Symposia

The ability to leverage diverse data types requires a robust and dynamic approach to systems design. The needs of a data scientist are as varied as the questions being explored. Compute systems have focused on the management and analysis of structured data as the driving force of analytics in business. As open source platforms have evolved, the ability to apply compute to unstructured information has exposed an array of platforms and tools available to the business and technical community. We have developed a platform that meets the needs of the analytics user requirements of both structured and unstructured data. This analytics workbench is based on acquisition, transformation, and analysis using open source tools such as Nutch, Tika, Elastic, Python, PostgreSQL, and Django to implement a cognitive compute environment that can handle widely diverse data, and can leverage the ever-expanding capabilities of infrastructure in order to provide intelligence augmentation.

The complexities of social and technological policy domains, such as the economy, the environment, and public health, present challenges that require a new approach to modeling and decision-making. ...

The early digital economy during the dot-com days of internet commerce successfully faced its first big data challenges of click-stream analysis with map-reduce technology. Since then the digital economy has ...

Academic studies exploiting novel data sources are scarce. Typically, data is generated by commercial businesses or government organizations with no mandate and little motivation to share their assets with academic ...

While attention has always been prized above money, few people have had the means to attract it to themselves. But the new digital economy has provided everyone with a loudspeaker; thus efforts at getting noticed have rapidly escalated in global society. The attention economy focuses on the mechanisms that mediate the allocation of this scarce entity. Social networks and big data play a role in determining what is noticed and acted upon.

We use the term "big data" with the understanding that the real game changer is the connection and digitization of everything. Every portfolio is affected: finance, transport, housing, food, environment, ...

By many indications, signs, and signals there is writing on the wall: the Internet of Things (IoT) is coming! In this closing statement, Kemal Delic briefly reflects on two possible developments for the IoT and concludes with a third, and more likely, scenario.

This paper aims to provide the view of what means IoT (Internet of Things) in energy efficiency applications, of its technical and business impacts, of its opportunities and risks for ...

At the very high level of abstraction, the Internet of Things (IoT) can be modeled as the hyper-scale, hyper-complex cyber-physical system. Study of resilience of IoT systems is the first ...

Industrial Internet of Things (IOT) is a distributed network of smart sensors that enables precise control and monitoring of complex processes over arbitrary distances. The great advantage of the industrial ...

Cyber-attacks and breaches are often detected too late to avoid damage. While "classical" reactive cyber defenses usually work only if we have some prior knowledge about the attack methods and ...

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisages expanding the current Internet with a huge number of intelligent communicating devices. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) integrating IoT will rely on a set of the open standards striving to offer scalability and reliability in a variety of operating scenarios and conditions. Standardized protocols will tackle some of the major WSN challenges like energy efficiency, intrinsic impairments of low-power wireless medium, and self-organization. After more then a decade of tremendous standardization efforts, we can finally witness an integral IP-based WSN standardized protocol stack for IoT. Nevertheless, the current state of standards has redundancy issues and can benefit from further improvements. We would like to highlight some of the cross-layer aspects that need to be considered to bring further improvements to the standardized WSN protocol stack for the IoT.

Between prophecies of revolutions and inertiae of legacies, the Internet of Things (IoT) has already become the brand under which light processing units communicate over complex networks. ...

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is more than a $19 trillion opportunity over 10 years. Fifty billions of devices will be connected to various networks in 2020. ...

With everything and everyone accessible as a virtual resource on the web, novel applications that are created out of existing capabilities will continue to emerge. ...

While much attention has been focused on building sensing systems and backing cloud infrastructure in the Internet of things/Web of things (IoT/WoT) community, enabling third-party applications and services that can ...

Over the decades, standards have been critical for defining how to interconnect computer and networking devices across different vendors so they can seamlessly work together. Standards have been critical, not ...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being held back by divergent approaches that result in data silos, high costs, investment risks and reduced market opportunities. To realize the potential and ...

How to find a "thing" in the Internet of Things (IoT) haystack? The answer to this question will be the key challenge that IoT users and developers are facing now ...

We are witnessing these days the rise of always-on, connected devices, systems and environments. This might well represent the basis for the emerging digital economy. ...

The debate about computers and intelligence must go on - we have more to learn, and more people need to convert their strong opinions to measured arguments. There is no reason to panic, however.

For years we humans have worried about plagues, asteroids, earthquakes, eruptions, fires, floods, famines, wars, genocides, and other uncontrollable events that could wipe away our civilization. ...

Liah Greenfeld and Mark Simes have long worked together, integrating the perspectives of two very different disciplinary traditions: cultural history/historical sociology and human neuroscience. ...

