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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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Jan 8, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Mark Halper |Doug Meil |Ted Selker
In a Kafkaesque nightmare come true, nearly 1,000 individuals who ran local post offices in the U.K. were wrongly convicted of stealing money from those operations between 1999 and 2015 as a Fujitsu software system known as Horizon erroneously showed imbalances in their accounts. The convictions resulted in prison for some of the managers and financial ruin for many held responsible for the missing funds.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Doug Meil |Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill
Public cloud computing platforms have made delivering data and analytics easier than ever. They are certainly easier and more powerful compared to when such solutions were deployed on-premise not long ago, but not always necessarily easy. There are still many decisions to be made. It is also worth reflecting on how these choices have evolved in the past 10-15 years, as well as the principles that haven’t changed.
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Jan 6, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Thomas Haigh |Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill
In the first four parts of this Communications Historical Reflections column series, I have followed the artificial intelligence (AI) brand from its debut in the 1950s through to the reorientation of the field around probabilistic approaches and big data during the AI winter that ran through the 1990s and early 2000s. Aside from the brief flourishing of an expert system industry in the 1980s, the main theme of that long history was disappointment.
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Jan 6, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill
Our recent posts have considered different ways of using Generative AI to help you think. We started with a bunch of faces, a bunch of disciplines, a bunch of roles. These were surprising uses of Generative AI in that they aren’t what people have been thinking of using it for. Let’s turn to the wonderous thing we do to get started on any project. Making lists is a hard skill to learn, but it serves us well in so many situations.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Henrik Skaug Sætra |Alex Tray |Herbert Bruderer |Ted Selker
A spectre is haunting the social media platform known as X—a spectre of exodus. But the migration from the platform once known as Twitter to alternatives like Bluesky has also sparked warnings about another spectre–the echo chamber.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Alex Tray |Herbert Bruderer |Ted Selker |Logan Kugler
In the past few years, HR has seen a significant transformation driven by the rise of machine learning tools and technology.1 These tools extract insights, patterns, and predict trends from massive amounts of data. HR has now shifted from traditional methods to data-driven approaches for better workplace management, productivity, and aligning HR strategies with larger business goals.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Don Monroe |Herbert Bruderer |Ted Selker |Logan Kugler
Our increasingly digitized world is creating more data every year, including videos from ubiquitous smart phones, observations from billions of sensors and surveillance cameras, output from artificial intelligence, and much more. Until now, exponential growth in data storage capacity has largely kept pace with the flood of data at a steady cost. This trend may not continue, according to John Monroe at Furthur Market Research, who for almost 25 years, until 2022, was an analyst at Gartner.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Herbert Bruderer |Ted Selker |Logan Kugler
Much has been made of the abilities of the new developments in machine intelligence and in particular of what chatbots such as ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs) are capable of. While these new pieces of software are impressive when it comes to generating text, some people in the computing community take this observation much further and, in my opinion, much too far. They claim programming will be a thing of the past.
