Communications of the ACM articles from March 2001

Communications of the ACM archives from March 2001

Editorial Pointers.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS, MANY OF the tools and technologies destined to enhance the lives and livelihoods of future generations will move from development laboratories to the San Jose Convention Center. Indeed, as you read this, ACM is putting the...

News Track.(Company Business and Marketing)
March 1, 2001... The Future of the Tech Workplace An ongoing effort involving dozens of people and pilot programs with hundreds of employees at Sun Microsystems could be the next model for large high-tech companies worldwide in molding the workplace to...

Software as Currency.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... With its valuable characteristics, software is the most effective knowledge storage medium, making it the future currency of the world. The basic economic resource--"the means of production," to use the economist's term--is no longer...

A Cyberpublishing Manifesto.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... The distribution of digital information on physical media is just not effective. Information belongs in cyberspace. Imagine a world without the printed page. What would it look like? How would it function? What would the role of an archive...

Digital Immortality.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... DIGITAL immortality, like immortality, is a continuum from enduring fame at one end to endless experience and learning at the other, stopping lust short of endless life. Pre-serving and transmitting your ideas is one-way immortality--allowing...

Closing the Circle of Information Technology.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... INFORMATION technology has already penetrated and transformed research in science and technology so fundamentally younger generations not know what it was like before the computing revolution. My own career as a microbiologist exploring the...

Virtual Beings.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... As part of an article on travelers' expectations, USA Today, September 23, 2000, reported: "The angry woman with children in tow had some choice words for the theme park marketing director. Where were the live dinosaurs she and her kids saw in...

Cyborgs.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... How might we interact with future computers? Let me list the ways: by gesture; by hand, foot, and body motion; by the speed and forcefulness of our activities; by our thoughts, feelings, and emotions; by where, how, and when we look; by speech...

Digital Experience.(Technology Information)(Column)
March 1, 2001... WE experience our physical environment through our natural senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Combined with the models of the world each of us develops through learning, they allow us to experience and function in the physical and...

The Desktop Fab.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... FUTURE chips, displays, and micromachines will be fabricated by printing. A version of the future fab will sit on your desktop, will be programmable by the user, and fabricate the things such as chips and micromachines we normally associate...

Look to the Past to Envision the Future.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... A key distinguishing characteristic of human beings is our use of tools, including extensive use of communications technologies. From plows to mills to books and radios, we have used technology to create tools and means of communicating....

Affecting Humanity.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... THE future is about creating an environment where the complications and the distractions of technology are not upsetting, diverting, or overwhelming. Technology is already guiding us to information that is valuable to us, but people care...

The Future is Ours.(Technology Information)(Column)
March 1, 2001... PREDICTING the future is an activity fraught with error. Wilbur Wright, co-inventor of the motorized airplane that successfully completed the first manned flight in 1903, seems to have learned this lesson when he noted: "In 1901, I said to my...

Astronauts and Mosquitoes.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... PROCESSING devices, even relatively low-end ones, are sent forth into the world in much the same way as we send astronauts into space. They are carefully packaged to protect them from the environment, accompanied by a great deal of baggage,...

User Interfaces: Disappearing, Dissolving, and Evolving.(Technology Information)(Column)
March 1, 2001... As I wrote in my February 1997 Communications essay on post-WIMP user interfaces, user-computer interfaces are a necessary evil. They imply a separation between what I want the computer to do and the act of doing it. Ultimately I prefer the...

When Everything Is Searchable.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... AFTER communication, search is the most visible and important aspect of the Internet. The first major sites were search engines; although they have evolved into portals, search remains fundamental to the vision, purpose, and performance of the...

Bandwidth and the Creation of Awareness.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... MODERN telecommunications is the transmission of electromagnetic signals using technology that ultimately delivers useful information to people or machines in the form of voice, data, and video. But the essence of telecommunications is content,...

The Paradox of Place.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... FRIEDRICH Nietzche ushered in the existential era at the end of the 19th century with his proclamation that "God is dead." A century later, Nicholas Negropointe ushered in the electronic era with his proclamation that "place is dead."...

The Wireless Web.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... UNQUESTIONABLY, mobile and wireless computing will dominate the Internet industry in the future. New and exciting e-services are already being deployed while at the same time the Internet becomes more and more pervasive in our everyday lives....

