Elasticity in the cloud
By David Chiu, March 2010
Articles Tagged: Management
Articles & Features
Cloud computing in plain English
By Ryan K. L. Ko, March 2010
Scientific workflows and clouds
In recent years, empirical science has been evolving from physical experimentation to computation-based research. In astronomy, researchers seldom spend time at a telescope, but instead access the large number of image databases that are created and curated by the community [42]. In bioinformatics, data repositories hosted by entities such as the National Institutes of Health [29] provide the data gathered by Genome-Wide Association Studies and enable researchers to link particular genotypes to a variety of diseases.
By Gideon Juve, Ewa Deelman, March 2010
The cloud at work
By Sumit Narayan, Chris Heiden, March 2010
State of security readiness
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. With this pay-as-you-go model of computing, cloud solutions are seen as having the potential to both dramatically reduce costs and increase the rapidity of development of applications.
By Ramaswamy Chandramouli, Peter Mell, March 2010
The business of clouds
At the turn of the 20th century, companies stopped generating their own power and plugged into the electricity grid. In his now famous book The Big Switch, Nick Carr analogizes those events of a hundred years ago to the tectonic shift taking place in the technology industry today.
By Guy Rosen, March 2010
Social learning and technical capital on the social web
The social Web is a set of ties that enable people to socialize online, a phenomenon that has existed since the early days of the Internet in environments like IRC, MUDs, and Usenet (e.g. 4, 12). People used these media in much the same way they do now: to communicate with existing friends and to meet new ones. The fundamental difference was the scale, scope, and diversity of participation.
By Sarita Yardi, December 2009
Grafitter
"Know thyself". Carved in stone in front of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, that was the first thing people saw when they visited the Oracle to find answers. The benefits of knowing oneself are many. It fosters insight, increases self-control, and promotes positive behaviors such as exercise and energy conservation.
By Ian Li, Anind Dey, Jodi Forlizzi, December 2009
Privacy challenges and solutions in the social web
Research related to online social networks has addressed a number of important problems related to the storage, retrieval, and management of social network data. However, privacy concerns stemming from the use of social networks, or the dissemination of social network data, have largely been ignored. And with more than 250 million active Facebook (http://facebook.com) users, nearly half of whom log in at least once per day [5], these concerns can't remain unaddressed for long.
By Grigorios Loukides, Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis, December 2009
Are your friends who they say they are?
How sure are you that your friends are who they say they are? In real life, unless you are the target of some form of espionage, you can usually be fairly certain that you know whom your friends are because you have a history of shared interests and experiences. Likewise, most people can tell, just by using common sense, if someone is trying to sell them on a product, idea, or candidate. When we interact with people face-to-face, we reevaluate continuously whether something just seems off based on body language and other social and cultural cues.
By Roya Feizy, Ian Wakeman, Dan Chalmers, December 2009
Don't ask me
Searching for information online has become an integral part of our everyday lives. However, sometimes we don't know the specific search terms to use, while other times, the specific information we're seeking hasn't been recorded online yet.
By Gary Hsieh, December 2009
Don't change a thing
As a student of computer science, there's a significant chance you will end up working in software development after graduation. Despite whether your career path takes you into industry or academia, you're likely to have some kind of interaction with software development companies or organizations, if only in trying to get the most out of a project or collaboration.
By Michael DiBernardo, September 2009
Dynamic displays
While touchscreens allow extensive programmability and have become ubiquitous in today's gadgetry, such configurations lack the tactile sensations and feedback that physical buttons provide. As a result, these devices require more attention to use than their button-enabled counterparts. Still, the displays provide the ultimate interface flexibility and thus afford a much larger design space to application developers.
By Chris Harrison, Scott Hudson, September 2009
Server virtualization architecture and implementation
Virtual machine technology, or virtualization, is gaining momentum in the information technology community. While virtual machines are not a new concept, recent advances in hardware and software technology have brought virtualization to the forefront of IT management. Stability, cost savings, and manageability are among the reasons for the recent rise of virtualization. Virtual machine solutions can be classified by hardware, software, and operating system/containers. From its inception on the mainframe to distributed servers on x86, the virtual machine has matured and will play an increasing role in systems management.
By Jeff Daniels, September 2009
Introduction
By Justin Solomon, June 2009
LibraryThing
By Anna Ritchie, June 2009
A computer scientist's introductory guide to business process management (BPM)
Computers play an integral part in designing, modelling, optimising and managing business processes within and across companies. While Business Process Management (BPM), Workflow Management (WfM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) have been IT-related disciplines with a history of about three decades, there is still a lack of publications clarifying definitions and scope of basic BPM terminologies like business process, BPM versus WfM, workflow, BPR, etc. Such a myriad of similar-sounding terminologies can be overwhelming for computer scientists and computer science students who may wish to venture into this area of research. This guide aims to address this gap by providing a high level overview of the key concepts, rationale, features and the developments of BPM.
