Today’s public displays effectively disappear: people have become so accustomed to their low utility that they ignore them. In contrast to Mark Weiser’s influential vision of the “Computer for the 21st Century,” however, public displays of the 21st century should not disappear. Instead they should become the backbone of a new global communications medium. The creation of this new communications...

Several success stories of open source (OS) products have been seen during last decade. Due to the economical importance of the products, it is important to know who are the ones who have the largest influence to the products. Is there a dominant player in developing communities? In this paper the aspect is studied with respect to the Linux Kernel community. We show that the influence is center...

A number of unsustainable trends, such as those related to climate change, biological diversity, environmental pollution, depleting fish stocks, deforestation, accumulating radioactive waste threaten people in different parts of the world and globally. In addition to this we are experiencing a financial crisis. Something appears to be seriously wrong with the mental maps of influential actors i...

The rise of the blogosphere has empowered the average consumer to influence the public perception and profitability of brands. As such, marketing organizations need to be aware of what people are saying in influential blogs, how the expressed opinions could impact their business, and how to extract business insight and value from these blogs. This has given rise to the emerging discipline of So...

Version control helps coordinating a group of people working concurrently to achieve a shared objective. Concurrency control helps coordinating a group of threads working concurrently to achieve a shared objective. The seemingly superficial analogy between version control and concurrency control is deeper than expected. A comparison of three major flavors of version control systems (exemplified...

Rajeev Motwani was a pre-eminent theoretical computer scientist of his generation, a technology thought leader, an insightful venture capitalist, and a mentor to some of the most influential entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley in the first decade of the 21st century. This article presents an overview of Rajeev’s research, and provides a window to his early life and the various influences that shape...