The Digital Physics of Data Mining.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... Visualizing proteins within nurse-like cells that support leukemia cell survival; each color represents a different intercellular structure, including the nucleus (blue) and various gene products (red and green). Microscope images acquired by...

When Computers Speak, Hear, and Understand.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... "OPEN the pod bay doors, HAL." The HAL9000 computer responsible for the Discovery spacecraft's mission to Jupiter in the classic 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke was more than reluctant to oblige...

When the Network Is Everything.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... Two major properties will characterize networks in the future. They will be ubiquitous; by default, everything will be connected to a network of some form and work in coordination with other devices, services, and network-enabled entities. And...

Wearables in 2048.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... WHAT is a wearable? Fair question to ask. With new technology, a few pioneers, some media coverage, and a couple of start-ups, it is an emerging industry ahead of a market trying to define itself. Are present-day wearables designed from...

Pushing Functionality into Even Smaller Devices.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... IN today's society, people need computers, computers that are not only functional in terms of computation, but functional in our mobile, dynamic, and social lives. As computing becomes more pervasive, people will carry their access devices...

Computational Bioimaging for Medical Diagnosis and Treatment.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... The coming decades will experience an explosion in the use and scope of medical imaging, and the fuel for this fire will be computing and visualization. From Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical drawings 500 years ago, to Wilhelm Roentgen's first...

Computers and Biology.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... CAN we replace costly and possibly unethical animal experiments by computer runs? Can we have computer versions of ourselves that can be used for medical experiments, reducing the danger of risky trials? I believe will have some positive...

Continuum Computer Architecture for Exaflops Computation.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... THE ultimate computers in our long-term future will deliver exaflops-scale performance (or greater) and will look very different from today's microprocessors and massively parallel computers. Ironically, however, their alien structures and...

Never Lost, Never Forgotten.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... WHAT will nanotechnology and macronetworks do for the informed human race? Computers are vanishing. They are vanishing into the infrastructure around us, whether it is the insides of appliances (telephones, televisions) or simply shrunk to...

Ultimate Cryptography.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... PREDICT the state of cryptography in 1,000 years. The thought is daunting. The very narrowness of the field makes the problem that much more difficult. It is one thing to try to decide whether sentient life on Earth will be made of carbon or...

Spiritual Life and Information Technology.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... WE write this essay in a tentative and exploratory voice. We are in the early process of opening a new topic for discussion in our field, and the discussions are filled with surprises for us. About 50 people attended special interest group...

Promise and Peril--The Deeply intertwined Poles of 21st Century Technology.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... THERE have been increasingly urgent warnings from Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun and principal developer of the Java programming language) and others on the impending dangers from emerging self-replicating technologies. The day is close at hand...

The End of Computing Science?(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... To put it bluntly, we simply do not know yet what we should be talking about, but that should not worry us, for it just illustrates what was meant by "intangible goals and uncertain rewards". IN academia, in industry, and in the commercial...

The Computer-Mediated Economy.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... ONE way to forecast 1,000 years ahead is to look back 1,000 years. How is today's economy different from its counterpart 1,000 years ago, and what does that difference suggest about what the economy will be like 1,000 years from now? Human...

Be Absolute for Death: Life after Moore's Law.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... IF there was ever a creator of wealth on a fantastic scale, ever a changer of custom and social values, ever a determinant of where our culture is headed and why, it's Moore's Law. Gordon Moore didn't so much invent his law as observe it--the...

Accountability Through Transparency; Life in 2050.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... THE year is 2050 and we, the People of the United States, live in a truly "cammed nation." The eyes of digital video surveillance devices are tucked into every nook and cranny of our lives, like sand in a two-year-old's swimsuit after a...

Toward a New Politics of Intellectual Property.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... UNTIL recently, copyright was on the periphery of law because it involved technical rules for a highly specialized industry. The politics of copyright largely focused on intra-industry bickering. The typical response of a legislature to these...

Forget the Past to Win the Future.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... IF computer scientists were asked to speculate on their future 10, 20, or 30 years ago they would have been consistently shortsighted. The science fiction writers were infinitely better in predicting developments. We should acknowledge that it...

The Demise of Sovereignty.(Government Activity)
March 1, 2001... ONCE upon a time, nations laid claim to three-mile, off-shore extensions of their jurisdictions. Any nation desiring to send its ships within three miles of another nation's coast either obtained permission first, or risked having its ships...

