How can we add the most important ingredient to our relationship with machine learning?
By Kush R. Varshney
The future of pedestrian-automated vehicle interactions
While the increasing popularity of autonomous vehicles has garnered critical media attention, less has been written about the field of pedestrian-automated vehicle interactions and its challenges. Current research trends are discussed as well as several areas receiving much less attention, but are still vital to the field.
By Lionel P. Robert
Artificial intelligence for software engineering
Artificial intelligence is predicted to impact many industries (including the software industry), changing how we produce, manufacture, and deliver. The rise of artificial intelligence may significantly transform the practice of software engineering, helping us build better software faster.
By Hoa Khanh Dam
The AI revolution
This article explores the areas of bias in natural language processing, from the tools that are used to analyze the data to the fundamental theories in the field. It delves deeper into the very idea that the data that is analyzed (language) itself shapes human perception of reality, and evolves over time.
By Talia Kohen
Co-creating the future of work: Lessons from workplace automation
What sociology and ethnography can teach us about designing the workplace technologies of tomorrow.
By Christine T. Wolf
That's not fair!
Why we need to study machine learning fairness, even in an increasingly unfair world.
By Deborah Raji
Facial recognition is the plutonium of AI
It's dangerous, racializing, and has few legitimate uses; facial recognition needs regulation and control on par with nuclear waste.
By Luke Stark
Robot, all too human
Advanced robotics and artificial intelligence systems present a new challenge to human identity.
By Joanna J. Bryson
Giving birth to touch devices
A finger swipe to control your device---what could be simpler? Yet bringing that simple concept to commercial success was anything but simple. Here's a story for those who seek to make an impact.
By George E. Gerpheide
Considering social factors in new technologies
New technologies that alter how we interact with other people come and go, creating new opportunities but also upending social norms. How should builders of new technologies consider the social implications of their systems?
By Amy X. Zhang
Why digital systems do not reach their full potential in organizations
The continuous evolution of digital systems shaping the workplace and the optimizing of work processes is revolutionary. But despite decades of accumulated experience, there are still plenty of projects that fail completely or deliver unexpected and unacceptable results. This article discusses why problems with the digitalization of working life persist.
By Bent Sandblad, Thomas Lind
The benchtop human
The artificial creation of human skin, tissue, and internal organs may sound like a futuristic dream but, incredibly, much of it is happening right now. In research facilities and hospitals around the world, scientists and medical researchers are using scanners and printers, traditionally reserved for auto design, model building, and product prototyping, to develop completely personalized treatments.
By Siddharth Kumar Sah, Soumya Jindal
Artificial intelligence technologies: Eight viewpoints
Every year, the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence sponsors a student essay writing contest. This article presents a clear perspective on last year's winners, which represent a diverse collection of opinions on artificial intelligence.
By Johanna Schacht
Promises of the virtual museum
Have we escaped the hype and death cycles that have plagued the history of virtual reality? In the last few years, as commercial virtual reality headsets and systems have become accessible, content developers, film festivals, and---most intriguing---galleries and museums are dipping their toes in the virtual pool.
By Jas Brooks
Computing as an evolving discipline
Throughout computing's history, there have been dramatically different opinions on what computing, as a discipline, is "really" about. Each decade has changed our views of bleeding-edge technology, core knowledge in computing, the nature of computing as a discipline, and the essential skills and competence of computing professionals.
By Matti Tedre
Beyond coding: toward software development expertise
Understanding what it takes to become an effective developer.
By Marian Petre, André van der Hoek
The search for my computer science
A journey spanning Nigeria, the United States, and Tanzania, is one woman's search for meaning and validation as a computer scientist.
By Judith Uchidiuno
Gender and inclusiveness
Various policies and processes have been implemented to bring equality for women in the IT sector. Yet there are various issues faced by women that still need to be addressed broadly as an institutional responsibility rather than a mere brand-building strategy.
By Sadhana Deshpande
The human manual
Understanding how computer systems are built today can help us improve how well we work together.
By Bryan Kim
Computer science as a global language
How computer science helped me become a citizen of the world and the lessons real-life experiences taught me about effectively interacting with other people.
By María Andreína Francisco Rodríguez
How much are the greenland and antarctic ice sheets melting?
Designing better simulation software to prepare for a warming world.
By Josefin Ahlkrona
What is the role of a computer scientist in shaping a sustainable future?
It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the warnings of a disrupted climate system, from melting ice caps to species extinction. But the problems are so far removed, and so large, we often wonder what does this have to do with our work as computer scientists?
By Elina Eriksson
Human values in a digital society
In a period of rapid technological change, there is a risk of ethics taking a back seat.
By Simon Winter
The arbitrary nature of computing curricula
Computing is still a young discipline with new topics emerging daily, spawning an extended family of disciplines, which makes negotiating a curriculum an inherently fraught process that will not meet everybody's needs.
By Tony Clear
Computer scientists in action: Anja Bechman, data science
By Anja Bechmann
Computer scientists in action: Christina Harrington, inclusive technology design
By Christina Harrington
Computer scientists in action: Lining Yao, fabrication
By Lining Yao
Computer scientists in action: Alexandra Jimborean, computer architecture
By Alexandra Jimborean
Demistifying the dark web
Anonymity network overlays have a dark shroud of mystery. The "dark web" is known to everybody and nobody. But what is it, really?
By Vasilis Ververis
Autonomous infrastructure for a suckless internet
How can we promote an internet that respects human rights? Investing in autonomous infrastructure built and operated by politically motivated techies, who put their skills at the service of the public interest, may be the answer.
By Stefania Milan
The principle of least authority: how capabilities can improve internet-scale privacy
The core protocols our computers use to communicate across the internet need to be improved in order to give users control over their privacy and protect metadata. Capabilities encode information about what can be done with data into the data itself, and may be a useful building block for the next generation of internet protocols.
By Jack Grigg
Routes to rights: internet architecture and values in times of ossification and commercialization
This article discusses the consequences of the commercialization and evolution of the Internet infrastructure, and how it affects our ability to exercise human rights online.
By Niels ten Oever, Davide Beraldo
Stop looking over our shoulders!
The global push for secure digital identities, privacy tools, and online rights.
By Kali Kaneko
How to fix email: making communication encrypted and decentralized with autocrypt
Email has been declared dead many times but refuses to die. There is a new effort underway to make encrypted end-to-end email communication as automatic as possible. It is part of a diverse set of efforts to reinvigorate the email ecosystem, which remains a crucial cornerstone of a functioning, open internet.
By Holger Krekel, Karissa McKelvey, Emil Lefherz
Can we build a privacy-preserving web browser we all deserve?
The web is the biggest legacy application ever developed or supported by software engineers, but it's also blurring the line between the consumption of data and the leaking of personal details. Browser makers may be the only line of defense.
