Just so you’re clear: it was not my idea to give a talk to Microsoft Research. I had learned embarrassingly little about computer science in my 18 years of life, and the last thing I wanted to do is to have that exposed in front of a bunch of genius PhDs in MSR. But my manager thought it’d be a great...

Neural Networks started as an academic discipline over 50 years ago with the publication by McCulloch and Pitts of their famous result that any logical problem can be solved by a suitable network composed of so-called binary decision nodes. These are processors which make the simplest possible decision, that is, whether or not to respond to a...

The telegraph, telephone, radio, and especially the computer have put everyone on the globe within earshot— at the price of our privacy. It may feel like we're performing an intimate act when, sequestered in our rooms and cubicles, we casually use our cell phones and computers to transmit our thoughts, confidences,...

In an age where online universities and distance learning courses exist side by side with traditional classroom learning, the development, design, use and challenges of creating web-based learning systems that promote learning in students, whether over a distance or within a university proper, is increasingly complex and often...

The availability of geographic and geo-spatial information and services, especially on the openWeb, has become abundant in the last several yearswith the proliferation of online maps, geo-coding services, geospatial Web services and geospatially enabled applications. Concurrently, the need for geo-spatial reasoning has significantly...

Graph rewriting systems have come of age. In autumn 1994, the 25th anniversary of the first publication in this area was celebrated at the 5th Workshop on Graph Grammars and their Applications to Computer Science. In the interim, the subject has evolved. The current situation can be described by a three-stage model. At the very low...

Discover how to engage your students and raise their grades and attendance in your classroom. THE MULTIPLAYER CLASSROOM: DESIGNING COURSEWORK AS A GAME is your detailed guide to designing any structured learning experience as a game. Written for professional educators or those learning to be educators, here are the tools to engage and excite...

The study of data structures is an essential subject of every under graduate and...

Mac OS X offers an amazing development environment for scores of technologies. It seems that developers from numerous camps are migrating to Mac en masse. Scan the room at any Ruby or Rails conference, for example, and you’ll see programmers coding on Macs almost exclusively. As developers move to Mac, almost inevitably they...

Databases are the workhorses of the information age. Like Atlas, they go largely unnoticed in supporting the digital world we’ve come to inhabit. It’s easy to forget that our digital interactions, from commenting and tweeting to searching and sorting, are in essence interactions with a database. Because of this fundamental...