By Ryan K. L. Ko, June 2009
Courier problems
Courier problems comprise a set of recently proposed combinatorial optimization problems, which are inspired by some novel requirements in railway wagon scheduling. In these problems, scheduling strategies of some mobile couriers are considered. These mobile couriers initially reside at some fixed location. They are assigned some duties of commodity transfer between different pairs of locations. The scenario may be static or dynamic. The motivation is to optimize the movement of the couriers over the constraint of the traversed path or the associated cost. We discuss here some varieties of the courier problems formalized on graphs and address the potential methods of their solution.
By Malay Bhattacharyya, June 2009
HCI and theology
By Steve Clough, March 2009
State considerations in distributed systems
By Daniel W. Goldberg, March 2009
AmazonViz
This article describes a technique to visualize query results, representing purchase orders placed on Amazon.com, along a traditional 2-D scatter plot and a space-filling spiral. We integrate 3-D objects that vary their spatial placement, color, and texture properties into a visualization algorithm. This algorithm represents important aspects of a purchase order based on experimental results from human vision, computer graphics, and psychology. The resulting visual abstractions are used by viewers to rapidly and effectively explore and analyze the underlying purchase orders data.
By Amit Prakash Sawant, Christopher G. Healey, Dongfeng Chen, Rada Chirkova, March 2009
Exploring global terrorism data
By Joonghoon Lee, December 2008
Digital blasphemy
By Cara Cocking, December 2008
Towards a user-friendly semantic formalism for natural language generation
Computational semantics has become an interesting and important branch of computational linguistics. Born from the fusion of formal semantics and computer science, it is concerned with the automated processing of meaning associated with natural language expressions [2]. Systems of semantic representation, hereafter referred to as semantic formalisms, exist to describe meaning underlying natural language expressions. To date, several formalisms have been defined by researchers from a number of diverse disciplines including philosophy, logic, psychology and linguistics. These formalisms have a number of different applications in the realm of computer science. For example, in machine translation a sentence could be parsed and translated into a series of semantic expressions, which could then be used to generate an utterance with the same meaning in a different language [14]. This paper presents two existing formalisms and examines their user-friendliness. Additionally, a new form of semantic representation is proposed with wide coverage and user-friendliness suitable for a computational linguist.
By Craig Thomas, December 2008
On teaching computer science
By David Chiu, December 2008
Motion planning for skateboard-like robots in dynamic environments
By Salik Syed, September 2008
The use of compiler optimizations for embedded systems software
Optimizing embedded applications using a compiler can generally be broken down into two major categories: hand-optimizing code to take advantage of a particular processor's compiler and applying built-in optimization options to proven and well-polished code. The former is well documented for different processors, but little has been done to find generalized methods for optimal sets of compiler options based on common goal criteria such as application code size, execution speed, power consumption, and build time. This article discusses the fundamental differences between these two general categories of optimizations using the compiler. Examples of common, built-in compiler options are presented using a simulated ARM processor and C compiler, along with a simple methodology that can be applied to any embedded compiler for finding an optimal set of compiler options.
By Joe Bungo, September 2008
Mixed nuts
By Sid Stamm, June 2008
Meeting educational needs of the elderly in ICT
By Sergio Sayago, Patricia Santos, Maite Gonzalez, Míriam Arenas, Laura López, December 2007
Planning and improvisation in software processes
This paper presents the results of an empirical study aimed at examining the extent to which software engineers follow a software process and the extent to which they improvise during the process. Our subjects tended to classify processes into two groups. In the first group are the processes that are formal, strict, and well-documented. In the second group are the processes that are informal and not well-structured. The classification has similar characteristics to the model proposed by Truex, Baskerville, and Travis [12]. Our first group is similar to their methodical classification, and our second group is similar to their amethodical classification. Interestingly, software engineers using a process in the second group stated that they were not using a process. We believe that software engineers who think that they are not using a process, because they have the prevalent concept of process as something methodical that is strict and structured, actually are using an informal (amethodical) process. We also found that software engineers improvise while using both types of processes in order to overcome shortcomings in the planned path which arose due to unexpected situations. This finding leads us to conclude that amethodical processes are processes too.
