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1 week ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Chris Edwards |Orit Hazzan |Micah Beck
The computer scientists of the 1960s had high hopes for the way humans and intelligent machines would work with each other. In separate essays that date back more than half a century, Joseph Licklider and Douglas Engelbart described situations where the humans and artificial intelligence (AI) would exchange ideas in insightful dialogues of the kind followed by ancient Greek philosophers. Some of that optimism has not gone away.
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2 weeks ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Sandrine Ceurstemont |Orit Hazzan |Micah Beck |Marc Rotenberg
Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) started making waves a few years ago with the release of systems such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. They are able to produce sophisticated and human-like text, code, or images after the models powering them are trained on large quantities of data. However, it soon became apparent that the specific phrasing of a question or statement input by a user, known as a prompt, had an impact on the quality of the resulting output.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Neil Savage |Orit Hazzan |Micah Beck
Ian Burkhart was a 19-year-old college student enjoying a day out with friends in 2010 when he dove into the water off North Carolina’s Outer Bank, hit bottom, and broke his neck. He wound up paralyzed below the elbows, unable to walk or to control his wrists or fingers. The accident did not end his story, though, because just four years later he became the first person to undergo a procedure aimed at restoring movement to his hands.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | George Neville-Neil |Orit Hazzan |Micah Beck
Dear KV,By now, I am sure you have seen the CrowdStrike news, and I cannot help but imagine you have opinions on what really went wrong to cause so many problems. The news, both tech and nontech, is full of explanations of what went wrong: poor testing, relying too much on one company for critical infrastructure, allowing a critical module failure to prevent further remote updates … the list goes on.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Orit Hazzan |Micah Beck |Doug Meil |Ted Selker
In this post, I present a dialogue between two experts in computer science education, exploring the need to rethink assessment in the field in the GenAI era. This dialogue is a synthesis of insights gathered from various sources, including conversations, discussions, and email exchanges on the SIGCSE mailing lists regarding assessment in computer science.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Micah Beck |Doug Meil |Ted Selker |Mark Halper
Theoretical Computer Science is a glass slipper that has never quite fit the foot of practical Computer Engineering. The essence of their marriage is that theoreticians devise a formal model which captures some essential features of reality, and then apply reasoning about it to implementations. The problems occur when the models do not capture enough of the structure of real systems to explain and predict their behavior.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Gregory Goth |Ted Selker |Micah Beck
The phrase “think globally, act locally” may be most associated with environmental activists such as folk singer Pete Seeger, but it is also becoming a watchword in the buttoned-down world of electric power security. The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DoE), through several recent funding rounds, is enabling new collaborations between university researchers, national laboratories, industry research associations, and individual utility companies to strengthen power grid cybersecurity.
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Ron Westfall |Ted Selker |Micah Beck |Shaoshan Liu
The swift expansion of data-intensive, high-performance computing alongside an exploding array of artificial intelligence (AI) workload demands are driving demand for resilient, low-power nonvolatile memory.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Ted Selker |Berry Billingsley |Micah Beck |Shaoshan Liu
This is the first blog in a series that will consider positive uses of technology. We start by introducing the idea of a physical/tangible interface that modifies a Generative AI prompt to make a student aware of the way different personas might view a question. The question “Is technology a force of good?” might be asked from a skeptical, thoughtful, confident or curious position; Generative AI’s answers to these very different positions will also be very different from each other.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | George Neville-Neil |Micah Beck |Shaoshan Liu |Alex Tray
Dear KV,Even though I am not in academia, I try to keep up with the research in computing science, mostly by reading the abstracts of papers in the SIGs I was a member of in college. From time to time, I find an interesting paper that contains something I can apply in my day job. Sometimes I am even lucky enough to find that the researchers have posted their code to their web page or a service like GitHub. But, more often than not, whenever I try the code, I find it has many problems.
