Communications of the ACM articles from February 2000

Communications of the ACM archives from February 2000

MORE PAY NOW.(a survey by RHI Consulting on IT salaries)(Industry Trend or Event)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... Professionals looking for IT-related jobs in the U.S. can expect starting salaries this year to increase an average of 6.8% over their 1999 levels, according to RHI Consulting, Menlo Park, Calif. Those specializing in systems integration will...

EURO NET USE.(a survey by MMXI Europe BV on use of the web in Europe)(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... Germans use the Web at home almost as much as the average U.S. Internet user, says a new market research survey by MMXI Europe BV, described as the first broad-based survey of the European market. The survey, which covers the three largest...

THE CURSOR WHO SPIED ME.(Comet Systems' Comet Cursor collects information about web browsers)(Company Business and Marketing)
February 1, 2000... A customizable computer cursor that morphs from a simple pointer to just about anything, from campaign slogans to cartoon characters to ads, has been found by privacy activists to double as a tracking mechanism, keeping a record of its users'...

ROBOT WHEELCHAIR CLIMBS STAIRS.(Dean Kamen's Independence 3000 IBOT Transporter)(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... Imagine a sleek wheelchair with two pairs of midsize wheels on a swivel. Imagine approaching a curb, or even, stairs, and being able to swivel repeatedly up the stairs. Imagine sitting in the supermarket, hitting the "stand" button, and...

Y2K AFTERMATH.(cost to US businesses for fixing year 2000-related computer problems)(Industry Trend or Event)
February 1, 2000... Bottom Line Price Tag Governments and companies worldwide spent about $200 billion on the Y2K computer problem, U.S. Y2K chief John Koskinen said. This figure is easy to break down: The U.S. spent $100 billion; the rest of the world...

HIGH-TECH, HOLD THE COMPUTER.(auction of the Patek Philipe pocket watch)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... The most complicated watch made without a computer was auctioned at Sothebys. The 74-year-old Patek Philipe pocket watch sold for $11 million, the most ever paid for a timepiece. Send items of interest to fox_r@acm.org

THE BOSS KNOWS.(American Management Association survey on corporate monitoring of employee e-mail)(Industry Trend or Event)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... Corporate surveillance of employee email is rising: * 27% of major U.S. firms check employee email, up from 15% in 1997. * Fewer companies that monitor email are telling their employees they are doing so--84% in 1999, down from 91%...

NIELSON NET RATINGS.(top 10 web sites, November 1999)(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)(Illustration)
February 1, 2000... Top 10 Web Sites as of November 1999 Property Unique Audience Time Per Person 1. AOL Websites 21,935 0:10:00 2. Yahoo! 19,965 0:25:38 3. MSN 12,966 0:18:07 4....

Identity Theft, Social Security Numbers, and the Web.(the dangers of relying on Social Security Numbers for online user identification)(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
February 1, 2000... Privacy is lost in the proliferation of technology's omnipresent accessibility. When one changes employers, as I have recently, the different institutional and cultural attitudes become obvious. For example, consider salary-benefit...

The Promise and Problems of the No Electronic Theft Act.(Industry Trend or Event)
February 1, 2000... The information age has generated its fair share of new statutes, some of which may be considered criminal. Advances in technology have always caused difficulties for societies. Frequently, the reaction is a quick call for new laws. When...

Exploring Virtuality.(the implications of virtual reality on human cognition)(Technology Information)
February 1, 2000... Are we dealing with an autonomous virtual realm or merely with an aspect of the mental realm? It is useful to perceive our interactions with the world around us as being within different realms: we physically interact with the world in...

Not Now, Not Like This.(licensing of software engineers)(Industry Trend or Event)(Column)
February 1, 2000... Why the ACM Council does not support the licensing of so, ware engineers at this time. Two "Viewpoint" columns in the December 1999 issue of Communications present arguments in favor of the licensing of software engineers (Amr El-Kadi's...

News on Demand.(development of interactive online news services)(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
February 1, 2000... Imagine waking in the morning, turning on your interactive TV, and being greeted by your intelligent news agent. Your agent has spent the night digitizing, segmenting, indexing, extracting, translating, and summarizing the world's news...