The Priesthood of the Singularity posits a fast approaching prospect of machines overtaking human abilities (Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, Viking Press, 2006) on the basis of the exponential ...

In this paper a look is taken at artificial intelligence and the ways it can be brought about, either by means of a computer or through biological growth. ...

The state of the art in automating basic cognitive tasks, including vision and natural language understanding, is far below human abilities. Real-world reasoning, which is an unavoidable part of many ...

To jumpstart this symposium, Espen Andersen describes the debate surrounding "technological singularity" and questions whether this is something that will happen---and if so, what the consequences might be. ...

In order to determine (and shape) the long-term impact of MOOCs, we must consider not only cognitive and technological factors but also cultural ones, such as the goals of education ...

Synchronization bugs such as data races and deadlocks make every programmer cringetraditional locks only provide a partial solution, while high-contention locks can easily degrade performance. Maurice Herlihy proposes replacing locks ...

Multicore CPUs and GPUs have brought parallel computation within reach of any programmer. How can we put the performance potential of these machines to good use? ...

Multicore processors dominate the commercial marketplace, with the consequence that almost all computers are now parallel computers. To take maximum advantage of multicore chips, applications and systems should take advantage ...

Is the MOOCs phenomenon a disruptive innovation or a transient bubble? It may be partly both. Broadcasting lectures and opening up courses via MOOCs by itself poses little change of ...

Database management systems are necessary for transaction processing and query processing. Today, parallel database systems can be run on multicore platforms. ...

Fred Siff warns us that online learning, and in particular MOOCs, are threatening to overrun not just old models of instruction but the very nature of higher education institutions themselves. ...

Early graphical processing units (GPUs) were designed as high compute density, fixed-function processors ideally crafted to the needs of computer graphics workloads. Today, GPUs are becoming truly first-class computing elements ...

Computing education has some significant education challenges today. We aren't diverse enough, and we need to be able to develop more teachers. ...

This article will briefly describe some of the cost issues associated with MOOCs and suggest a perspective through which drastic tuition savings might someday be achieved, possibly through the assistance ...

In the past, parallel processing was a specialized approach to high-performance computing. Today, we have to rethink the computational cores of algorithmic and data structures applications. ...

Is the MOOC honeymoon winding down? ...

Where does computer science as an intellectual discipline fit in human discourse? Over a dozen contributors have looked at this question of identity from as many viewpoints. ...

Whether MOOCs can provide a good education and broaden educational opportunities at lower cost is an ongoing discussion. In this article Stanford professor, John C. ...

In this interview conducted by Ubiquity editor Walter Tichy, Prof. ...

As a discipline, we have been discussing parallel programming for years. After all these years, do we know the right language abstractions for parallel programming? Would we recognize the right ...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) enable the delivery of high-quality educational experiences to large groups of students. Coursera, one of the largest MOOC providers, developed a program to provide students ...

Chips with multiple processors, called multicore chips, have caused a resurgence of interest in parallel computing. Multicores are now available in servers, PCs, laptops, embedded systems, and mobile devices. ...

Advanced educational technologies are developing rapidly and online MOOC courses are becoming more prevalent, creating an enthusiasm for the seemingly limitless data-driven possibilities to affect advances in learning and enhance ...

Assessment in traditional courses has been limited to either instructor grading, or problems that lend themselves well to relatively simple automation, such as multiple-choice bubble exams. ...

MOOCs have fueled both hope and anxiety about the future of higher education. Our objective in this symposium is to surface and explore some of the open questions which have ...

In this latest installment of "The Science in Computer Science," Prof. Paul Rosenbloom continues the discussion on whether or not computer science can be considered a "natural science." ...

The Computer Science Unplugged project provides activities that enable students to engage with concepts from computer science without having to program. ...

This article is a personal account of the methodological evolution of software engineering research from the 1970s to the present. ...

In this twelfth piece of the Ubiquity symposium discussing science in computer science, Erol Gelenbe reviews computation in natural systems, focusing mainly on biology and citing examples of the computation ...

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While evolution has inspired algorithmic methods of heuristic optimization, little has been done in the way of using concepts of computation to advance our understanding of salient aspects of biological ...

The goal of the LabRats Science Education Program is to inspire secondary school-age students from all backgrounds to love learning about science and technology. Shawn Carlson, the Executive Director of ...

Phil Yaffe has provided numerous commentaries on various aspects of professional communication, which have helped readers more effectively articulate their own ideas about the future of computing. ...

Until 2000, computer science enrollments were steadily increasing. Then suddenly students started turning to other fields; by 2008, enrollments had dropped by 50 percent. To that end, Jan Cuny has ...