By Christoph Kerschbaumer, Luke Crouch, Tom Ritter, Tanvi Vyas
The case for regulating social networks and the internet
We don't need to miss out on the joys of technology in order to regain what liberty and democracy are supposed to mean, but the regulatory transformation we need is of epic proportions.
By carlo von lynX
Why architecture and artificial intelligence?
What do architecture and AI have to do with each other? Quite a bit, it turns out, and it is a history that goes back to the origins of AI.
By Molly Wright Steenson
Harnessing technology for art history at the Frick Art Reference Library
The Frick Art Reference Library has been researching the potential of computer technology to enhance the methods art historians have historically used to do their research. The Frick has launched a number of exciting new collaborative projects with the hopes of bringing the normally staid world of art history into the 21st century.
By Louisa Wood Ruby, Samantha Deutch
The Replica Project: Building a visual search engine for art historians
From the time of prehistoric etchings on the walls of the Lascaux cave to the present day, people have always been creating art. With millions of artistic artifacts filling museums, churches, cultural institutions, and private collections across the globe, connecting to our shared cultural and artistic past is no longer impossible.
By Benoit Seguin
The burgeoning computer-art symbiosis
Computers help us understand art. Art helps us teach computers.
By Shiry Ginosar, Xi Shen, Karan Dwivedi, Elizabeth Honig, Mathieu Aubry
Creation, curation, and classification: Mario Klingemann and Emily L. Spratt in conversation
Computer-generated art has long challenged traditional notions of the role of the artist and the curator in the creative process. In the age of machine learning these philosophical conceptions require even further consideration.
By Emily L. Spratt
The visual impact of sound: Glitchometry
Applying sound effects to image files can yield mind-boggling images.
By Daniel Temkin
The story of Aitokaiku: Utilizing artificial intelligence for music
With the growing popularity of streaming services, artificial intelligence-generated systems, and open art content, the music industry is facing a complex set of challenges.
By Jarno Eerola
Rethinking creativity
Why it matters to liberate creativity and how technology can help us along the way.
By Seda Röder
Can we build the cyborg future we all deserve?
Knowing who we represent in HCI helps us understand what is at stake. Intersectionality can help us do better.
By Ari Schlesinger
Digital and physical barriers to changing identities
Social media sites often erect barriers to changing identities online, which can be similar to physical world barriers faced by marginalized groups. How can social media be designed to enable rather than constrain life changes?
By Oliver L. Haimson
Disability-disclosure preferences and practices in online dating communities
Based on a cooperative research project, this article explores the experience of dating online with a disability, contextualized with an overview of the historical connection between disability and asexuality. It concludes with ideas for decoupling this inaccurate association through online dating platforms.
By Cynthia L. Bennett
Leveraging personal experience for academic research and outreach
Use your individuality to build your career path whether it leans toward academia, outreach, or both. The existing underlying threads between your experiences and the pursuit of research problems might surprise you.
By Joslenne Peña
Gender and the art of community relations
Aspects of one's personal identity can change the way you experience being part of a community, especially if you are in a minority group. The author reports on her experiences of conducting research with women who participate in the Debian Linux project.
By Lesley Mitchell
Reflecting on robots, love, and poetry
Finding the poetry in programming and the algorithms in poems
By Margaret Rhee
OPEN ACCESS
"We had tough times, but we've sort of sewn our way through it: the partnership quilt
Using capacitive touch sensors and traditional quilting techniques lead to the collision of seemingly disparate worlds and resulted in the creation of the Partnership Quilt, a living archive of voices in the shape of an interactive piece of craftwork.
By Angelika Strohmayer, Janis Meissner
Forests, trees, and false dichotomies
As the gap between research and productization continues to narrow, traditional labels may no longer apply.
By Stephen Miller
On entrepreneurship
Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, shares his ideas about entrepreneurship learning, finding the right people, and navigating failure with grace.
By Jie Qi
Running an alt.business: being a good cause and doing good business
Hacker, maker, and engineer Limor "Ladyada" Fried shares her insights on open technologies and business models.
By Limor Fried
Identity: the killer app of crowdfunded open hardware
In the next 20 years, the notion of a secure, verifiable identity will drive the adoption of crowdfunded open hardware.
By Joshua Lifton
Being an open entrepreneur
What does it mean to be an entrepreneur making open source hardware? An open entrepreneur has parallels to being an entrepreneur of any company, but there are also advantages that are often overlooked.
By Alicia Gibb, Nathan Seidle
Building a business based on the life you want to lead
Running a business and living the lifestyle you want can be seen as mutually exclusive. Maintaining the right balance, while meeting the changing goals of both, can be seen as a talent. But shifting focus away from the bottom line can lead to a better outcome, professionally and personally. Two entrepreneurs share their ongoing journey toward mastering this art.
By Chris "Akiba" Wang, Jacinta Plucinski
I, entrepreneur
Five, diverse entrepreneurs from around the world share a common ambition of social good. Here they detail how they entered the world of startups.
By Numair Khan, Alexandru Penu, Thomas Dickerson, Linda Liukas, Cesar Jung-Harada, Sam Bhattacharya
Mapping organized ignorance in environmental health
How data collection and reporting standards have shaped what we know and do not know about water contamination in Hoosick Falls, NY.
By Laura Rabinow, Lindsay Poirier
The cognitive and immersive situations room
Cognitive environments with "eyes," "ears," "mind," "mouth," and "hands" will converse with people, understand group dynamics, present stories, and augment group intelligence, enabling humans and computers to accomplish things neither could do alone.
By Hui Su
From social movements to social surveillance
How the technology of the Occupy movement became a mobile app for policing.
By Joan Donovan
Biological obstacles and technological leaps
Technology can address biological threats like viral epidemics and bioterrorism that could put humankind on the brink of biological disaster.
By Ketaki Katdare
Filter bubbles and fake news
The results of the 2016 Brexit referendum in the U.K. and presidential election in the U.S. surprised pollsters and traditional media alike, and social media is now being blamed in part for creating echo chambers that encouraged the spread of fake news that influenced voters.
By Dominic DiFranzo, Kristine Gloria-Garcia
Managing crises, one text at a time
Crisis Text Line CTO Jason Bennett shares his insight on the technology behind this helpline using text to reach people in need of counseling during times of crisis.
By Rahul R. Divekar, Nidhi Rastogi
Serving people in crisis to make the world a better place
Carolin Silbernagl, who leads betterplace lab, the research arm of betterplace.org in Berlin, Germany, is a social technologist, as well as co-founder of dotHIV. Here, she shares what it takes to make betterplace, the first mover in the area of digital social startups in Germany.
By Nidhi Rastogi, Rahul R. Divekar
Online censorship, cyberattacks, and access to information
Dan Keyserling, head of communications at Jigsaw, an incubator within Alphabet, shares how technology can help address global challenges, especially on the front lines of press freedom, political repression, and human rights.
By Nidhi Rastogi
The Heidelberg Laureate Forum on the moving frontier between mathematics and computer science
Young and early-career researchers at the 2016 Heidelberg Laureate Forum discuss how the frontier between mathematics and computer science is shifting, what the future promises, and the implications the frontier's shape and dynamics will have on both fields.
