Communications of the ACM
Artificial Intelligence: Past and Future
The most dramatic chess match of the 20th century was the May 1997 rematch between the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue and world champion Garry Kasparov, which Deep Blue won. While this victory was considered by many a triumph for …DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor
Software Engineering Is Engineering
I was confounded by the conclusion of Michael Davis's Viewpoint "Will Software Engineering Ever Be Engineering?" (Nov. 2011), mainly because anything I can do in code I can also do in digital hardware, analog hardware, fluidics …ACM President's Letter
Early in 2011, IEEE Computer Society President Sorel Reisman and I began discussing how IEEE-CS and ACM could work together more cooperatively. We …ACM's Annual Report
FY11 was a defining year for ACM as the largest educational and scientific computing society in the world. Many of the initiatives we have set forth over the last few years have taken root and we now see tangible evidence of …DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Understanding CS1 Students; Defective Software
Mark Guzdial writes about why teachers must grasp introductory CS students' theories about computing. Bertrand Meyer argues for the necessity of analyzing large-scale software disasters and publishing a detailed technical study …DEPARTMENT: CACM online
eBooks Will Abound in the ACM Digital Library
ACM is preparing to offer a new and exciting member benefit for 2012; eBooks accessible via the ACM Digital Library! Expanding the eBooks Collections in the ACM Learning Center, ACM will make available full-text versions of eBook …COLUMN: News
Better Medicine Through Machine Learning
Computers that tease out patterns from clinical data could improve patient diagnosis and care.Revamping Storage Performance
Great strides are being made in finding fast alternatives to the slow disks that dominate storage systems, but fast media are not nearly enough.Law and Disorder
International law has always been a murky and Byzantine area. However, the Internet and digital technology have raised the stakes, the risks, and the challenges.Celebration Time
The centennial celebrations of Alan Turing's birth might help turn a quiet British genius into an iconic global hero.Analyzing Apple Products
Researchers untangle the complex web of Apple's global supply chain — and offer lessons for managers and policymakers trying to chart the future course of U.S. industry.John McCarthy, 1927 - 2011
Winner of the 1971 A.M. Turing Award, John McCarthy was a founder of artificial intelligence and inventor of the Lisp programming language.COLUMN: Law and technology
The Yin and Yang of Copyright and Technology
Examining the recurring conflicts between copyright and technology from piano rolls to domain-name filtering.COLUMN: The business of software
The Difference Engine
Observations on cognitive diversity and team performance.COLUMN: Historical reflections
The IBM PC: From Beige Box to Industry Standard
Looking back at three decades of PC platform evolution.COLUMN: Viewpoint
Interfaces For the Ordinary User: Can We Hide Too Much?
Increasing the visibility and access to underlying file structure on consumer devices can vastly improve the user experience.COLUMN: Interview
An Interview with Stephen A. Cook
Stephen A. Cook, winner of the 1982 A.M. Turing Award, reflects on his career.SECTION: Practice
Creating Languages in Racket
Sometimes you just have to make a better mousetrap.Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet
Networks without effective AQM may again be vulnerable to congestion collapse.I/O Virtualization
Decoupling a logical device from its physical implementation offers many compelling advantages.SECTION: Contributed articles
The State of Phishing Attacks
Looking past the systems people use, they target the people using the systems.Flexible Experimentation in Wireless Sensor Networks
Virtual testbeds model them by seamlessly integrating physical, simulated, and emulated sensor nodes and radios in real time.Long-Term Confidentiality of PKI
How to guarantee files encrypted and transmitted today stay confidential for years to come.SECTION: Review articles
(Computer) Vision Without Sight
Computer vision holds the key for the blind or visually impaired to explore the visual world.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Where Do People Draw Lines?
Computer graphics once focused exclusively on realism. The field eventually broadened to include other pictorial styles. The breadth of situations in which line drawings are …Where Do People Draw Lines?
This paper presents the results of a study in which artists made line drawings intended to convey specific 3D shapes.Technical Perspective: Content-Centric Networking
Much has changed in the 50 years since the invention of packet switching and the early network designs and deployments that would evolve into today's Internet. The designs …Networking Named Content
Current network use is dominated by content distribution and retrieval yet current networking protocols are designed for conversations between hosts. We present Content-Centric Networking which uses content chunks as a primitive …COLUMN: Last byte