In this ninth symposium article, Lukáš Sekanina addresses evolutionary and evolvable hardware; answering the questions what it means for a physical system to be designed evolutionarily and on what kinds ...

In this article, David Fogel discusses the relationship between evolutionary computation and evolutionary game theory. The mathematics of evolutionary game theory relies on assumptions that often fail to describe the ...

In the third installment of this symposium, which originally appeared in the Communication the ACM, we go back to 1981. More than 30 years ago, I called on ACM members ...

The first article in this symposium, which originally appeared in the Communication the ACM, is courtesy of ACM President Vinton Cerf. Earlier this year, he called on all ACM members to commit to building a stronger science base for computer science. Cerf cites numerous open questions, mostly in software development, that cry out for experimental studies.

In this article, Moshe Sipper discusses a foreseeable future in which an entirely new paradigm of producing software will emerge. ...

The recent interest in encouraging more middle and high school students to prepare for careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) has rekindled the old debate about whether computer ...

In this article evolutionary computation (EC) is considered as a kind of nature-inspired computing (NIC) paradigm. EC not only has great effect on the development of computing methods from structure ...

During the past 35 years the evolutionary computation research community has been studying properties of evolutionary algorithms. Many claims have been made---these varied from a promise of developing an automatic ...

In this article in the ACM Ubiquity symposium on evolutionary computation Max H. Garzon presents reflections on the connections between evolutionary computation, natural computation, and current definitions of computer science. ...

In this second article in the ACM Ubiquity symposium on evolutionary computation Hans-Paul Schwefel explores the effects of simulating evolutionary mechanisms. ...

In this third article in the ACM Ubiquity symposium on evolutionary computation Xin Yao provides a deeper understanding of evolutionary algorithms in the context of classical computational paradigms. ...

Evolution is one of the indispensable processes of life. After biologists found basic laws of evolution, computer scientists began simulating evolutionary processes and using operations discovered in nature for solving ...

The "computation" symposium presents the reflections of thinkers from many sectors of computing on the fundamental question in the background of everything we do as computing professionals. While many of us have too many immediate tasks to allow us time for our own deep reflection, we do appreciate when others have done this for us. Peter Freeman points out, by analogy, that as citizens of democracies we do not spend a lot of time reflecting on the question, "What is a democracy," but from time to time we find it helpful to see what philosophers and political scientists are saying about the context in which we act as citizens.

Editor's IntroductionThis fourteenth piece is inspired by a question left over from the Ubiquity Symposium entitled What is Computation?Peter J. DenningEditor Computing saw the light as a branch of mathematics ...

In this thirteenth piece to the Ubiquity symposium discussing What is computation? Melanie Mitchell discusses the idea that biological computation is a process that occurs in nature, not merely in ...

In this twelfth piece to the Ubiquity symposium discussing What is computation? Erol Gelenbe reviews computation in natural systems, focusing mainly on biology and citing examples of the computation that ...

In this eleventh piece to the Ubiquity symposium discussing What is computation? Jeffrey P. Buzen develops a new computational model for representing computations that arise when deterministic algorithms process workloads ...

In this tenth piece to the Ubiquity symposium discussing What is computation? Joseph Traub shares his views about using the Turing Machine model and the real number model for solving ...

In this ninth piece to the Ubiquity symposium discussing What is computation? Alfred V. Aho shares his views about the importance of computational thinking in answering the question. ...

In this sixth article in the ACM Ubiquity symposium,What is Computation? Ruzena Bajcsy of the University of California-Berkeley explains that computation can be seen as a transformation or function of ...

In this fifth article in the ACM Ubiquity symposium on What is computation? Paul S. Rosenbloom explains why he believes computing is the fourth great scientific domain, on par with ...

In this seventh article in the ACM Ubiquity symposium, What is Computation?, Dave Bacon of University of Washington explains why he thinks discussing the question is as important as thinking ...

Most people understand a computation as a process evoked when a computational agent acts on its inputs under the control of an algorithm. The classical Turing machine model has long ...

In this second article in the ACM Ubiquity symposium on 'What is computation?' Peter Wegner provides a history of the evolution of comptuation. --Editor ...

In the second in the series of articles in the Ubiquity Symposium What is Computation?, Prof. John S. Conery of the University of Oregon explains why he believes computation can ...

Various authors define forms of computation as specialized types of processes. As the scope of computation widens, the range of such specialties increases. Dennis J. Frailey posits that the essence ...

The first Ubiquity symposium seeks to discuss the question, "What is computation?" ...