By Edmon Begoli, Vincent Schlegel, Michael Atiyah, Praise Adeyemo, Tim Baarslag
Data analytics, accelerators, and supercomputing
The Message Passing Interface faces new challenges as modern concepts and technologies like data analytics and accelerators penetrate high-performance computing. Here, we discuss the future of MPI with HPC expert Prof. Torsten Hoefler of ETH Zürich, Switzerland.
By Vasileios Kalantzis
Quantum algorithms for machine learning
Quantum computing and machine learning are two technologies that have generated unparalleled amounts of hype among the scientific community and popular press. Both are mysterious, immensely powerful, and on a collision course with each other.
By Bingjie Wang
Many-body quantum mechanics
Special purpose quantum computers---realized with current technology---have the potential to revolutionize physics, chemistry, and materials science.
By Michael L. Wall, Arghavan Safavi-Naini, Martin Gärttner
Black holes, quantum mechanics, and the limits of polynomial-time computability
Which computational problems can be solved in polynomial-time and which cannot? Though seemingly technical, this question has wide-ranging implications and brings us to the heart of both theoretical computer science and modern physics.
By Stephen P. Jordan
Reliable quantum circuits have defects
The first large-scale practical quantum computer is within reach. Coming to grips with the strategy and challenges of preparing reliable executions of an arbitrary quantum computation is not difficult. In fact, defects are good.
By Alexandru Paler, Austin G. Fowler, Robert Wille
Establishing quantum advantage
What are quantum computers good for? This essay reviews the progress toward proving a quantum advantage over classical computing.
By Adam Bouland
Programming quantum computers using 3-D puzzles, coffee cups, and doughnuts
Programming a quantum computer is a task as baffling as quantum mechanics itself. But it now looks like a simple 3-D puzzle may hold the solution.
By Simon J. Devitt
Black holes and the limits of quantum information processing
The densest memories and the fastest processors imaginable on computers located billions of light-years away
By Brian Swingle
Undecidability of the spectral gap
What happens to undecidability in the quantum computing paradigm?
By Johannes Bausch
A brief introduction to decolonial computing
Does computing need to be decolonized, and if so, how should such decolonization be effected? This short essay introduces a recent proposal at the fringes of computing, which attempts to engage these and other related questions.
By Syed Mustafa Ali
Decolonising HCI and interaction design discourse: some considerations in planning AfriCHI
Bringing African theorists into the construction of African identity in HCI.
By Nicola J. Bidwell
Breaking the cycle of Macondo: design and decolonial futures
How can the ideas of timelessness and anachronism contribute to the decolonization of design practices in Latin America?
By Luiza Prado de O. Martins, Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira
A tale of two cities, real and imagined
How an election promise to develop India's smart cities became an urban concern.
By Rahul Bhatia
Negotiating science, technology, culture, and religion: the art and ideas of Laleh Mehran
In this interview, the artist Laleh Mehran discusses her use of interactive installations to explore the relationships between science, theology, and technology. She also shares how her experience as an Iranian-American has shaped the structure and themes of her work.
By Jennifer Jacobs
Jian Guan on design and innovation in China
Having attended universities in the U.S. and China, this educator shares his insight of the design industry and education in China.
By Ahmed Ansari, Raghavendra Kandala
Design Livre: designing locally, cannibalizing globally
Design Livre is a conversation about creative ways of resisting the bad effects of globalization, such as technological dependence. This article tells the story of how this conversation started, where is it going now, and what is the relevance of its underlying topics.
By Frederick M. C. van Amstel, Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto
A manifest for digital imperfection
Artistic style is an important aspect for creative practice. However giving away some computational control over digital design and fabrication is necessary in order to engage designers in a higher-risk practice that enhances attention, creative decision making, and product ownership.
By Amit Zoran
Personal fabrication: from automated machines to augmented tools
Fully automated digital fabrication tools are the darling of the personal fabrication movement, but they may not be the best format for harnessing digital fabrication for personal use. Instead we should be developing tools that work cooperatively with users to augment natural abilities rather than eliminate human involvement altogether.
By Ilan Moyer
Creating animated characters for the physical world
Making the design and production of animated, mechanical characters accessible to the public.
By Stelian Coros
Building a toolkit for fabricating interactive objects
Despite the recent proliferation of easy-to-use personal fabrication devices, designing custom objects that are useful remains challenging. RFID technology can allow designers to easily embed rich and robust interaction in custom creations at low cost.
By Andrew Spielberg, Alanson Sample, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, James McCann
3-D printing interactive objects
Today's 3-D printing hobbyists churn out kilos of static trinkets. These existing machines can further help them create functional objects, if new perspectives and designs are employed.
By Valkyrie Savage
Soft printing with fabric
3-D printed objects made of fabric could be flexible and deformable, bringing possibilities to new sensors and actuators.
By Huaishu Peng, Scott Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, James McCann
Lots of parts, lots of formats, lots of headache
After three decades of digitally fabricating the world's wildest architecture, Zahner's R&D team discuss trials, tribulations, and a path to personalized production.
By James Coleman, Craig Long, Andrew Manto, Trygve Wastvedt
Drowning in triangle soup: the quest for a better 3-D printing file format
File formats for additive manufacturing are lagging behind the capabilities of 3-D printing technology itself, and no one is doing anything about it.
By Jesse Louis-Rosenberg
Island three revisited: O'Neill cylinders and digital materials
Huge, habitable structures in space are a staple of science fiction, but digital materials could make them a reality.
By Daniel Cellucci, Kenneth C. Cheung
3-D printing: green or not?
3-D printing could herald new advances in sustainable production, that is, so long as it does not become a sustainability hazard itself.
By David Rejeski
Fabrication lends a hand: creating custom assistive technology
Lost your hand in a lightsaber fight? No problem, we can fix that. Rapid and consumer-grade fabrication tools could revolutionize the way we design and deliver assistive technologies.
By Erin Buehler
FEATURE: Features
The internet of things… of all things
A spendthrift refrigerator, a garrulous cellphone, and a loafing automobile, there's a new technology in town everyone's talking about.
By George Hurlburt
Prospects for the internet of things
The future of the Internet of Things may rely on our ability to tackle issues of safety, security, and privacy, while creating standardized systems that are easy to use and configure.
By Vinton G. Cerf
The genie in the machines
The ultimate goal of the Internet of Things and wearable revolution is to gift every person with their own magic genie, who will understand all of their needs and desires and thereby enrich the world around them.
By Jonathan Caras
Global synchronization and the challenges of building network awareness
The Internet of Things places new demands on wireless networks that cannot be met with conventional infrastructure, services, and protocols. But there is hope, specifically a new paradigm to enable wireless awareness through global synchronization.