Machine Learning OF Event Segmentation FOR News on Demand.(topic detection and tracking of news video)(Technology Information)
February 1, 2000... Deconstructing broadcast news using all sources of input from the multimedia stream. There are many different types of multimedia videos found in the world today--consider home videos, surveillance camera videos, television broadcasts as...

Complementary Video AND Audio Analysis FOR Broadcast News Archives.(the Informedia Digital Video Library project)(Technology Information)
February 1, 2000... Increasing the usefulness of extracted information. The Informedia Digital Video Library project [12], initiated in 1994, uniquely utilizes integrated speech and image and natural language understanding to process broadcast video. The...

Integrated Technologies FOR Indexing Spoken Language.(Bolt, Bearnek and Newman's Rough'n'Ready prototype system for indexing audio and video)(Company Business and Marketing)
February 1, 2000... Transcribing speech and making it ready for browsing Speech is not valued today as an archival information source because it is impossible to efficiently locate information in large audio archives. By itself, speech does not permit...

MAESTRO: Conductor OF Multimedia Analysis Technologies.(SRI International's system for analyzing and indexing multimedia)(Company Business and Marketing)
February 1, 2000... Combining technologies to achieve performance exceeding the sum of the parts. Although keyword-based queries are now a familiar part of any user's experience with the World Wide Web, they are of limited direct applicability to the vast...

Transcribing Broadcast News FOR Audio AND Video Indexing.(Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mecanique et les Sciences de l'Ingenieur's research on audio and video indexing)(Technology Information)
February 1, 2000... Automatically keeping up-to-date with rapidly changing news broadcasts. With the rapid expansion of different media sources for information dissemination, there is a pressing need for automatic processing of the audio data stream. For...

JAPANESE BROADCAST NEWS TRANSCRIPTION AND INFORMATION EXTRACTION.(a large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition system)(Technology Information)
February 1, 2000... Developing a system for close-captioning and automatic information extraction for Japanese broadcast news speech. Inspired by the activities within the DARPA research community, we have been developing a large-vocabulary,...

Measurements IN Support Of Research Accomplishments.(NIST)(Industry Trend or Event)
February 1, 2000... How the National Institute of Standards and Technology provides a basis for evaluating these novel systems. Since 1987, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has provided support to other federal governmental agencies'...

Partnerships IN THE U.S. TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY.(Industry Trend or Event)
February 1, 2000... Strategic motivations range from adding local access to long-distance services, to serving up millions of new customers, to claiming a piece of a potentially hot new technology. The enormous capital requirements and inherently global...

BIOMETRIC IDENTIFICATION.(Technology Information)
February 1, 2000... When it comes to working biometric identification technologies, it's not only our fingerprints that do the talking. Now, our eyes, hands, signature, speech, and even facial temperature can ID us. QUESTIONS RELATED TO THE IDENTITY OF...

THE MYTHS AND REALITIES OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INSOURCING.(Industry Trend or Event)
February 1, 2000... IT managers commiserate over the challenges of convincing senior executives that, contrary to popular belief, outsourcing isn't always a money-saving option. Information technology outsourcing--the practice of transferring IT assets,...

A COST AND PERFORMANCE MODEL FOR WEB SERVICE INVESTMENT.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
February 1, 2000... Need to decide whether developing a Web site or service is worth the financial investment and the trouble? Use this model to calculate the payoff. And get in (at the right level) while you can. The World-Wide Web is a powerful business...

Essential Business Object Design.(information model)(Technology Information)
February 1, 2000... In most business system developments, the information model is developed separately from the functional model. Information models or data models can only capture limited business semantics (see Figure 1), which include four entities:...

Risks of PKI: E-Commerce.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
February 1, 2000... Open any popular article on public-key infrastructure (PKI) and you're likely to read that a PKI is desperately needed for e-commerce to flourish. Don't believe it. E-commerce is flourishing, PKI or no PKI. Web sites are happy to take your...