What's New in Computing Now

Project Glass: An Extension of the Self

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:11:00 -0400

Thad Starner, technical lead/manager on Google's Glass Project, discusses some aspects of his history with the project, as well as their approach to reducing access time and the problem of microinteractions. More

Energy-Efficient Virtual Machine Consolidation

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:10:00 -0400

A novel approach to saving energy in an IaaS cloud exploits the lack of energy proportionality in server hardware. An experimental implementation showed savings up to 16 percent. More

Information Visualization Courses for Students with a Computer Science Background

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:09:00 -0400

Linnaeus University offers two masterís courses in information visualization for computer science students. This article describes the syllabi, exercises, and practices developed for these courses. More

A Shortage of Privacy Engineers

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:08:00 -0400

Privacy engineers—technologists responsible for ensuring that privacy is an integral part of a product’s design process—are increasingly in demand. But what makes an effective one? More

Classification and Analysis of 3D Teleimmersive Activities

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:07:00 -0400

Emerging 3D teleimmersive system platforms support broad range of possible cyberphysical activities. Classifying the activities and maintaining a performance profile for each class supports a high-quality user experience. More

Batteries Not Included: Powering the Ubiquitous Computing Dream

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:06:00 -0400

Mobile devices can never become truly ubiquitous without a suitably "invisible" power source. More

Information Visualization for Chronic Disease Risk Assessment

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:05:00 -0400

A new information-visualization method and prototype software tool supports risk assessment for negative health outcomes and lets clinicians explore nuances in patients' data and disease risk. More

NASA Computational Case Study: The Flight of Friendship 7

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:04:00 -0400

To study a method for computing the position of an Earth-orbiting spacecraft as a function of time, the authors compute the position of John Glenn's Mercury spacecraft Friendship 7 as it orbited the Earth during the third flight of NASA's Mercury program. More

Plug into the Supercloud

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:03:00 -0400

Today's cloud providers don't simply supply raw computing resources; they also act as distributors, dictating services that aren't compatible across providers. Superclouds offer a decoupling distribution layer. More

Silicon Photonic Interconnects for Large-Scale Computer Systems

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:02:00 -0400

Researchers from Oracle Labs re-envision the architecture of a silicon chip in a "macrochip" composed of small chips interconnected by a silicon photonics optical network. More

Landing a Spacecraft on Mars

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:01:00 -0400

How much software does it take to land a spacecraft safely on Mars, and how do you make all that code reliable? More

VSPN: VANET-based Secure and Privacy-preserving Navigation

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:12 -0400

In this paper, the authors propose a navigation scheme that utilizes the online road information collected by a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) to guide the drivers to desired destinations in a real-time and distributed manner. More

Mobile Security: A Look Ahead

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:11 -0400

Fueled by widespread adoption of employee-owned devices in the workplace and the explosion of mobile applications, mobile device security is under heavy debate in both the academic and industry security communities. Based on data collected from observing the interaction of 75 million users with the Internet, the authors extrapolate this data, giving insights into what threats wait on the horizon. More

From Minecraft to Minds

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:10 -0400

For the public, algorithms are part of computing’s self-made mystery, but to understand their nature is an important part of computational thinking. More

What's New in the Ubicomp Community?

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:09 -0400

This inaugural column offers a curated summary of interesting news and research in pervasive and mobile computing, with content drawn from submissions from community members and readers. More

Micro Stories and Mega Stories

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:08 -0400

Current technology makes it easy to capture and store experiential data, which in turn is driving novel forms of storytelling. More

The Problem of Evaluating CPU-GPU Systems with 3D Visualization Applications

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:07 -0400

A methodology for enforcing frame starting times enables the use of 3D visualization applications as benchmarks to evaluate CPU-GPU systems. More

From Data to Decisions: A Value Chain for Data

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:06 -0400

A data value chain offers a framework for managing disparate data holistically—from its collection through its integration, analysis, and visualization to support decision making. More

