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Communications of the ACM

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ACM's Copyright Policy

Addressing the needs of authors, readers, and the Association.

In the Virtual Extension

To ensure the timely publication of articles, Communications created the Virtual Extension to bring readers high-quality articles in an online-only format. The following articles are now available in their entirety to ACM members …
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM

From Idea to Product; How Schools of Education Can Help CS

Daniel Reed discusses how researchers communicate their project ideas to companies and product groups and get them successfully adopted. Mark Guzdial considers whether schools of education could create more high school CS teachers …
DEPARTMENT: CACM online

ACM Technews Now Available in the Android Market

After the successful launch of the ACM TechNews iPhone and iPad apps last year, ACM now introduces an Android version for both Android smartphones and tablets. ACM will continue to provide new and compatible options for accessing …
COLUMN: News

Improving Brain-Computer Interfaces

Researchers are demonstrating advances in restorative BCI systems that are giving paralyzed individuals more effective ways to communicate, move, and interact with their environment.

Seeing Is Not Enough

A new DARPA program is teaching cameras visual intelligence — how to spot and understand human behavior.

Living in a Digital World

Technology has created new opportunities to connect and interact. Yet, researchers are increasingly concerned that heavy technology usage is changing people's behavior in less than desirable ways.

Success at 16

A high school student wins first prize from ACM for developing a faster keyboard layout.
COLUMN: Technology strategy and management

The Platform Leader's Dilemma

Studying the lessons learned from past and present platform leaders.
COLUMN: Kode vicious

File-System Litter

Cleaning up your storage space quickly and efficiently.
COLUMN: Inside risks

Modernizing the Danish Democratic Process

Examining the socio-technological issues involved in Denmark's decision to pursue the legalization of electronic elections.
COLUMN: The business of software

Testing: Failing to Succeed

There are two situations in software testing that scare testers: when they see "too many" defects and when they do not see "enough."
COLUMN: Viewpoint

Rebooting the CS Publication Process

A proposal for a new cost-free open-access publication model for computer science papers.
SECTION: Practice

Abstraction in Hardware System Design

Applying lessons from software languages to hardware languages using Bluespec SystemVerilog.

The World According to LINQ

Big data is about more than size, and LINQ is more than up to the task.

Verification of Safety-Critical Software

Avionics software safety certification is achieved through objective-based standards.
SECTION: Contributed articles

From Blitzkrieg to Bitskrieg: The Military Encounter with Computers

Expect more cyberwarfare on the conventional battlefield and less against civilian infrastructure . . . assuming containment is possible.

Computational Journalism

How computer scientists can empower journalists, democracy's watchdogs, in the production of news in the public interest.
SECTION: Review articles

Biology as Reactivity

Exploring the connection of biology with reactive systems to better understand living systems.
SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: Power Efficiency as the #1 Design Constraint

Moore's Law, and associated observations by Bob Dennard, describe key technical foundations  of the semiconductor industry …

Understanding Sources of Ineffciency in General-Purpose Chips

To better understand what improvement in processor efficiency is possible, we quantify the performance and energy overheads of a 720p HD H.264 encoder running on a CMP system. We explore methods to eliminate these overheads by …

Technical Perspective: A Better Way to Learn Features

A typical machine learning program uses weighted combinations of features to discriminate between classes or to predict real-valued outcomes. The art of machine learning is …

Unsupervised Learning of Hierarchical Representations with Convolutional Deep Belief Networks

There has been much interest in unsupervised learning of hierarchical generative models such as deep belief networks (DBNs); however, scaling such models to full-sized, high-dimensional images remains a difficult problem. 

Technical Perspective: Visual Reconstruction

Nearly 460,000 Flickr pictures were used to create detailed three-dimensional geometry and colors of famous landmarks and monuments in Rome, Venice, and …

Building Rome in a Day

We present a system that can reconstruct 3D geometry from large, unorganized collections of photographs. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct city-scale image collections with more than a hundred …
COLUMN: Last byte

Future Tense: A Person of Influence

Inferred connections map our past and predict our future.
SECTION: Contributed articles: Virtual extension

Don't Turn Social Media Into Another 'Literary Digest' Poll

The power to predict outcomes based on Twitter data is greatly exaggerated, especially for political elections.

Computing For the Masses

A new paradigm is needed to cope with the application, technology, and discipline challenges to our computing profession in the coming decades.