Communications of the ACM
Revisiting the Publication Culture in Computing Research
In my May 2009 Editor's Letter, "Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research," I addressed the publication culture of our field: "As far as I know, we are the only scientific …DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor
Too Much Debate?
In his editor's letter "More Debate, Please!" (Jan. 2010), Moshe Y. Vardi made a plea for controversial topics on these pages, citing a desire to "let truth emerge from vigorous …In the Virtual Extension
Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Too Much Programming Too Soon?
Mark Guzdial and Judy Robertson discuss the role of programming in introductory computer science.DEPARTMENT: CACM online
Granting a Second Life
Almost 90% of what we learn comes from reading, estimates say, and the path that online information takes to your brain is less direct than most. TheCommunications Web site …COLUMN: News
CS and Biology's Growing Pains
Biologists can benefit from learning and using the tools of computer science, but several real-world obstacles remain.Engineering the Web's Third Decade
As Web technologies move beyond two-way interactive capabilities to facilitate more dynamic and pervasive experiences, the Web is quickly advancing toward its third major upgrade.Tracking Garbage
Researchers are focusing on the so-called "removal chain" in an attempt to save landfill space, improve recycling rates, and trim the flow of toxic materials into the environment.Katayanagi Prizes and Other CS Awards
Donald E. Knuth, Jon Kleinberg, Andrew Herbert, and other members of the computer science community were recently honored for their innovative research and service.COLUMN: Economic and business dimensions
Gaming Will Save Us All
How gaming, as the first media market to successfully transition toward media-as-a-service, is an exemplar for a similar evolutionary transition of content and entertainment.COLUMN: Legally speaking
Only Technological Processes Are Patentable
The U.S. Supreme Court will narrow the universe of process innovations that can be patented to those that are "technological," but what will that mean for software?COLUMN: Computing ethics
The Ethics Beat
Surveying the increasing variety and nature of ethical challenges encountered by computing researchers and practitioners.COLUMN: The profession of IT
Orchestrating Coordination in Pluralistic Networks
Learning to build virtual teams of people of diverse backgrounds is an urgent challenge.COLUMN: Broadening participation
Hiring and Developing Minority Faculty at Research Universities
Emphasizing the importance of creating more programs and investing more funding toward the goal of developing minority faculty at research universities.COLUMN: IT policy
Making the Case For Computing
Seeking funding for current and future computing initiatives requires both a strong argument and a broad community of supporters.COLUMN: Viewpoint
Privacy on the Data Web
Considering the nebulous question of ownership in the virtual realm.SECTION: Practice
GFS: Evolution on Fast-Forward
Kirk McKusick and Sean Quinlan discuss the origin and evolution of the Google File System.Toward Energy-Efficient Computing
What will it take to make server-side computing more energy efficient?Global IT Management: Structuring For Scale, Responsiveness, and Innovation
To succeed on a global scale, businesses should focus on a trio of key elements.SECTION: Contributed articles
Chasing the AIDS Virus
With no HIV vaccine in sight, virologists need to know how the virus will react to a given combination drug therapy.Virtual Computing Initiative at a Small Public University
Student participation and resulting expertise is as valuable as having the high-performance resource itself.SECTION: Review article
Making Decisions Based on the Preferences of Multiple Agents
Computer scientists have made great strides in how decision-making mechanisms are used.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: A First Glimpse of Cryptography's Holy Grail
We all know how to protect our private or most valuable data from unauthorized access: encrypt it. Still, the use of encryption to protect valuable or sensitive data can be …Computing Arbitrary Functions of Encrypted Data
Suppose that you want to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. This separation is possible: we describe a "fully homomorphic" encryption scheme that keeps data private, but that allows a …Technical Perspective: Seeing the Trees, the Forest, and Much More
Bristling with cameras, microphones, and other sensors, today's portable phones are nevertheless essentially deaf and blind. How shall we go about building machines that can …Using the Forest to See the Trees: Exploiting Context For Visual Object Detection and Localization
Recognizing objects in images is an active area of research in computer vision. However, most of the algorithms for detecting objects perform an exhaustive search across all locations and scales in the image comparing local image …COLUMN: Last byte
Puzzled: Solutions and Sources
Last month (February 2010, p. 120) we posted a trio of brainteasers, including one as yet unsolved, concerning the breaking of a bar of chocolate.Future Tense: The Primal Cue
Future Tense, one of the revolving features on this page, presents stories and essays from the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, their boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what …SECTION: Virtual extension
