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Communications of the ACM

Table of Contents


Is Moore's Party Over?

For almost 50 years we have been riding Moore's Law's exponential curve. Oh, what a ride it has been! No other technology has ever improved at a geometric rate for decades …
DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor

Justice For Jahromi

The computer science community is deeply concerned over the fate of Masaud Jahromi, chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ahlia University in Bahrain …

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 article is now available in its entirety to ACM members …
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM

In Support of Open Reviews; Better Teaching Through Large-Scale Data Mining

Bertrand Meyer writes about his long-standing decision not to provide anonymous reviews. Greg Linden considers how educational practices could be improved through the data mining of students' schoolwork.
DEPARTMENT: CACM online

ACM Offers a New Approach to Self-Archiving

A new service, named the ACM Author-Izer, is a unique tool that enables ACM authors to generate and post links on either their home page or institutional repository that will …
COLUMN: News

Modeling Chaotic Storms

Scientists say improvements to extreme-weather prediction are possible with new weather models and a reinvention of the modeling technologies used to process them.

Hacking Cars

Researchers have discovered important security flaws in modern automobile systems. Will car thieves learn to pick locks with their laptops?

Risky Business

Governments, companies, and individuals have suffered an unusual number of highly publicized data breaches this year. Is there a solution?
COLUMN: Privacy and security

Security Risks in Next-Generation Emergency Services

Sounding the alert on emergency calling system deficiencies.
COLUMN: Economic and business dimensions

What Gets Measured Gets Done

"U.S. broadband is terrible" has become a familiar meme. Given the growing importance of broadband Internet connections, a poor broadband infrastructure would indeed be cause for concern. As it turns out, however, much of this …
COLUMN: Legally speaking

Why the Google Book Settlement Failed - and What Comes Next?

Assessing the implications of the Google Book Search settlement.
COLUMN: Computing ethics

Will Software Engineering Ever Be Engineering?

Considering whether software engineering and engineering can share a profession.
COLUMN: Education

Teaching-Oriented Faculty at Research Universities

Nine teacher-oriented faculty in computer science departments at research universities in the U.S. or Canada describe how their positions work, how they contribute to education, and how departmental policies can influence their …
COLUMN: Viewpoint

Gender Demographics Trends and Changes in U.S. CS Departments

Using the past 10 years of Taulbee Survey data to evaluate female student enrollment across varied academic institutions and departments.
SECTION: Practice

The Software Industry is the Problem

The time has come for software liability laws.

Java Security Architecture Revisited

Difficult technical problems and tough business challenges.

OCaml For the Masses

Why the next language you learn should be functional.
SECTION: Contributed articles

'Natural' Search User Interfaces

Users will speak rather than type, watch video rather than read, and use technology socially rather than alone.

Managing Is Adoption in Ambivalent Groups

Insightful implementers refocus user ambivalence and resistance toward trust and acceptance of new systems.

The Rise and Fall of High Performance Fortran

HPF pioneered a high-level approach to parallel programming but failed to win over a broad user community.
SECTION: Review articles

Nanonetworks: A New Frontier in Communications

Technology able to create devices the size of a human cell calls for new protocols.
SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: Making Untrusted Code Useful

The following paper combines two important themes in secure computing: assurance and information flow control. For high assurance, a system's Trusted Computing Base needs to be small and the policy simple. Flow control is one …

Making Information Flow Explicit in HiStar

Features of the new HiStar operating system permit several novel applications, including privacy-preserving, untrusted virus scanners and a dynamic Web server with only a few thousand lines of trusted code.

Technical Perspective: A Perfect 'Match'

In a breakthrough contribution, the authors of the paper that follows have developed an efficient way to find approximate nearest neighbors for the case of database patches within image data.

The Patchmatch Randomized Matching Algorithm For Image Manipulation

This paper presents a new randomized algorithm for quickly finding approximate nearest neighbor matches between image patches. Our algorithm offers substantial performance improvements over the previous state of the art. 
COLUMN: Last byte

Puzzled: Distances Between Points on the Plane

Welcome to three new puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is as yet (famously) unsolved.
SECTION: Viewpoints: Virtual extension

Information Seeking: Convergence of Search, Recommendations, and Advertising

How to address user information needs amidst a preponderance of data.