By Alyssa B. Apsel, Enkhbayasgalan Gantsog
Trends in internet of things platforms
With billions of IOT devices predicted to appear over the next few years, some things have to change.
By Michael Andersen
Querying flying robots and other things
A discussion on the role of ontologies and stream reasoning in Internet of Things applications.
By Daniel de Leng
Toward computing over encrypted data in IoT systems
The multitude of IoT devices contributes to the enormous amount of data stored on corporate clouds. Yet the level of computing power has outpaced advances in privacy protection. Could encrypted search preserve the privacy of data, while utilizing the computing power of the cloud?
By Hossein Shafagh
The ambient intelligence course at Politecnico di Torino
At Italy's oldest technical university, students learn about IoT concepts and technologies by building end-to-end prototypical systems.
By Luigi De Russis
Panasonic and the OpenDOF project
Is the decision to go open-source always purely altruistic? Not for many large companies, and that is not a bad thing.
By Bryant Eastham
OPEN ACCESS
Toward a web of systems
Web and semantic technologies will form the foundation for ecosystems of machines that interact with each other and with people as never before.
By Florian Michahelles, Simon Mayer
SECTION: Features
One step beyond virtual reality
We have come a long way since the late 1970s, when virtual reality technology was in its infancy. With an array of new VR technologies in the market, what might be the future impact on our daily lives?
By Diego Martinez Plasencia
Substitutional reality
Now that virtual reality headsets are finally reaching the wider consumer market, how can we merge the physical and virtual worlds to create a unified multi-sensory experience?
By Adalberto L. Simeone, Eduardo Velloso
Using your own muscles
Leveraging the user's own muscles to simulate impact and forces from a virtual reality world allows us to create more immersive experiences without bulky equipment.
By Pedro Lopes, Alexandra Ion, Robert Kovacs
Lost in the rift
Virtual reality users are torn between the real and virtual worlds. Determining how, and when, to show elements of reality in a virtual view is key to providing usable VR experiences.
By Daniel Boland, Mark McGill
Managing cybersickness in virtual reality
If the physical side effects associated with virtual reality are not managed, the widespread adoption of VR may come to a halt.
By Lisa Rebenitsch
What is the vergence-accommodation conflict and how do we fix it?
The next wave of virtual reality technology might turn to light field displays to solve a dizzying problem.
By Robert Konrad
VR to the rescue
Virtual reality is helping rescue teams prepare for emergency situations in places they could never ordinarily go, like collapsed mines deep underground.
By Alain Boulay
Profile: Susumu Tachi
The scientist who invented telexistence
By Adrian Scoică
An interview with the director of biomedical informatics at Stanford
Russ Altman discusses how computational biology is rapidly transforming clinical practice, particularly in his own field of pharmacogenomics.
By Cristina Pop, Billy Rathje
OPEN ACCESS
Computational and statistical issues in personalized medicine
Computational methods can be used to find associations between our genome and our traits, and new optimizations to these computations promise to do it much faster.
By Christoph Lippert, David Heckerman
Fighting disease with data
Recent advances in genome typing and sequencing technologies have enabled quick generation of a vast amount of molecular data at very low cost. The mining and computational analysis of this type of data can help shape new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies in biomedicine.
By Marina Sirota, Bin Chen
Advancing the frontier of data-driven healthcare
Suchi Saria of Johns Hopkins University shares how big data and machine learning can help improve the practice of healthcare, and how computing students can contribute.
By Narges Razavian
Disease dietomics
How computational biology might help in discovering the missing links between diet and disease.
By Malay Bhattacharyya
A conversation with Vijay Pande
The director of Stanford University's Pande Lab discusses how his work with large-scale, distributed simulation is being used to study protein folding and its connection to disease.
By Cristina Pop
Hidden Markov models and mouse ultrasonic vocalizations
An introduction to Markov models, their significance, and an explanation of how a hidden Markov model can be used to model the ultrasonic calls made by mice.
By Adam A. Smith
Big data comes in tiny packages
Single-cell data creates computational opportunities for discovery in disease and human health.
By Karen Sachs, Tiffany Chen
Digital drivers in the age of massive datasets
How technology enables the data geek in life sciences and healthcare.
By Sarah Aerni, Hulya Farinas, Gautam Muralidhar
Profile: Sriram Kosuri
Never mind the cloud, back up your selfies to DNA
Never mind the cloud, back up your selfies to DNA
By Adrian Scoică
Kristin Lauter on Cryptography and Mathematics
There are unique challenges posed by cryptography research. This interview examines potential threats to modern security techniques and how to overcome them.
By Shashank Agrawal, Billy Rathje
Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Cryptography's holy grail
For more than 30 years, cryptographers have embarked on a quest to construct an encryption scheme that would enable arbitrary computation on encrypted data. Conceptually simple, yet notoriously difficult to achieve, cryptography's holy grail opens the door to many new capabilities in our cloud-centric, data-driven world.
By David J. Wu
Encrypted Search
The need to embed search functionality into every aspect of technology has produced an abundance of information that is difficult to secure. Can advances in cryptography resolve the inherent conflicts of big data?
By Seny Kamara
Secure Your Data and Compute on It, Too
Modern cryptography provides techniques to perform useful computations on sensitive data.
By Mike Rosulek
Exploring the Risks to Identity Security and Privacy in Cyberspace
Cyberspace, a world of great promise, but also, of great peril. Pirates, predators, and hackers galore, are you and your online identity at risk in this wild frontier?
By Jason R. C. Nurse
The Wrens of Bletchley Park
The lives and times of the British women who operated Colossus, and their all-important role in events leading to D-Day and the close of the Second World War.
By Michael Smith
Profile: Ian Pratt
Pioneering security through virtualization
By Adrian Scoică
Gathering people to gather data
An interview with Paul Wicks, Vice President of Innovation at PatientsLikeMe, a patient network and real-time research platform.
By Diana Lynn MacLean
Opportunities of social media in health and well-being
Intelligently leveraging data from millions of social media posts is a modern public health approach that has the potential to save many lives.
By Munmun De Choudhury
Here comes the #engagement: A serious health initiative made trendy
Creating a user experience to communicate the seriousness of HIV prevention and awareness can be both educational while entertaining. This combination along with a sense of cultural influence helps to both attract and engage millennials.
By Fay Cobb Payton, KaMar Galloway
Challenges in personal health tracking
Increasingly, personal health data can be tracked and integrated from numerous streams quickly and easily, but our feedback lingers in the land of "show the user a graph and hope." How can we help people make sense of personal health data?
By Matthew Kay
Did I take my meds today?
People tend to believe they are more aware of their own health behaviors than they really are. In this article, we present technologies that employ ubiquitous home sensing to support awareness of healthy habits.
By Matthew L. Lee
Seeing is believing
Why visualization will play a critical role in bringing big data decision making to a hospital bed near you.
By Megan Monroe
Wearable technologies
Wearable computing has the potential to fundamentally alter healthcare by enabling long-term patient monitoring and rehabilitation outside of the lab.
