Search

Edward Feigenbaum, the recipient of the 2013 Pioneer Award, is one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence and has been one of its leaders for more than 50 years. He became aware of the birth of AI when he was an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech (later, Carnegie Mellon University). Continuing to graduate school there, he was mentored by Herbert Simon, and he also collaborated with Allen Newell. His career has taken him from Carnegie to the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, RAND, and the Pentagon. Feigenbaum has also authored and coedited several seminal AI books: Computers and Thought (1963), The Fifth Generation (1983), and the four-volume Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (1980s). In this interview, David Alan Grier and Feigenbaum talk about his career, his mentor Herbert Simon, and the development of AI. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the impact of the computer industry on the environment, examining how the industry is attempting to reduce its footprint on the planet. Landfills are being filled up with discarded computer equipment, the author states. Of the three areas within the computer industry that touch the environment, disposal, manufacturing, and operations, it is the operational sector that has made the most visible improvements, that article indicates. Other topics include the power consumption of computers, decreasing the use of toxic substances in computers, and the disposal of unwanted equipment.

The article focuses on the use of computer simulation technology, the technology of computer games, which caught the public attention in the U.S. Chess-playing computers captured the attention of early computer researchers compared with the computer simulation. As more programmers became skilled at writing games with simulation tools, they explore computer games, fantasy worlds. The computer game industry has used simulation technology to create a host of artificial and imaginary worlds. Therefore, people get their first exposure to computers through video games. INSET: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

The article presents information on email correspondence between Allan Bromley, on of the foremost scholar of Charls Babbage, inventor and industrialist and Maurice Wilkes, one of the computer pioneers of the 20th century, on Babbage's second difference engine. Wilkes wrote to Bromley that it must give him some satisfaction that Difference Engine No. 2 should have been successfully built. To this Bromley replied that he enjoyed Doron Swade's book "Cogwheel Brain," that contained the details of building of the Difference Engine No.2 and that it concurred with his assessments of Babbage. He said that the book was new to him and that he could not follow the action blow-by-blow. He was pleased with Babbage's project and was reassured that his judgment of Babbage's designs was sound. The 1832 Model of Difference Engine No. 1 is far smoother. He thinks it was necessary to build the Difference Engine No. 2 to "prove" that Babbage was a competent mechanical designer and to allow attention to focus more on the logical design of the Analytical Engines.

Relates the story of John Atanasoff's work and his contributions to the literature of computing. Background of agricultural computing from 1800-1910; Atanasoff's connection to the computing lab, Iowa State College Statistical Laboratory; Influence of Henry Wallace on Atanasoff.

Just as we teach our children about how to protect themselves from the dangers in the world, we need to educate ourselves about cybersecurity, to protect ourselves from the threats of the cyber world. This issue on cybersecurity education is one step in that direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses virtualization, a technology that arose from the need to share a single computer's resources among multiple users. During the mid-1960s researchers at International Business Machines (IBM) performed seminal work on virtualization. When an IBM proposal to develop time-sharing computer systems for the U.S. government failed to win a contract, IBM began work on its own system that eventually culminated in the Virtual Machine (VM) platform. Despite a lack of encouragement from IBM executives VM eventually gained a following among programmers.

The article reflects on the computer scientists' projection of visions of the future. The author talks about his father's standard marketing speech on the potential of computers to its users and the role of human leadership in the application of computer technology to many problems demanding solution. The vision of Ida Rhodes, an employee at the National Bureau of Standards, about the future of computer is discussed including her description of people's use of computers and other technology at their homes.

The article reports on the attack of Internet worm is the U.S. which had damaged the research computers in the country. The worm which has crawled from machine to machine by exploiting security weaknesses in the old version of the Unix operating system, has invaded the network and has affected the free process cycles of every machine it infected. The worm has three ways of propagation which include dropping of a little piece of code in a remote machine, entering the machine through the mail program's debug option, and gathering a list of user IDs from the machine.

The article discusses the author's experience related to ideas about women in computer technology. He talks about his lecture to a local business group where a question about the suitability of women for scientific and technical careers was asked. He also discusses his experience of sharing an office with a female coworker in a computer company and describes her experiences concerning women in the computer industry.

The article discusses on the development of computers. In just a short span of time new discovery or development is introduced and spreads to the market. Computer users exerted time on upgrading their computer so as no to be left behind in the latest innovation but many also decided to stop if the attempt was not successful. Improvements of the circuit was started by Gordon Moore who worked as an engineer in a semiconductor company, Fairchild. He formulated the law by looking at the number of elements in the integrated circuit and stated that the number of these elements increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Moore's Law had made an impact on the innovation of computers which are still in use today.

The article reflects on the values of George Stibitz, a computer designer of 1946 and the Slide Rule of R.C. Archibald. A part of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Stibitz had designed an electric calculator that could send and receive numbers over telephone lines. He values workers who do computations and knew the names of Bell Laboratories computing staff. Archibald gave the field of digital computer a structure, information and a history. Acknowledge by the Smithsonian Institution, Archibald's slide rule is displayed in an exhibit on the history of computing.

The IEEE History Center and the IEEE History Committee held a conference on the history of electronics at Bletchley Park, England, from June 28-30, 2004. This meeting was one of the series of conferences that the History Center has been holding roughly every two years. The speakers at the conference touched on the entire range of electronic innovation, with topics including power engineering, communications, television, medical instrumentation and, of course, computer development. The key innovation much discussed at the meeting was the Fleming diode, an invention that the IEEE celebrated by dedicating a plaque in London at the end of the conference. The conference opened with a talk by Maurice Wilkes, a professor from Cambridge University and builder of the EDSAC, the first English programmable computer in the modern sense. Wilkes did not discuss electronic computers directly, but he suggested that vacuum tubes were merely the convenient tool for constructing these machines, and that early computer pioneers grasped the idea of the computer as far more general than the devices used to build them.

