Communications of the ACM articles from March 1997

Communications of the ACM archives from March 1997

The birth of a Celtic tiger. (information technology industry in Ireland)(Industry Overview)
March 1, 1997... Last St. Patrick's Day, traditional Irish musicians in Dublin, New York, and Paris were brought together in a concert transmitted live over the Internet to emigrants gathered in bars and halls around the world. The Paddynet, an Internet provider...

Standardizing reuse. (software reuse)
March 1, 1997... The distinction between use and reuse is sometimes a subtle one. We would argue that success in society is intimately linked, in the first instance, to the ability to create products and/or services that are used. The grander success occurs when...

Speech facilities for the reading disabled: using simple text-to-speech output and alternative mechanisms to tackle mountains of text.
March 1, 1997... Brain cancer and associated brain surgery can result in a variety of physical, psychological, and functional disabilities. To some extent, these disabilities are manageable using software or hardware support systems. In my case, I have been using...

Digital politics. (readers' response to Hal Berghels 'Digital Village' column in Communications of the ACM magazine)
March 1, 1997... Hal Berghel's "Digital Village" column provides a generally thoughtful view of the probable impact of the Internet on political participation ("Digital Politics," Oct. 1996, p. 19). His positive and negative balance in assessing potential is...

Biologically inspired approaches to robotics.
March 1, 1997... When it comes to autonomous robots, the contrast between fantasy and reality is really quite striking. On the one hand, we have the fantasy of such anthropomorphic robots as CS PO from Star Wars and Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next...

Myth made law. (Telecommunications Act of 1996)
March 1, 1997... Universal Service and the Telecommunications Act Despite losing most of the political, legal, and regulatory battles of the 1970s, AT&T managed to establish the idea that the 1934 Communications Act mandated "universal service." That myth...

Virtual objects in the real world. (augmented reality systems)
March 1, 1997... Computing at the intersection of two realms. The term virtual reality usually refers to systems that generate a totally synthetic environment, in which the end user is able to specify all the characteristics of the new environment. A...

Recommender systems.(Special Section: Recommender Systems)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1997... It is often necessary to make choices without sufficient personal experience of the alternatives. In everyday life, we rely on recommendations from other people either by word of mouth, recommendation letters, movie and book reviews printed in...

PHOAKS: a system for sharing recommendations. (People Helping One Another Know Stuff)(Special Section: Recommender Systems)
March 1, 1997... A collaborative filtering system that recognizes and reuses recommendations. Finding relevant, high-quality information on the world-wide Web is a difficult problem. PHOAKS (People Helping One Another Know Stuff) is an experimental system that...

ReferralWeb: combining social networks and collaborative filtering.(Special Section: Recommender Systems)
March 1, 1997... An interactive system for restructuring, visualizing and searching social networks on the Web. Numerous studies have shown that one of the most effective channels for disseminating of information and expertise within an organization is its...

Fab: content-based, collaborative recommendation.(Special Section: Recommender Systems)
March 1, 1997... By combining both collaborative and content-based filtering systems, Fab may eliminate many of the weaknesses found in each approach. Online readers are in need of tools to help them cope with the mass of content available on the World-Wide...

Siteseer: personalized navigation for the Web.(Special Section: Recommender Systems)
March 1, 1997... Bookmarks can be a key component for gathering preferential information. Siteseer is a Web-page recommendation system that uses an individual's bookmarks and the organization of bookmarks within folders for predicting and recommending relevant...

GroupLens: applying collaborative filtering to Usenet news.(Special Section: Recommender Systems)
March 1, 1997... High volume and personal taste makes Usenet news an ideal candidate for collaborative filtering techniques. The GrouPlens project designed, implemented, and evaluated a collaborative filtering system for Usenet news - a high-volume,...

Recommender systems for evaluating computer messages.(Special Section: Recommender Systems)
March 1, 1997... Successful recommendation systems may require centralized coordination. Collaborative filtering can identify useful messages on computer bulletin boards. But who will provide the evaluations? Today, many people read online newsgroups such as...

Situation room analysis in the information technologies market.
March 1, 1997... It would be interesting and scientifically rewarding to investigate the possibilities of designing a "sheltered" situation room for the information technologies and telecommunications (IT&T) services and products market. The proposed framework...