Communications of the ACM articles from April 2001

Communications of the ACM archives from April 2001

Editorial Pointers.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... IN THE WORLD OF TELECOMMUNICAtions, more is never enough. Pursuing ever greater capacity and services, the long-time suppliers of voice-based services are transforming themselves into full-service providers of a galaxy of communication and IT...

News Track.(News Briefs)
April 1, 2001... ICANN's Domain Name Experiment Appearing before a congressional panel, the head of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers defended the process ICANN used to select new suffixes to compete with the popular established...

FORUM.(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2001... Participatory Vs. Representative Democracy SEVERAL OF THE ARTICLES IN the January 2001 Communications are linked by the same implicit proposition: Direct (participatory, "quick") democracy is a better form of government than representative...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
April 1, 2001... IN OUR ARTICLE ("GAUGING THE Risks of Internet Elections," Jan. 2001, p. 73), Deborah Phillips and I referred to the U.S. military's pilot Internet voting project in the November 2000 election. According to the Pentagon's spokesperson, Glenn...

Academics, and the Scarlet Letter "A".(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... The computing world desperately needs truth-seekers, and fewer Advocates. "Scarlet letter: a scarlet letter `A' formerly worn by a person convicted of adultery" --Oxford American Dictionary This column isn't about what you think...

Crossing the Chasm.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... The keys to a coherent profession are bridges between computing technologists and the multitude. In the previous installment of this column I demonstrated that information technology is rapidly becoming a profession in the same way that...

On Bias, Science, Equal Protection, and Liability.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... The influence of social climate on judgement. Red Ball Jets were the shoes of choice among kids on my block. Kids with these shoes could run faster, jump higher, and kick farther than those wearing other shoes. While, as far as I know,...

AGENT-ORIENTED TECHNOLOGY FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... The vision of the telecommunications market today is "information at any time, at any place, in any form." Within this open market of information services, the aspects of service customization and instant service provision are of fundamental...

AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH FOR BUILDING COMPLEX SOFTWARE SYSTEMS.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... WHY AGENT-ORIENTED APPROACHES ARE WELL SUITED FOR DEVELOPING COMPLEX, DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS. Building high-quality, industrial-strength software is difficult. Indeed, it has been argued that developing such software in domains like...

AGENT-BASED TELEMATIC SERVICES AND TELECOM APPLICATIONS.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... A TOOLKIT FOR REALIZING RAPID DEVELOPMENT, DEPLOYMENT AND MANAGEMENT OF AGENT-BASED SYSTEMS AND SERVICES. The telecommunications market is expanding rapidly and players in that market are facing increasingly stiff competition. The key to...

COMMUNITY-BASED SERVICE LOCATION.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... HOW VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES AND SOFTWARE AGENTS CAN BE USED TO PROVIDE AND LOCATE TRUSTWORTHY SERVICES ON THE INTERNET. Although both computing and communications capabilities are improving exponentially, there has been a more rapid increase in...

SERVICE CREATION AND MANAGEMENT IN ACTIVE TELECOM NETWORKS.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... ESTABLISHING A FRAMEWORK ALLOWING CUSTOMERS TO RUN THEIR OWN CUSTOMIZED SERVICES OVER A PROVIDER'S NETWORK. Recent research in the area of active networking has demonstrated strong potential for this new technology. From the service point...

COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCES IN E-COMMERCE.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... USING A MULTIAGENT SYSTEM TO PROVIDE INTERMEDIATION SERVICE IN AN E-COMMERCE ENVIRONMENT. Effective e-commerce relies on an efficient and precise information interchange between participating stakeholders (typically customer and provider),...

AGENT-ORIENTED TECHNOLOGY IN SUPPORT OF E-BUSINESS.(Technology Information)
April 1, 2001... ENABLING THE DEVELOPMENT OF "INTELLIGENT" BUSINESS AGENTS FOR ADAPTIVE, REUSABLE SOFTWARE. The rapid growth of the Internet, networking systems such as electronic data interchange systems, and the penetration of ISDN-based applications are...

E-COMMERCE AND THE INFORMATION MARKET.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... Orchestrating online transactions between suppliers and customers, infomediaries walk a fine line creating services, controlling costs, and not winding up as order-takers for larger entities. Business-to-business (B2B) and...

BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON TROUBLED SOFTWARE PROJECTS.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... Despite inevitable personal risk, auditors owe their organizations accurate information about project status, especially bad news, in the interests of halting software project runaways. Management owes them the courtesy of listening. ...

TARGETING AUDIENCES ON THE INTERNET.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
April 1, 2001... How can researchers and communicators reach their desired audience on the Internet? Can Internet users be successfully and responsibly recruited as participants in studies and Surveys? A recent exploration of these questions suggests some good...

BOTTOM-UP DESIGN OF ACTIVE OBJECT-ORIENTED DATABASES.(Technology Information)
April 1, 2001... Top-down design approaches give database designers little guidance with transforming a conceptual model into an active object-oriented database schema. A bottom-up design approach may provide a better perspective. ACTIVE OBJECT-ORIENTED...

Software Process Improvement in the Small.(Industry Trend or Event)
April 1, 2001... A small software development company's most difficult challenge: changing processes to match changing circumstances. There are two battles over process that every small software company must win to be successful. The first is the...

Cyber Underwriters Lab.(Company Business and Marketing)
April 1, 2001... Underwriters Laboratories (UL) is an independent testing organization created in 1893, when William Henry Merrill was called in to find out why the Palace of Electricity at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago kept catching on fire (which is not...