The prospect of producing personal digital archives has become a holy grail for many technologists and researchers, according to the cover story in the latest issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM), a print and online publication for the computing and information technology fields. The authors propose a psychological focus to this challenge.
Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and Steve Whittaker of IBM Almaden Research Center analyse the role of cognitive processes in stimulating memory, and conclude that lifelogging design must be engineered to work in synergy with users’ memories rather than replacing human memory with digital systems. Also in this issue, Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi revisits the ACM Globalization and Offshoring of Software study, published in 2006, for which he was recently recognised. He recalls that the most fundamental insight he gained is that offshoring is just a symptom. The underlying phenomenon is the globalisation of computing. He concludes that we must continue monitoring employment and wage trends as well as global R&D trends to assess the ongoing impact of offshoring.
In a story on the technical and business issues of cloud computing applications, authors Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT, Paul Hoffman of SAP Labs, and John Jordan of Penn State University analyse the computing-as-utility business model. They point to the pace of innovation, the limits of scale, and latency issues as technical weaknesses in this model. They find more profound differences with this model in the potential for innovation and organisational redesigns that are shaping computing as well as the lack of interchangeable cloud offerings, and the stringent security standards required by the management of data and shared, dynamic resources. The real strength of cloud computing, they conclude, is as a catalyst for more innovation, a situation which requires greater creativity and skill from IT and business executives.
CACM is the flagship publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It offers readers access to this generation’s most significant leaders and innovators in computing and information technology.
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