Physical-Cyber-Social Computing: An Early 21st Century Approach

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:05 -0400

The authors present an emerging paradigm called physical-cyber-social (PCS) computing, supporting the computing for human experience (CHE) vision, which encompasses a holistic treatment of data, information, and knowledge to provide contextually relevant abstractions to humans. More

How to Use Google App Engine for Free Computing

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:04 -0400

An extensible framework based on Google App Engine’s Taste Queue API enables the use of its servers as computational nodes to solve computationally intense problems. More

Advancing Computational Science Education through Xsede

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:03 -0400

Redirected walking lets users explore a virtual world by walking in a confined physical space. There's a great need for computational science programs that prepare the current and next generation of researchers, educators, and practitioners to effectively utilize digital services in support of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Xsede helps facilitate the founding and expansion of such programs. More

The SCDOR Hack: Great Security Theater in Five Stages

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:02 -0400

Redirected walking lets users explore a virtual world by walking in a confined physical space. The South Carolina governor's response to the SCDOR hack represents a textbook application of Elizabeth Kubler Ross's "five stages of grief" to cybersecurity. More

Using Perceptual Illusions for Redirected Walking

Mon, 1 Apr 2013 11:00:01 -0400

Redirected walking lets users explore a virtual world by walking in a confined physical space. Exploiting three motion illusions can increase its effectiveness. More

Going Bright: Wiretapping without Weakening Communications Infrastructure

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:11 -0400

The exploitation of naturally occurring weaknesses in software platforms being used by law enforcement's targets is a solution to the law enforcement problem. More

Immersive 3D Holoscopic Video System

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:10 -0400

A 3D imaging system—part of a larger, EU-funded, immersive, audiovideo project—uses 3D holoscopic imaging to display full-color images with continuous parallax across a wide viewing zone. More

Trust in Automation

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:09 -0400

Focusing on the trust in the automation within macrocognitive work systems, the authors emphasize the dynamics of trust, considering the numerous different kinds and meanings of trust. Their goal is to work towards a methodology for designing and analyzing collaborative human-centered work systems. More

The XMOS Architecture and XS1 Chips

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:08 -0400

The XMOS architecture offers a new way to build electronic systems, replacing hardware components with software components executed by multithreaded multicore XS1 chips. More

Your "What" Is My "How": Iteration and Hierarchy in System Design

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:07 -0400

Requirements and architecture should better align. Requirements models must consider hierarchical system construction and architectural design notations must better support requirements specification for system components. More

Analysis of Error Masking and Restoring Properties of Sequential Circuits

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:06 -0400

Scaling of CMOS technology into nanometric feature sizes has raised concerns for the reliable operation of logic circuits such as in the presence of soft errors.This paper deals with the analysis of the operation of sequential circuits. More

Abstraction, Federation, and Scalability

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:05 -0400

Today's computer curricula may underemphasize systems architecture and systems engineering, but they hold the root design principles that support scalability. More

A Smarter Smart Home: Case Studies of Ambient Intelligence

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:05 -0400

The authors contend that technological support for sustainable home use lies in more subtle and contextually appropriate interventions, integrating informative models of occupant behavior, hybrid levels of automated control, and ambient sensing for localized decisions. More

A Glimpse of the Future of Scientific Programming

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:04 -0400

Current technological developments in computer science labs could potentially change the way scientists and engineers write programs in the future. More

Helping High Schoolers Move the (Virtual) World

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:03 -0400

In a workshop, high school students built a virtual world for a car-racing game, with instructional scaffolding aiding them in their programming tasks. More

Lessons Learned from Hurricane Sandy: Maintaining Service during a Disaster

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:02 -0400

An automated test service’s CEO describes how his business maintained its systems through 24 days of power and communication losses in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. More

Beauty in Software Engineering

Tue, 5 Mar 2013 11:00:01 -0400

Is there, like Euler's identity, a simply expressed relationship, dense in meaning, between software engineering's most basic entities? More