Communications of the ACM articles from November 1999

Communications of the ACM archives from November 1999

News Track.(News Briefs)
November 1, 1999... RELAXING CRYPTO EXPORT RESTRICTION The Clinton administration plans to ease restrictions on exports of encryption software and hardware products, a major shift in a long-standing policy and a victory for U.S. technology companies. The...

The Cost of Having Analog Executives in a Digital World.(Industry Trend or Event)
November 1, 1999... The likelihood of accurate technology forecasting can never be known. "There is no business in the worm which can hope to move forward if it does not keep abreast of the time, look into the future and study the probable demands of the...

Evolving a New Theory of Project Success.(Industry Trend or Event)
November 1, 1999... Regardless of how "troubled" a project may be, what is learned after crossing the finish line can be a practitioner's overwhelming success. "Ask the Man Who Owns One" --ADVERTISING SLOGAN FOR THE PACKARD AUTOMOBILE A lot has been...

Software Project Failure Lessons Learned.(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 1999... THIS LETTER, TRIGGERED BY Robert Glass's "Practical Programmer" column "Buzzwordism and the Epic $150 Million Software Debacle" (Aug. 1999, p. 17), aims at a more general scope than just replying to Glass's claims. Let me start, however,...

Knowledge Discovery.(Editorial)
November 1, 1999... We're interested in techniques that automatically fundamental properties and principles that are original and useful. THE NOTION OF COMPUTERS AUTOMATICALLY FINDING useful information is an exciting and promising aspect of just about any...

Machine Learning and Data Mining.(Technology Information)(Technical)
November 1, 1999... Machine learning algorithms enable discovery of important "regularities" in large data sets. OVER THE PAST decade, many organizations have begun to routinely capture huge volumes of historical data describing their operations, products,...

Discovery Tools for Science Apps.(Technology Information)(Technical)
November 1, 1999... Speed and smarts propel new tools for scientific applications. ONE GOOD CHARACTERIZATION OF SCIENCE IS THAT IT is the systematic study of some phenomena. Under this liberal view, discovery in science is not fundamentally different from...

Scientific Knowledge Discovery Using Inductive Logic Programming.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... ILP can be more effective than neural nets for delving into biological function data for pharmaceutical engineers developing new drugs and their multiple varieties. SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY TASKS CAN BE carried out using inductive...

Knowledge Discovery Based on Neural Networks.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... The intelligence emerging from interactions among numerous self-organizing processing elements can be trained to discover the knowledge embedded in data. TRADITIONALLY, HUMAN EXPERTS HAVE DERIVED THEIR KNOWLEDGE from their own personal...

Evolutionary Computation for Discovery.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... New automated tools hold the promise of allowing users to find more, learn more, and build more opportunities. IT SOUNDS A BIT STRANGE TO USE THE WORDS "EVOLUTION" and "discovery" together. We think of evolution as a slow, incremental...

Discovery through Rough Set Theory.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... Recent industry and market research apps demonstrate the decisive power of rough sets. APPLICATIONS OF ROUGH SETS theory to knowledge discovery involve collecting empirical data and building classification models from the data [1-3]. The...

Mining Online Text.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... Building mining apps in natural language processing poses special challenges, but also offers great rewards. NATURAL-LANGUAGE APPLICATIONS, such as machine translation, speech recognition, information retrieval, and summarization, are...

Discovery in the Human Genome Project.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... There are several layers of knowledge discovery in this international project and each one poses big questions to biologists. KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN BIOLOGY HAS PROFited enormously the past few years from technological improvements,...

Knowledge Discovery in Deep Blue.(chess computer)(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... A vast database of human experience can be used to direct a search. DEEP BLUE WAS THE FIRST CHESS COMPUTER TO defeat a reigning human world chess champion in a regulation match. A number of factors contributed to the system's success,...

The Messyware Advantage.(Web middleman companies)(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
November 1, 1999... The precipitous rise of the middleman. WHY IS YAHOO! WORTH SEVERAL BILLION DOLLARS? THE SOPHISTICATED EXPLANATION has to do with brands, image, and hype. A simpler explanation is that Yahoo! provides a very useful service, cataloging and...

TEN MYTHS OF MULTIMODAL INTERACTION.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... Moving from traditional interfaces toward interfaces offering users greater expressive power, naturalness, and portability. MULTIMODAL SYSTEMS PROCESS COMBINED NATURAL INPUT MODES--SUCH AS speech, pen, touch, hand gestures, eye gaze, and...

AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO ENTERPRISE COMPUTING ARCHITECTURES.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... Synthesizing an organization's computing infrastructure to support the spectrum of tasks performed by users in a geographically distributed organization. The alignment of an organization's information technology to its business strategies...

Putting OO Distributed Programming to Work.(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... An exercise in abstracting and factoring out failure detection. We argued in previous columns that object-oriented distributed programming should not be confused with distributed OO programming and that it should not be confused with...

Risks of Content Filtering.(censoring the Internet)(Industry Trend or Event)
November 1, 1999... The Internet and World Wide Web may be the ultimate double-edged swords. They bring diverse opportunities and risks. Just about anything anyone might want is on the Net, from the sublime to the truly evil. Some categories of information could...

A PROPOSAL FOR AN OPEN DSS PROTOCOL.(Decision Support System)(Technology Information)
November 1, 1999... Before Decision Support Systems can be shared via the Web, a common protocol for deploying them must be agreed upon. THE WEB WAS DESIGNED TO BE A "POOL OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, WHICH WOULD ALLOW collaborators to share their ideas and all aspects...