By Sinziana Mazilu, Gerhard Tröster
Talking to computers in natural language
Natural language understanding is as old as computing itself, but recent advances in machine learning and the rising demand of natural-language interfaces make it a promising time to once again tackle the long-standing challenge.
By Percy Liang
To err is human, to correct is divine
Technology has made language learning a more interactive and enjoyable experience, but it has never been smart enough to replace human tutors. However, the latest advances in automated grammatical error correction open up new horizons. Could software ever replace our language teachers?
By Mariano Felice, Zheng Yuan
From wax tablets to touchscreens
How we can enable users to transmit text to mobile and ubiquitous computer systems as quickly and as accurately as possible.
By Per Ola Kristensson
Ancient Sumerian online
Far from its beginnings as symbols pressed into clay tablets, Ancient Sumerian is now being digitized and shared through cutting edge semantic web technologies.
By Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller
Detecting influencers in social media discussions
Knowing who's influential can help when planning political campaigns, advertising strategies, or even combating terrorism; and now research into influence detection promises to automate such detection.
By Sara Rosenthal
Spoken dialogue systems
Wouldn't it be great if we could simply talk to our technical devices instead of relying on cumbersome displays and keyboards to convey what we want?
By Pierre Lison, Raveesh Meena
A hybrid system for code switch point detection in informal Arabic text
How to detect the switch between a standard and a dialectal form of a language in written text and why this is important for natural language processing tasks.
By Heba Elfardy, Mohamed Al-Badrashiny, Mona Diab
Miriam Plieninger on language learning with Babbel
Babbel's Director of Didactics, Miriam Plieninger, weighs in on how mobile apps are rapidly changing the way we approach language learning.
By Daniel Bauer, Billy Rathje
Profile: Geoffrey Hinton
Unlocking the language of the brain
By Adrian Scoică
OPEN ACCESS
Pattern recognition
Most people like to believe they judge others on their merits, and not by their gender or ethnicity. Neuroscience has shown this isn't always the case, so what can we do about it?
By Freada Kapor Klein, Ana Díaz-Hernández
Open source, open heart
Creativity requires technical training, personal development, and the freedom to take risks regardless of your gender.
By Jesse Beach
It's deeper than rap, toward culturally responsive CS
Using hip-hop lyrics and artificial intelligence to engage more students in computer science based on their cultural background.
By Omoju Miller
In search of diverse students
In Germany, the IGaDtools4MINT research project aims to integrate gender and diversity in STEM subjects.
By Tobias Berg, Rebecca Apel, Carmen Leicht-Scholten
Making tech more inclusive
Exposing the driving causes behind the lack of diversity in our communities, and how to use your privilege for good.
By Erin Carson
Hackers!
From the early 1980s to the present day, the tech industry, the law, and media representations have evolved in tandem, all hypnotized by the myth of "The Hacker"---an ideal coder, stereotyped as an exceptional young white man.
By Sarah Jeong, Colin McSwiggen
All hands on deck!
Ten action items for attracting and retaining more women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields of study.
By Grace Woo
Gendered expectations
A look at how implicit biases influence the advancement of women in science and engineering.
By Eve Fine, Amy Wendt, Molly Carnes
Campus for moms
Having a baby and taking a new start. A program for women on maternity leave, teaches them how to give birth to a startup.
By Liron Lifshitz-Yadin, Daniela Raijman-Aharonov
The prerequisites and privilege of autodidacticism
The proliferation of free, high-quality online courses has been heralded as a means to democratize education. The real innovations in online learning will be programs that teach the critical thinking required to learn more.
By Aliza Aufrichtig
Storm-chasing drones
Unmanned aircraft systems. Aerial robots. Drones. Regardless of the name, this new technology is being developed to revolutionize the sampling and understanding of complex atmospheric phenomena.
By Eric Frew
Feeding a hungry world
The fusion of next generation sensors and advanced information systems, combined with advances in unmanned aircraft systems that have emerged through aerospace engineering technologies, will contribute to the challenge of feeding our future world in a sustainable manner. Without these advances, the world may find itself short of food and perhaps on the brink of global conflict.
By Wayne Woldt, Eric Frew, George Meyer
Journalism with flying robots
The use of unmanned aerial drones will revolutionize news reporting, but many issues need to be resolved before things can really take off.
By Matt Waite
Connecting with oceans using underwater acoustic networks
Oceans cover a majority of our planet and are currently lacking in regards to exploration and technological innovations. One technology that can help enable more aquatic applications is underwater acoustic networks (UANs). This article discusses the current status of UANs, the new applications that can be provided, and the challenges faced by this technology.
By Michael Zuba
A dexterous crabster robot explores the seafloor
Crabster CR200 is a giant crab robot with six legs and 30 powerful joints developed at the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering. The robot can help explore ancient shipwrecks in areas of harsh tidal currents and turbid water, where traditional underwater vehicles have trouble operating.
By Bong-Huan Jun, Hyungwon Shim
A high-speed, real-time mobile gait rehabilitation system
Combining advanced technologies in real-time wireless communication, control theory, sensor and actuator design, and rehabilitation science.
By Wenlong Zhang, Yi-Hung Wei, Quan Leng, Song Han
Networking vehicles for safety
A cyber-physical systems perspective on the design of vehicular networking solutions for safer and greener transportation.
By Yaser P. Fallah
Composing on-demand intelligent PHYsical layers
In the future, our radio devices will adapt to deal with new types of signals. The challenge is to describe those signals so that devices can learn from one another and communicate.
By Aveek Dutta, Dola Saha
Profile: Benjamin Cichy
Writing code to run on Mars
By Adrian Scoică
Quantified performance
A look at how athletic performance can be measured outside of the laboratory.
By Christina Strohrmann, Gerhard Tröster
Fitness trackers
Digital activity sensors are no longer confined to research labs; they're in the wild and they come in lime green. They offer the promise to improve our health and even to affect the ways that we interact with others.
By Andrew Miller
Tracking how we read
Using activity recognition for cognitive tasks can provide new insights about reading and learning habits.
By Kai Kunze
Toward smartphone assisted personal rehabilitation training
When utilizing internal sensors, modern smartphones are inexpensive and powerful wearable devices for sensor data acquisition, processing, and feedback in personal daily health applications.
By Gabriele Spina, Oliver Amft
Capturing human motion one step at a time
The design, construction, and deployment of a pressure-enhanced IMU system that fits in the bottom of your shoe.
By Rolf Adelsberger
mHealth @ UAH
New health care systems that integrate wearable sensors, personal devices, and servers promise to fundamentally change the way health care services are delivered and used.
By Mladen Milosevic, Aleksandar Milenkovic, Emil Jovanov
Airwriting
It may be possible to enable text entry by writing freely in the air, using only the hand as a stylus.
By Christoph Amma, Tanja Schultz
Wearable brain computer interface are we there yet?