By Rosalva E. Gallardo-Valencia, Susan Elliott Sim, December 2007
Adaptively ranking alerts generated from automated static analysis
Static analysis tools are useful for finding common programming mistakes that often lead to field failures. However, static analysis tools regularly generate a high number of false positive alerts, requiring manual inspection by the developer to determine if an alert is an indication of a fault. The adaptive ranking model presented in this paper utilizes feedback from developers about inspected alerts in order to rank the remaining alerts by the likelihood that an alert is an indication of a fault. Alerts are ranked based on the homogeneity of populations of generated alerts, historical developer feedback in the form of suppressing false positives and fixing true positive alerts, and historical, application-specific data about the alert ranking factors. The ordering of alerts generated by the adaptive ranking model is compared to a baseline of randomly-, optimally-, and static analysis tool-ordered alerts in a small role-based health care application. The adaptive ranking model provides developers with 81% of true positive alerts after investigating only 20% of the alerts whereas an average of 50 random orderings of the same alerts found only 22% of true positive alerts after investigating 20% of the generated alerts.
By Sarah Smith Heckman, December 2007
Observations on teamwork strategies in the ACM international collegiate programming contest
By Saman Amirpour Amraii, December 2007
Achieving I/O improvements in a mass spectral database
Research in proteomics has created two significant needs: the need for an accurate public database of empirically derived mass spectrum information and the need for managing the I/O and organization of mass spectrometry data in the form of files and structures. Lack of an empirically derived database limits the ability of proteomic researchers to identify and study proteins. Managing the I/O and organization of mass spectrometry data is often time-consuming due to the many fields that need to be set and retrieved. As a result, incompatibilities and inefficiencies are created by each programmer handling this in his or her own way. Until recently, storage space and computing power has been the limiting factor in developing tools to handle the vast amount of mass spectrometry information. Now the resources are available to store, organize, and analyze mass spectrometry information.The Illinois Bio-Grid Mass Spectrometry Database is a database of empirically derived tandem mass spectra of peptides created to provide researchers with an organized and searchable database of curated spectrum information to allow more accurate protein identification. The Mass Spectrometry I/O Project creates a framework that handles mass spectrometry data I/O and data organization, allowing researchers to concentrate on data analysis rather than I/O. In addition, the Mass Spectrometry I/O Project leverages several cross-platform and portability-enhancing technologies, allowing it to be utilized on a variety of hardware and operating systems.
By Eric Puryear, Jennifer Van Puymbrouck, David Sigfredo Angulo, Kevin Drew, Lee Ann Hollenbeck, Dominic Battre, Alex Schilling, David Jabon, Gregor von Laszewski, December 2006
Ultimate car entertainment systems
By Nick Datzov, December 2006
TigerEvents
By Chris Jordan, Oliver Baltzer, Sean Smith, August 2006
RAS
By Jarrod Trevathan, Wayne Read, August 2006
Architecting trust-enabled peer-to-peer file-sharing applications
Decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) resource sharing applications lack a centralized authority that can facilitate peer and resource look-ups and coordinate resource sharing between peers. Instead, peers directly interact and exchange resources with other peers. These systems are often open and do not regulate the entry of peers into the system. Thus, there can be malicious peers in the system who threaten others by offering Trojan horses and viruses disguised as seemingly innocent resources. Several trust-based solutions exist to address such threats; unfortunately there is a lack of design guidance on how these solutions can be integrated into a resource sharing application. In this paper, we describe how two teams of undergraduate students separately integrated XREP, a third-party reputation-based protocol for file-sharing applications, with PACE, our software architecture-based approach for decentralized trust management. This was done in order to construct trust-enabled P2P file-sharing application prototypes. Our observations have revealed that using an architecture-based approach in incorporating trust into P2P resource-sharing applications is not only feasible, but also significantly beneficial. Our efforts also demonstrate both the ease of adoption and ease of use of the PACE-based approach in constructing such trust-enabled decentralized applications.
By Girish Suryanarayana, Mamadou H. Diallo, Justin R. Erenkrantz, Richard N. Taylor, August 2006
Using perception in managing unstructured documents
By Ching Kang Cheng, Xiaoshan Pan, October 2005
Requirements engineering
By Kristina Winbladh, August 2004
Tracing the development of denial of service attacks
By Yanet Manzano, September 2003
Virtual communities and team formation
By Yanru Zhang, Michael Weiss, September 2003
Using the web to enhance and transform education
By Michael Hulme, Michael Locasto, September 2003
Zero configuration networking
By David Stirling, Firas Al-Ali, June 2003
Managing XML data storage
By Jerry Emerick, June 2002
The grading system of the real world
By Lynellen D. S. Perry, June 2002
Design of an interactive tutorial for logic and logical circuits
By Jeremy Kindy, John Shuping, Patricia Yali Underhill, David John, March 2000
Ask Jack
By Jack Wilson, March 2000
Objective viewpoint
By George Crawford, September 1999
Choosing a Ph.D. program in computer science
By Rachel Pottinger, September 1999
The Texas Tech tornado cluster
By Per Andersen, September 1999