Presents letters to the editor related to computers and computing. Clarifications for Sperry Rand's third-generation computers; Comments on Bell Labs' digital computers and the U.S. Navy.

We're dissecting the accomplishments of the past to more efficiently achieve the goals of the future. In the Web extra at https://youtu.be/_uQ8OsTSzOE, author David Alan Grier expands on his column about how artificial intelligence is less about building minds and more about taking apart boxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several letters are presented from readers responding to articles from previous issues including "Click Here to Empty Trash" and "XML Does Real Programmers a Service" from the September, 2008 issue, and "Enhancements to Society's Products and Services: Report of Progress Made in 2008" from the December, 2008 issue.

The article author informs that early in his career, when he was a new programmer working with a computer design team, he was given the task of connecting a small computer in a remote office to a central machine room about three miles away. In this task, he collaborated with a senior field engineer named Roger. Roger was an old timer. He had worked with the company, Burroughs Corporation, for nearly 30 years and could remember computers built of vacuum tubes. He and the author worked in a small, dingy room. Roger assembled the computer and showed him how to operate it. The author struggled to configure the software so that the data would move freely back and forth between the two sites. After one particularly frustrating day of effort, Roger turned to the author and said, that was the future, man. Once they figured how to make that stuff work, companies would have tiny little offices that were all connected by data communications. Twenty years later, Roger's moment of prophecy can be seen in Annals.

The article presents information on the role of computer pioneer Herman H. Goldstine in the computer industry. Goldstine had a long and influential career, which began at the University of Chicago where he was a mathematics student. It was a life that produced an important history, The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann, and served to remind how profoundly the electronic computer changed the lives of those who developed it. His first wife, Adele, had led the female computing staff at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering during World War II. Through most of the 1950s, Goldstine worked on von Neumann's computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1958, he joined International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) as a senior researcher. He served as IBM's director of research and retired as an IBM fellow. He ended his career as the president of the American Philosophical Society, a scientific organization that was founded in the 18th century. He had a full and satisfying life as an early leader in computers, a career that he probably did not anticipate when he began graduate study in applied mathematics during the 1950s.

Focuses on the development of a great machine theory of history. List of people who have contributed in the world of computing and computers; Discussion on the term "Great Man" theory; Information on Tracy Kidder and the development of the Data General Eagle computer in the late 1970s.

Addresses basic questions on the practice of computing. Issue which concerns professionalization in the computer industry; Processes involved in working with a computer; Social factor which affects employment in computing.

When we consider expanding the Computer Society or IEEE, we ultimately face some aspect of the immigrant experience, of moving across cultural boundaries. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/AsY3GSMNx9M is a video segment in which author David Alan Grier expands on his Errant Hashtag column, in which he discusses the importance of making computer certification programs easy to access for people of all walks of life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Interdisciplinary work is a key part of computing, but it often demands that we drop old conceptions and learn to think as others do. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/y8BSzeoZDCA is a video segment in which author David Alan Grier expands on his Errant Hashtag column, in which he discusses how interdisciplinary work is a key part of computing, but that it often demands we drop old conceptions and learn to think as others do. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social networking has neither altered the way that technical knowledge is presented nor has it dislodged computer science from its central place in the technical canon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Crowdsourcing is one of the more intriguing forms of computation that employs markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although word "program" entered the vocabulary of computer developers with the ENIAC project, the word did not take its modern meaning at that time. Within the ENIAC, the term referred to the control signal that synchronized and directed the actions of the machine's individual units. Eight years would pass before the field would shift the usage of the word program away from the electronic circuits that controlled the machine toward the symbolic instructions that describe a set of operations to be set in motion by those circuits. In the intervening time, engineers more commonly used the word planning to describe the process of preparing a list of instructions for a computer. The term "plan" derived from the production engineering field, a discipline that developed in the 1920s in England in response to the production demands of World War I. The story of its usage shows how the concept of programming started to develop and suggests that programming owes much to the fields of production engineering systems engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As we look to the future, we must not only anticipate a year of innovation and progress but also a migration of labor that will remake the field of digital technology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The task of navigating the information hierarchy is harder than we would like to think and involves more uncertainty than we care to admit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various papers published within the issue, including one by Donn Parker on the use of computers for criminal purposes and another by Stewart Gillmor on computer dating program.

The article presents information on Allan Bromley, one of the foremost scholars of inventor, Charles Babbage and Maurice Wilkes, one of the computer pioneers of the 20th century. Shortly before his death in 2002, Bromley conducted a lengthy correspondence about Babbage with Wilkes. Their correspondence was conducted over email from England to Australia. The correspondence shows two innovative minds conversing about a great thinker of the 19th century. It suggests that Babbage remains a bit of a mystery, even though much has been published about Babbage's life and works. The correspondence published in this journal contained some editorial comments by Maurice Wilkes. In particular, the two correspondents used the abbreviations DE and AE for the difference engine and the analytical engine. Wilkes deleted some technical material that's of minor importance or of no long-term interest, while at the same time retaining some personal touches to preserve the character of the resulting document as an exchange of views between real people.

Reflects on the possible problems that the journal `Annals' might encounter in providing information about computers and computing history. Changes that need to be done to deal with the challenges of the Information Age; Significance of the journal to computing.