Brain computer interfaces are still restricted to the domains of health and research, but we understand what needs to be done and are getting closer to making a commercial wearable EEG system.
By Viswam Nathan
Profile: Ori Inbar
Making augmented reality a reality
By Adrian Scoică
What is Public and Private Anyway? A Pragmatic Take on Privacy and Democracy
Revealing private content on the Web can also spark public engagement. To understand this, we need to challenge our common sense notions of privacy and democracy.
By Andreas Birkbak
Something Bad Might Happen: Lawyers, anonymization and risk
The line between personal and anonymous information is often unclear. Increasingly it falls to lawyers to understand and manage the risks associated with the sharing of "anonymized" data sets.
By Marion Oswald
Personal, Pseudonymous, and Anonymous Data: The problem of identification
Why defining what counts as personal data is important for data protection and information sharing.
By Iain Bourne
Talking 'Bout Your Reputation
People think they want anonymity, but actually desire privacy. But how do we reframe the debate surrounding privacy and security? Perhaps technology is the answer.
By David Birch
Understanding the Data Environment
Protecting data privacy and anonymity requires a better understanding of the conditions and mechanisms under which they may be threatened.
By Elaine Mackey, Mark Elliot
What is Bitcoin?
Strengths and weaknesses of the leader in a new generation of emerging cryptocurrencies.
By Dominic Hobson
The Tor Project: An inside view
A decade since the first version was released, Tor continues to be at the center of the debate around online privacy.
By Kelley Misata
It's Not About Winning, it's About Sending a Message: Hiding information in games
New information hiding techniques use online games to transmit secrets covertly. The technique is simple, but the problem of detecting these covert channels is far from solved.
By Philip C. Ritchey
An Illustrated Primer in Differential Privacy
The vast amounts of data that are now available provide new opportunities to social science researchers, but also raise huge privacy concerns for data subjects. Differential privacy offers a way to balance the needs of both parties. But how?
By Christine Task
Cynthia Dwork on Differential Privacy
Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research, Dr. Cynthia Dwork, provides a first-hand look at the basics of differential privacy.
By Michael Zuba
Profile: Jessica Staddon
Managing Google's privacy research
In this profile, Jessica Staddon discusses managing privacy research for one the world's best-known technology corporations.
By Adrian Scoică
The well-programmed clavier
A look into the workings of the Emmy and Emily Howell programs, including musical examples with pointers to where they can be heard as well as seen.
By David Cope
Modeling online creative collaborations
A study of the online music writing community FAWM.ORG reveals that people who collaborate share less in common than you might think.
By Steven Dow, Burr Settles
The chilling tale of copyright law in online creative communities
Online content creators are making decisions every day based on copyright laws that even judges have trouble interpreting. What impact does this confusion over the law have on our technology use and our creativity online?
By Casey Fiesler
Running rivers
For animated film "Brave," Pixar Animation Studios adopted a procedural workflow for special effects. This new paradigm changed how Pixar approached effects. It allowed them to iterate, experiment, and layer physics alongside artist-directed elements. The effects artists used proceduralism to create a Scottish river for the main characters to enjoy some mother/daughter time.
By Michael O'Brien
Making a scene
How can people and AI equally participate in creating something? How do they do it when they cannot edit or revise their work?
By Brian O'Neill
Profile Ken Muset
A career shaped by creativity
By Adrian Scoică
Creativity in code
Mediums such as fine art and poetry are common subjects in computational creativity---but what about something closer to home? Can computers be as creative in programming as they are in poetry?
By Michael Cook
Kodu game lab, a few lessons learned
Kodu Game Lab is a complete, 3-D game development environment designed to be accessible to children as young as 9 years old. The core of Kodu is a custom visual programming language, which blends ease of use with expressibility.
By Stephen Coy
Computational origami: a creative blend of mathematics and art
To some, mathematics is an art form. In this interview, we discuss the creativity behind computational origami, a growing area of computational geometry, with Erik Demaine.
By Michael Zuba, Nick DePalma
Scientific computing in the age of complexity
Climate modeling has come a long way since von Neumann declared it a problem too hard for pencil and paper, but tailor-made for the new digital computers. As the models and computers both evolve toward ever-greater complexity, they are changing our notions of digital simulation itself.
By V. Balaji
Electrical modeling and simulation for stockpile stewardship
A survey of radiation modeling and circuit simulation approaches that are essential for stockpile stewardship.
By Heidi K. Thornquist, Eric R. Keiter, Sivasankaran Rajamanickam
A look inside the earth
On the computational resources and techniques required for imaging the Earth's crust.
By Gregory A. Newman
Challenges and methods in large-scale computational chemistry applications
Interesting problems in computational chemistry from a computer science perspective.
By Jeff R. Hammond
Expanders, tropical semi-rings, and nuclear norms
Scientific computing for social and modern information networks.
By David Gleich
Massive streaming data analytics
Analyzing massive streaming graphs efficiently requires new algorithms, data structures, and computing platforms.
By Jason Riedy, David A. Bader
Linguistic structure prediction with the sparseptron
Recent advances in natural language processing bring together rich representations and scalable machine learning algorithms.
By Noah A. Smith, André F. T. Martins
How much (execution) time and energy does my algorithm cost?
Do we need to design algorithms differently if our goal is to save energy, rather than time or space? This article presents a simple and speculative thought experiment that suggests when and why the answer could be "yes."
By Jee Whan Choi, Richard W. Vuduc
High-performance computing and the cloud
Infrastructure clouds offer tremendous potential for scientific users, however, they face numerous challenges that must be addressed before they are widely adopted by scientific communities.
By Paul Marshall, Henry Tufo, Kate Keahey
Dream applications of verifiable computational results
A new system allows researchers to discover, reuse, cite, and experiment upon any computational result that is published with a Verifiable Result Identifier.
By Matan Gavish, David Donoho, Amos Onn
Profile Arthur S. Bland
High performance at Oak Ridge laboratory
By Adrian Scoică, Arthur S. Bland
Seven factors for designing successful mHealth projects
Although mobile technology has the power to vastly improve healthcare delivery in developing regions, many issues can affect the success of mHealth systems.
By Atanu Garai
Designing and developing an open source medical informatics module
Lessons learned in planning and managing a development sprint to build a flexible, open source HL7 query service while successfully collaborating with diverse stakeholders and volunteers.
By Suranga Nath Kasthurirathne
Crime prevention technologies in low-income communities
Using collaborative technology as a grassroots effort to reduce violent crime in Chicago.
By Sheena Lewis Erete
Online education for developing contexts
A personal experience with academia in Pakistan leads to using online education initiatives as an opportunity for massive improvement.
By Arjumand Younos
ICTD at the University of California Berkeley
Several leading researchers from UC Berkeley share their personal research stories, opinions about the field, and advice for students interested in ICTD.
By Nithya Sambasivan
A social scientist sits among ICTD workers
Reflections on the place of qualitative methods in ICTD work.
