Posts Tagged ‘acm’

It’s official – girls think CS sucks

Posted: 2 June 2009 in Uncategorized
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New Image for Computing (NIC) is a project put together by WGBH and the ACM to spice up the image of computing professions amongst teens, especially among girls and minorities.  They released a study showing that at least among boys, the mission has pretty much been achieved for minorities.  Black and hispanic male teens have a more favorable image of computing as a profession than white males do.  Girls, on the other hand, think it really sucks.  45% of teen males think computing would make a very good profession, whereas only 10% of girls think so.  35% of girls think it’s a bad choice, as opposed to 10% of males.  Ouch!

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Dapper

Posted: 3 June 2008 in Uncategorized
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Dapper

My friend Israel clued me in on Dapper a few weeks ago. I have played around with them a very small bit, but that was all it took to recognize their potential. The idea is simple, the implementation not so much. When you browse videos on YouTube, the layout of search results are all the same. So why can’t something recognize this and treat any search result as an rss feed, checking it periodically for changes? Enter Dapper. One thing that has bothered me for the past couple years is the fact that the ACM Technews does not have an RSS feed. WTF, ACM? Thanks to Dapper, now it does.

Unfortunately, Dapper is not perfect. It took me a few tries to get my first dapp working (what they call a single instance of the service). Granted, it was on fairly complicated output (not ACM Technews). If the service you are trying to create a dapp of uses sessions, your attempt will probably fail (and if it doesn’t, let me know how you did it). They are still improving the service, though, so perhaps that will change.

If you are into information trapping, though, Dapper is a must have in your arsenal of traps.

ACM Turing Award Winner

Posted: 4 February 2008 in Uncategorized
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Ed Clarke, a professor of Computer Science at CMU, just won the 2007 ACM Turing Award.  The ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery and is the oldest professional group for the computing industry.  I first became a member in 2005 and have maintained that membership since.  The Turing Award is given in honor of Alan Turing, the father of computer science (most would agree).  This award is basically the Nobel prize of computer science (since they don’t give Nobels for CS) and is meant to recognize individuals who have made a lasting and significant contribution to the computing field.

Ed’s work was in conjunction with two other people:  E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis.   Their work was on model checking, which is a way of determining whether a hardware or software structure is a model of a logical formula.  So if a structure matches a formula in propositional logic, it checks.

Clarke joins three other professors at CMU who are Turing recipients.  Raj Reddy was co-awarded it in 1994 for large scale AI systems.  Manuel Blum won it in 1995 for his work on computational complexity theory.  Dana Scott won it in 1976 for non-deterministic finite state machines, something that has a major role in natural language processing (and computational linguistics).