Communications of the ACM
A Tour of ACM's HQ
With a membership fast approaching 100,000, ACM's 170 conferences, 45 periodicals, 34 Special Interest Groups, and 644 professional and student chapters are all supported by 72 staffers.DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor
Workflow Tools For Distributed Teams?
"Orchestrating Coordination in Pluralistic Networks" by Peter J. Denning et al. (Mar. 2010) offered guidance for distributed development teams. I can vouch for the issues …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
The Chaos of the Internet as an External Brain; and More
From the early days of computers, people have speculated that computers would be used to supplement our intelligence. In the last decades, most of the work toward this dream has …DEPARTMENT: CACM online
Interact Naturally
The mouse's days are numbered. Computer interfaces that remove user-system barriers are in the works and are intuitive enough for first-time users to throw away the manual.COLUMN: News
Straightening Out Heavy Tails
A better understanding of heavy-tailed probability distributions can improve activities from Internet commerce to the design of server farms.Beyond the Smart Grid
The electrical grid isn't the only utility acquiring intelligence, as water and gas meters throughout the U.S. gain radio communication capabilities and …Mine Your Business
Researchers are developing new techniques to gauge employee productivity from information flow.Robin Milner: The Elegant Pragmatist
Remembering a rich legacy in verification, languages, and concurrency.CS and Technology Leaders Honored
Awards were recently announced by ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science honoring leaders in the fields of computer science and technology.COLUMN: Privacy and security
Myths and Fallacies of 'Personally Identifiable Information'
Developing effective privacy protection technologies is a critical challenge for security and privacy research as the amount and variety of data collected about individuals increase exponentially.COLUMN: Inside risks
Privacy By Design: Moving From Art to Practice
Designing privacy into systems at the beginning of the development process necessitates the effective translation of privacy principles, models, and mechanisms into system requirements.COLUMN: The profession of IT
The Resurgence of Parallelism
Parallel computation is making a comeback after a quarter century of neglect. Past research can be put to quick use today.COLUMN: Kode Vicious
Plotting Away
Dear KV, I've been working with some code that generates massive data sets, and . . . I'm finding that more and more often I have to explain my data to people who are either …COLUMN: Law and technology
Intel's Rebates: Above Board or Below the Belt?
Over several years, Intel paid billions of dollars to its customers. Was it to force them to boycott products developed by its rival AMD or so they could sell its microprocessors at lower prices?COLUMN: Viewpoint
Institutional Review Boards and Your Research
Researchers in computer science departments throughout the U.S. are violating federal law and their own organization's regulations regarding human subjects research—and in …COLUMN: Interview
An Interview with Ed Feigenbaum
ACM Fellow and A.M. Turing Award recipient Edward A. Feigenbaum, a pioneer in the field of expert systems, reflects on his career.SECTION: Practice
Securing Elasticity in the Cloud
Elastic computing has great potential, but many security challenges remain.Simplicity Betrayed
Emulating a video system shows how even a simple interface can be more complex—and capable—than it appears.A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo
A survey of powerful visualization techniques, from the obvious to the obscure.SECTION: Contributed articles
Managing Scientific Data
Needed are generic, rather than one-off, DBMS solutions automating storage and analysis of data from scientific collaborations.Conference Paper Selectivity and Impact
Conference acceptance rate signals future impact of published conference papers.SECTION: Review articles
Efficiently Searching For Similar Images
New algorithms provide the ability for robust but scalable image search.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Building Confidence in Multicore Software
Surprises may be fun in real life, but not so in software. One approach to avoiding surprises in software is to establish its functional correctness, either by construction …Asserting and Checking Determinism For Multithreaded Programs
The trend towards processors with more and more parallel cores is increasing the need for software that can take advantage of parallelism. Writing correct …Technical Perspective: Learning To Do Program Verification
When you decide to use a piece of software, how do you know it will do what you need it to do? Will it be safe to run? Will it interfere with other software you already have …seL4: Formal Verification of an Operating-System Kernel
We report on the formal, machine-checked verification of the seL4 microkernel from an abstract specification down to its C implementation. We assume correctness of compiler, assembly code, hardware, and boot code.COLUMN: Last byte
Puzzled: Solutions and Sources
Last month (May 2010, p. 120) we posted a trio of brainteasers, including one as yet unsolved, concerning variations on the Ham Sandwich Theorem.Future Tense: How the Net Ensures Our Cosmic Survival
The Internet has changed the way I think, though, ironically, less than I expected.SECTION: Virtual extension