By Sumitra Nair
Voices in ICT for development
Researchers from around the world tell us about their personal and institutional efforts in international development.
By Nithya Sambasivan
Lessons and opportunities in ICT4D
If ICT4D aims to effectively answer the grand challenges it faces, young researchers, in both design and computer science, must be aware of the consequences of how terminology frames this field, be willing to critique and adjust research methods and attend to neglected, challenging concepts.
By Samantha Merritt
Facing the African ICTD academic divide
This article stitches together the current journey of ICTD researchers based in Africa who formed a virtual network, which hopes to contribute toward the enhancement of representation within the academic ICTD community.
By Kathleen Diga
User experience practices in Nairobi's iHub community
How a forthcoming user experience (UX) lab will meet the needs of the African technology community.
By Mark Kamau, Angela Crandall, Kagonya Awori
Research at Nairobi's iHub
By Angela Crandall, Rhoda Omenya
Matthew Kam: Technology, impact and development
By Ryan Kelly
Sketching and streaming algorithms for processing massive data
The rate at which electronic information is generated in the world is exploding. In this article we explore techniques known as sketching and streaming for processing massive data both quickly and memory-efficiently.
By Jelani Nelson
Big privacy
Approaches from computer science and statistical science for assessing and protecting privacy in large, public data sets.
By Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Jerome P. Reiter
Taming big probability distributions
New algorithms for estimating parameters of distributions over big domains need significantly fewer samples.
By Ronitt Rubinfeld
Designing good MapReduce algorithms
An introduction to designing algorithms for the MapReduce framework for parallel processing of big data.
By Jeffrey D. Ullman
Big data and internships at Cloudera
Students working in the big data space get uniquely valuable experiences and perspectives by taking industrial internships, which can help further their research agendas.
By Yanpei Chen, Andrew Ferguson, Brian Martin, Andrew Wang, Patrick Wendell
An interview with Surajit Chaudhuri
Surajit Chaudhuri, Distinguished Scientist and head of the Extreme Computing Group (XCG) at Microsoft Research, Redmond provides valuable insights for revisiting data analytics in the context of big data.
By Aditya Parameswaran
Peregrine: Low-latency queries on Hive warehouse data
How Facebook is analyzing big data.
By Raghotham Murthy, Rajat Goel
Big data platforms: What's next?
Three computer scientists from UC Irvine address the question "What's next for big data?" by summarizing the current state of the big data platform space and then describing ASTERIX, their next-generation big data management system.
By Vinayak R. Borkar, Michael J. Carey, Chen Li
Interactive analysis of big data
New user interfaces can transform how we work with big data, and raise exciting research problems that span human-computer interaction, machine learning, and distributed systems.
By Jeffrey Heer, Sean Kandel
Propagation and immunization in large networks
Many interesting research questions can be explored by studying processes running over networks.
By B. Aditya Prakash
Parallel machine learning on big data
On algorithms for parallel machine learning, and why they need to be more efficient.
By John Langford
Profile Jeff Dean
Big data at Google
By Edward Z. Yang, Robert J. Simmons
How to be an "entrepredemic"
The life of an academic entrepreneur can help you avoid a false choice.
By Jonathan Friedman
An interview with Mendel Rosenblum
The co-founder of VMware and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford explains how an academic research project evolved into a commercial idea.
By Asaf Cidon, Tomer London
Want a tenure?
Why running a startup is a lot like building a research lab.
By Eldar Sadikov, Montse Medina
Jumping into the water
How a Ph.D. graduate went from theoretical computer scientist to water-sensor analyzer.
By Amitai Armon
An interview with Peter Levine
Peter Levine, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and lecturer at Stanford, shares his insights on how startups should assemble their initial team and create their first product.
By Asaf Cidon, Tomer London
On education in entrepreneurship
Jessica Mah started her first company, internshipIN.com, at the age of 13, shortly after she began her studies in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently Product Architect and CEO of inDinero.com, which she co-founded during her undergraduate studies, she discusses the value of her computer science education and how it affected her entrepreneurial path.
By Christina Pop
Make your own story
When it comes to startups, sometimes failing can make you a better entrepreneur.
By Saar Drimer
A linear function for the toughest choice
As you journey along your career path, how will you decide which way to turn when you reach the academia-industry fork in the road?
By Pierpaolo Baccichet
Profile Leah Busque
Herding TaskRabbits
By Robert J. Simmons
What is computation?
Our culture is in the process of renegotiating what it thinks computation and computer really mean.
By Ian Horswill
An interview with Robert Soare
University of Chicago's Robert Soare, the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, offers his reflections on Alan Turing.
By Arefin Huq
Invitation to complexity theory
Complexity theory provides new viewpoints on various phenomena that were considered by past thinkers.
By Oded Goldreich
The tale of the PCP theorem
How the search for the limits of computing led to the discovery of the unexpected power of proofs.
By Dana Moshkovitz
Pseudorandomness and derandomization
The computational theory of pseudorandomness and cryptography.
By Luca Trevisan
Why now is the right time to study quantum computing
Quantum computing is not merely a recipe for new computing devices, but a new way of looking at the world.
By Aram Harrow
Future of computing
The intersection of biology and computer science is pushing computation beyond its traditional limits---forget algorithms think evolution.
By Dennis Shasha
Profile Dickie George
looking back on 40 years at the NSA
By Robert J. Simmons
Inventing open government
Internet startup POPVOX connects constituents to Congress in a play to disrupt the world of advocacy.
By Joshua Tauberer
Using software to liberate U.S. case law
Although public information is open, it is not always easily accessible.
By Harlan Yu, Stephen Schultze
FREE CONTENT FEATURE
An interview with Dr. Beth Simone Noveck
The former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful discusses open government and what it really means.
By Peter Kinnaird
Shared values, clashing goals
The difference between aggregating public data and investigative journalism.
By Sarah Cohen
How can software engineers help make government better?
Using their technical expertise to bring transparency to the federal government, developers are unlocking data one API at a time.
By Luigi Montanez
Can data visualization help build democracy?
An overview of OECD's Better Life Index Experience.
By Jérôme Cukier
Recent ideas for circumventing internet filtering
Technical solutions can provide a skeleton key to unlocking the Internet.
By Dan Boneh
Fighting censorship with algorithms
By Mohammad Mahdian
Profile Cameron Wilson
ACM's man in Washington
By Robert J. Simmons
The connectome project
Using neuroimaging, researchers are succesfully mapping neural connectivity and in the process creating vivid "brainbows."
By Amelio Vázquez-Reina, Won-Ki Jeong, Jeff Lichtman, Hanspeter Pfister
The sensorium
Research teams from around the world reflect on their brain sensing setups.
By Evan M. Peck, Erin T. Solovey
Trends in BCI research
It would be wise for stakeholders to organize and establish guidelines in order to prevent BCI from becoming a passing fad.
