Communications of the ACM
DEPARTMENT: CEO's letter
DEPARTMENT: Executive editor's corner
DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor
DEPARTMENT: CACM online
COLUMN: News
COLUMN: Viewpoints
SECTION: Practice
SECTION: Contributed articles
SECTION: Review article
SECTION: Research highlights
COLUMN: Last byte
SECTION: Virtual extension
On the 10th Anniversary of ACM's Digital Library
When ACM launched its pioneering Digital Library a decade ago, it was one of the first professional societies to offer its members—and the broader computing community—a digital repository of its publications. At launch, the …DEPARTMENT: Executive editor's corner
Jim Gray: Humble Visionary: Humble Visionary
"Visionary" and "humble" are words often used in the same breath by friends and colleagues to describe Gray. His contributions to computer science are too numerous to tackle on …DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor
Letters to the Editor: Even Science Would Benefit From Auctions
In "designing the Perfect Auction" (Aug. 2008), Hal R. Varian noted that such auctions have many practical and obvious applications, including in Web advertising, cooperative robotics …DEPARTMENT: CACM online
A First Look at the Redesigned Site
Here's a first look at the revised Communications Web site. The design is mostly complete, and development is in full swing. These images convey the site's energy and abundance, …COLUMN: News
Damage Control
The U.S. patent system is overdue for reform, but what needs fixing, and how, is a matter of some dispute.Analyzing Online Social Networks
Social network analysis explains why some sites succeed and others fail, how physical and online social networks differ and are alike, and attempts to predict how they will evolve.The Limits of Computability
Computational complexity and intractability may help scientists better understand how humans process information and make decisions.COLUMN: Viewpoints
Economic and Business Dimensions: Search Engine Advertising
Examining a profitable side of the long tail of advertising that is not possible under the traditional broadcast advertising model.Cyber Privacy and Security Pose Difficult Problems
It's not just science or engineering that will be needed to address security concerns, but law, economics, anthropology, and more.Legally Speaking: Quantafying the Value of Patent Exhaustion
Should patents confer power to restrict reuses and redistributions of products embodying the whole or essential parts of inventions?Education: Reprogramming College Preparatory Computer Science
The college preparatory computer science education curriculum must be improved, beginning with the earliest phases of the process.SECTION: Practice
Real-World Concurrency
What does the proliferation of concurrency mean for the software you develop?Software Transactional Memory: Why Is It Only a Research Toy?
The promise of STM may likely be undermined by its overheads and workload applicabilities.CTO Roundtable on Virtualization: Part I
Virtualization technology is hot again, but for the right reasons?SECTION: Contributed articles
A Tribute to Jim Gray
We knew him as both scholar and friend.Jim Gray, Astronomer
How he helped develop the SkyServer, delivering computation directly to terabytes of astronomical data.SECTION: Review article
The Convergence of Social and Technological Networks
Internet-based data on human interaction connects scientific inquiry like never before.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: The Polaris Tableau System
Jim Gray nominated the Polaris paper for the Research Highlights section and wrote the first draft of this Technical Perspective in November 2006. David Patterson revised the essay in August 2008.Polaris: A System For Query, Analysis, and Visualization of Multidimensional Databases
In this paper, we address these demands by presenting the Polaris formalism, a visual query language for precisely describing a wide range of table-based graphical presentations of data.Technical Perspective: Safeguarding Online Information Against Failures and Attacks
Users need storage that is highly reliable (it is not lost) and highly available (accessible when needed). Guaranteeing these requires replication, which …Zyzzyva: Speculative Byzantine Fault Tolerance
A longstanding vision in distributed systems is to build reliable systems from unreliable components. An enticing formulation of this vision is Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication, in which a group of servers …COLUMN: Last byte
Puzzled: Circular Food
Welcome to three new challenging mathematical puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is as yet unsolved, so you may need extra luck with that one. Here, I concentrate on circular food, so …SECTION: Virtual extension