Electronic Empire.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... As we continue into the terra nova of the electronic frontier, there is no set destiny that determines how the electronic society evolves. For all of the promise of true democracy, free markets, unrestrained speech, and the creation of a global...

A Larger Role in the Public Policy Process for User Control.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... PREDICTIONS of the future always remind me of a documentary film I saw in a third-grade science class. The substitute teacher introduced it as The Year 2000 or something of the sort. It was filled with expert predictions of the technologies we...

Inventing the Future.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... Humans are both a blessing and a curse for our planet's biodiversity. When we put our minds to it, we can help nature, but as with every two-way street we are also the most disruptive force on earth, an example of this power is our ability to...

Can Freedom Withstand E-Books?(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... COMMUNICATIONS published a science fiction story of mine in 1997 called "The Right to Read," in which I describe a world 50 years hence where it is illegal to lend your books to a friend. This story is becoming reality even faster than...

Many Zeros Ahead.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... SHALL we believe the predictions of the end of humanity at the hands of robots and our survival from global warming? Our science-fiction writers have done a much better job than our futurists. Here's what I learned from them about what might be...

Insurance and the Computer Industry.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... IN the future, the computer security industry will be run by the insurance industry. I don t mean insurance companies will start selling firewalls, but rather the kind of firewall you use--along with the kind of authentication scheme you use,...

The Future of the Internet Digital Divide.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
March 1, 2001... TECHNOLOGICALLY, Internet capacity will continue to increase into the foreseeable future. The available bandwidth, storage capacity, and processing capacity will grow from the current gigabits, gigabytes, and billions of instructions per second...

Developing the Future.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... SOFTWARE is arguably the word's most important industry. The presence of software has made possible many new businesses and is responsible for increased efficiencies in most traditional businesses. Software, both directly and indirectly through...

Will Software Ever Work?(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... NOT if it's business as usual in the software industry. But we could make it work. Throughout this issue, you'll hear some amazing predictions about the future--instant universal communication, pervasive computing, new medical...

A Just-in-Time Software-based World.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... IN the past year, three new digital devices have provided a glimpse of daily changes in our future: the email PDA, the digital VCR, and the automobile GPS. The RIM Blackberry provides Microsoft Exchange email in realtime to my belt where I...

Back to the Future.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... EVERY opportunity to look forward is also an invitation to look back. We have little hope of understanding where we are going except within the context of where we have been. My own views on the future of computing and software grow from nearly...

The Ubiquitous Beauty of User-Aware Software.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... WHILE the information age has brought computing technology to work, home, and community, users and computers are still fundamentally unrelated--and sometimes adversarial. The next era will revolutionize how computers and users interact. It...

Computer Security--An End State?(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... IT seems that one cannot open a newspaper without reading about yet another computer security breach. Worse yet, even sites that should be well protected, such as the CIA's Web site, have been hacked. Is this inevitable? Will matters continue...

A Commonsense Opportunity for Computing.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... As students, we begin by learning rules&facts, but in time, our job is to break them. To make clear my intention with this opening thought, let's recall some classic rules&facts: The world was once believed flat; humans cannot fly; and machines...

Keep (Over)reaching for the Stars.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... The year is 50,000 B. C. By a stream in the woods, very close to San Francisco Bay stood Gulden Gote both nervous and excited about the experiment he was about to perform. The elders of the tribe stood close by in rapt attention. Gulden pushed...

Education is the Key to Future Dreams.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... Because of my experience as an astronaut almost 40 years ago, I am often called on to recount that small piece of history and to reflect on the course of the U.S. space program since then. Not one of us involved in the early days could have...

Universal Literacy--A Challenge for Computing in the 21st Century.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... What would happen if you asked 50 successful female computer scientists about the future? As we approached the new century, the last years were full of visionary exercises--attempts to predict, state, or prognosticate a future for...

The Computer isn't the Medium, It's the Message.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... As long as there have been computers there have been people touting their value in education. But, the software produced for education has invariably been a dull approximation of the existing school system. Educational software meant drill and...

Closing the Fluency Gap.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... IN the years ahead, the declining cost of computation will make digital technologies accessible to nearly everyone in all parts of the world, from innercity neighborhoods in the U.S. to rural villages in developing nations. That will bring an...

Computers: Boon or Bane?(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... Predicting the long-term effects of computers is both difficult and easy: we wont get it right, but we won t see ourselves proven wrong. Rather than try, we present some alternatives allowing readers to make their own predictions. *...