By Brendan Allison
Profile Ed Boyden
The synthetic neurobiologist
By Robert J. Simmons
Subliminal computing
Can information presented below the threshold of consciousness be used to provide support to the users of interactive computer systems?
By Ryan Kelly
From Neural Networks to Deep Learning
Pondering the brain with the help of machine learning expert Andrew Ng and researcher-turned-author-turned-entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins.
By Jonathan Laserson
Sustainable data centers
How Google addresses energy and environment issues as they pertain to its global data centers.
By Bill Weihl, Erik Teetzel, Jimmy Clidaras, Chris Malone, Joe Kava, Michael Ryan
Sustainable sensing for a smarter planet
At what scale is indoor solar harvesting the better primary power source?
By Prabal Dutta
Sourcemap
Industry and consumers need tools to help make decisions that are good for communities and for the environment.
By Leo Bonanni
GrowFood.org
New social media is helping connect students to apprenticeships in the practice of organic farming.
By Ethan Schaffer
Let's split!
Going sustainable by dividing personal transportation into two categories.
By Dan Sturges
The networked vehicle 1.0
The electric car revolution is back in gear and ready to plug into the mass market.
By Steven Letendre, Willet Kempton, Jasna Tomić
In the dark, out in the cold
For 30% of the population, lack of access to home-energy monitoring devices translates into a lack of power---in more ways than one.
By Tawanna Dillahunt, Jennifer Mankoff
Challenges in sustainable human-home interaction
Building eco-friendly homes with occupant intelligence as the foundation.
By Johnny Rodgers, Lyn Bartram, Rob Woodbury
Dialogical encounters
Translating ecological data into arresting images and sound require an artist's touch.
By Tiffany Holmes
Why I don't rob banks for a living
Can game theory 'prove' that online robbery is irrational?
By Nicole Immorlica
What can gold farmers teach us about criminal networks?
By observing how covert financial networks operate in online games like World of Warcraft, we can learn about how they might function offline.
By Brian Keegan, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Dmitri Williams, Jaideep Srivastava, Noshir Contractor
Catching bad guys with graph mining
Suspicious network patterns may be the key to detecting criminals and fraudsters on e-commerce sites.
By Polo Chau
The 'Internet of Things' and commerce
Everything, everywhere, tagged and tracked. How can this data be harnessed to deliver better products and services?
By Mark Harrison
The problem of money as a measuring stick
A more accurate measuring instrument may be found in stable money baskets built by computers and mathematics.
By Nikolai V. Hovanov, James W. Kolari, Mikhail V. Sokolov
An interview with Greg Schwartz
The CIO of USAA, a full-service, branchless financial services operation, sees much more to banking than e-transactions.
By James Stanier
Massive multiplayer human computation for fun, money, and survival
Labor-on-demand---it's like cloud computing but with human workers.
By Lukas Biewald
Analyzing the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace
An associate professor at New York Universitys Stern School of Business uncovers answers about who are the employers in paid crowdsourcing, what tasks they post, and how much they pay.
By Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis
Crowdsourcing, collaboration and creativity
While many organizations turn to human computation labor markets for jobs with black-or-white solutions, there is vast potential in asking these workers for original thought and innovation.
By Aniket Kittur
Heads in the cloud
A professor and several PhD students at MIT examine the challenges and opportunities in human computation.
By Robert C. Miller, Greg Little, Michael Bernstein, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Lydia B. Chilton, Max Goldman, John J. Horton, Rajeev Nayak
Mathematics for the masses
Can human computation bring together people from diverse backgrounds to solve age-old math problems?
By Jason Dyer
An introduction to human-guided search
Can people help computers solve challenging optimization problems?
By Michael Mitzenmacher
Beyond freebird
Exploring Twitter and live events by structure and context can shed light on what people think.
By David A. Shamma
Ethics and tactics of professional crowdwork
Paid crowd workers are not just an API call---but all too often, they are treated like one.
By M. Six Silberman, Lilly Irani, Joel Ross
Games for extracting randomness
Two computer scientists have created a video game about mice and elephants that can make computer encryption properly secure---as long as you play it randomly.
By Ran Halprin, Moni Naor
Profile Luis von Ahn
By Robert J. Simmons
Running the turk
To find out how Amazon.com runs its marketplace for crowdsourced labor, we spoke to the vice president at the company responsible for it.
By Nelson Zhang
Bacterial computing
Undergraduate students find that a genetically engineered machine can solve Hamiltonian Path Problems.
By Jeffrey L. Poet, A. Malcolm Campbell, Todd T. Eckdahl, Laurie J. Heyer
IT for synthetic biology and DNA nanotechnology
Somewhere between the studies of information technology and organic chemistry, researchers are trying to make tiny robots out of DNA molecules.
By Masami Hagiya, Fumiaki Tanaka, Ibuki Kawamata
Parallel computing with patterns and frameworks
Exploiting parallelism may require developers to think differently about how their programs are written.
By Bryan Catanzaro, Kurt Keutzer
Teaching parallel programming
In this roundtable, three professors of parallel programming share their perspective on teaching and learning the computing technique.
By John Mellor-Crummey, William Gropp, Maurice Herlihy
PetaBricks
Building adaptable and more efficient programs for the multi-core era is now within reach.
By Jason Ansel, Cy Chan
Getting and staying agile
The human side of software development thrives on face-to-face interaction and teamwork.
By David L. Largent
Profile Armando Solar-Lezama
Programming machines to program bits
By Michael Bernstein
Profile John Resig
Origins of the JavaScript ninja
By Michael Bernstein
In search of a natural gesture
While computing has advanced exponentially, almost explosively, since the 1970s, input devices have only just begun to change. Why?
By Johnny Chung Lee
Pen-based computing
Pens may seem old-fashioned, but some researchers think they are the future of interaction. Can they teach this old dog some new tricks?
By Gordon Kurtenbach
Interactive surfaces and tangibles
Tap. Slide. Swipe. Shake. Tangible user interfaces have some scientists toying around with stuff you can really put your hands on.
By Sergi Jordà, Carles F. Julià, Daniel Gallardo
Interfaces on the go
Enabling mobile micro-interactions with physiological computing.
By Desney Tan, Dan Morris, T. Scott Saponas
My new PC is a mobile phone
Techniques and devices are being developed to better suit what we think of as the new smallness.
By Patrick Baudisch, Christian Holz
From brains to bytes
Brain-computer interfaces have the potential to change the way we use devices, and there are at least four methods for implementation.
By Evan Peck, Krysta Chauncey, Audrey Girouard, Rebecca Gulotta, Francine Lalooses, Erin Treacy Solovey, Doug Weaver, Robert Jacob
Profile Hiroshi Ishii
Tangible bits
By David Chiu
FEATURE: Features
Map-based navigation in a graphical MOO
By Wendy A. Schafer, Doug A. Bowman, John M. Carroll
Three-dimensional file system browser
By Robert Chin
Coaching a society of robots in accomplishing joint tasks
By Marc Perron