Computer

A summary of articles published in Computer 50 and 25 years ago.

As the importance of software in our world increases, so do the duties, skills, and knowledge required of software engineers.

Challenges and competitions offer a compelling platform for engaging students and lifelong learners in new technologies and skill development. This special issue explores a sampling of challenge-based approaches to education and community outreach.

Challenge-based learning fosters critical thinking and raises student interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and in STEM careers. Hands-on, mentor-based programs like FIRST connect youth with industry professionals to solve real-...

The Greenpower program inspires the pursuit of careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics by challenging student teams to design, build, and race a single-seat electric car.

Autodesk's Design for Industry program recruits students to envision creative technical solutions that support industry's needs through the use of professional design tools.

In the past, only governments and large corporations could afford the high cost of earth observation and atmospheric data collection. A high-altitude balloon system called ValBal flies for days at a time at a cost under $1,000, putting it within reach of ...

A hackathon in Palm Beach County, Florida, helped solve organizational and health-access challenges by bringing together the local technology and nonprofit sectors.

An architecture firm used the hackathon model to design spaces that integrate lifelong learning with other aspects of our daily lives, such as working, playing, and socializing.

WiSE-Mnet++ is a holistic simulator that abstracts the key functions of smart-camera networks and models the main operations to account for hardware capabilities, the complexities of visual data, and their associated high-data-rate communication.

Although most systems written in C are statically configurable with a preprocessor, contemporary commercial, open source, and research refactoring engines often do not support preprocessor directives well; even simple refactorings could introduce errors. ...

Smart spaces are becoming increasingly vulnerable from the interplay of cyber and physical entities. A representation of the spaces' topology can reveal security-relevant contextual characteristics, and a visualization tool allows security analysts to ...

Disk-based backup systems use data deduplication to replace redundant data chunks with references. These systems initially supported workloads from their tape-based predecessors, but changes to hardware and applications have forced them to adapt in ...

The authors propose an agile, softwarized infrastructure for the flexible, cost-effective, secure, and privacy-preserving deployment of Internet of Things systems for smart healthcare applications and services.

The Mirai botnet and its variants and imitators are a wake-up call to the industry to better secure Internet of Things devices or risk exposing the Internet infrastructure to increasingly disruptive distributed denial-of-service attacks.

At a threatcasting workshop, participants imagined tomorrow's threats and identified concrete steps we can take today to mitigate them.

Much has been made of the dark web's dangers, but democracy has more to fear from Citizens United and the global surveillance industry than Silk Road or Tor.

Despite the success of IEEE 1687, it has one significant shortcoming: it's difficult to use on devices without an 1149.1 test access port controller. IEEE P1687.1 addresses this problem.

For students, good teaching is key to understanding and unlocking a promising future. For career academicians, we must grapple with our role's innate duality: through teaching we affect the future, but through research we best secure our own.

Recent advances in deep learning for image recognition have spawned numerous challenge-based learning competitions in which participants can use a low-cost GPU graphics card to accomplish goals that required expensive resources in the recent past. ...

It should be easy to connect the institutions of Africa's most populous country with the global tech community. The web extra at https://youtu.be/Nxkbiy89jq0 is an audio recording of author David Alan Grier reading his Global Code column.