Commentary: ACM1 Master-of-Ceremonies Bob Metcalfe Discusses Upcoming Conference.(Calendar of Events)
March 1, 2001... ACM1: "Beyond Cyberspace... A Journey of Many Directions" will be held March 10-14, 2001 in San Jose, CA. In addition to the Conference (March 12-14), ACM will host the ACM1 Exposition (March 10-13) and ACM1 Educators Day (March 10) and the...

ACM1 Exposition March, 2001 San Jose, California.(Calendar of Events)
March 1, 2001... The ACM1 Exposition will be held March 10-13 as part of ACM1: "Beyond Cyberspace... A Journey of Many Directions," March 10-14, 2001 in San Jose, CA. (See facing column for an interview with Master-of-Ceremonies Bob Metcalfe.) The ACM1...

ANNUAL REPORT 2000.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... activities of the acm a supplement to Communications of the ACM LETTER FROM PRESIDENT ACM's commitment to sharing our wealth of educational and scientific information with a worldwide audience was surely at the core of most of our...

ACM Student Chapter Active in Tamaulipas, Mexico.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... The ACM Student Chapter at Instituto Tecnologico of Madero in Tamaulipas, Mexico was chartered in 1997, and faculty and students have been working energetically ever since. Their work has contributed to establishing and maintaining a very...

CRC "MyProfile" is the Next Big Thing!(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... ACM's Career Resource Centre (CRC) has just launched! CRC is a "work-in-progress," an organic site that grows because of member feedback and member participation. ACM's objective for the CRC is to help members assess and refine their career...

Gateway Added to MVP Program!(Company Business and Marketing)
March 1, 2001... ACM is pleased to announce the addition of Gateway to the Member Value Plus program. Gateway is making select portables, servers, and network-ready desktop personal computers available to ACM Members at a discounted price. Gateway business...

New International Student Research Contest.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... The new ACM International Student Research Contest, launched last spring, is open to students conducting recent research in any area of computing. Beginning April, 2001, the Contest model will be two tiered. In the first tier there will be...

New Student Chapter Kit Program Started.(Technology Information)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... Beginning last fall, ACM partnered with IBM and with Hyperion Solutions to provide valuable educational student chapter kits to the ACM Student Chapters, free of cost. These kits consist of several types of training and learning resources that...

Calling All Faculty!(Industry Trend or Event)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... ACM is calling all faculty to order free ACM student brochures. ACM student membership continues to experience tremendous growth, thanks to the support of dedicated faculty members. Student membership offers the same benefits as those of...

ACM's New AND Noteworthy Products.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... Welcome to "For Members Only: New & Noteworthy Products," a showcase for the latest (and most noteworthy) ACM publications, products, and services. This issue features selected books, magazines, journals, and conference proceedings as well as...

ACM Digital Library Update.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... The third phase of the ACM Digital Library's retrospective capture project was completed at the end of December, 2000, as scheduled. ACM journals and magazines are now available to Digital Library users from the very first volume and issue to...

SIG Conferences Coming Up In May.(Calendar of Events)
March 1, 2001... ICSE 2001, the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering (May 12-19) will be held as part of the ICSE 2001 Software Engineering Week in Toronto, Canada, May 11-20, 2001. ICSE 2001 is the premier conference for software engineering...

ACM1 Educators Day Gives the Big Picture.
March 1, 2001... ACM1 Educators Day will be held March 10th, 2001 as part of ACM1: "Beyond Cyberspace... A Journey of Many Directions," March 10-14, 2001 in San Jose, CA. (See page 1 this issue of MemberNet.) Luminaries from K-12 education, higher education,...

ACM Awards Banquet to Be Held in March in San Jose.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... Recipients of ACM's 2000 awards and the new ACM Fellows will be honored at the 2001 ACM Awards Banquet on Sunday, March 11, 2001 in San Jose, CA. Recipients of the awards will be featured in the June, 2001 issue of MemberNet. At press time...

Nominations for 2001 Awards.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... Nominations are being sought for ACM's 2001 Awards Program. Nominations must include: * Name, address, phone, fax, and email of the person making the nomination. * Name, address, phone, fax, and email of the candidate for whom an...

New Fellows to be Inducted at Banquet.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... Twenty-seven new ACM Fellows will be inducted at the ACM banquet, bringing the total Fellows to 411. The ACM Council established the Fellows program in 1993 to recognize and honor ACM members who have distinguished themselves by their technical...