Communications of the ACM
Where Is the Science in Computer Science?
The term "computer science" raises expectations, at least to my mind, of an ability to define models and to make predictions about the behavior of computers and computing systems.DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor
When Harm to Conference Reputation Is Self-Inflicted
Citing conferences sponsored by the World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society, Moshe Y. Vardi's Editor's Letter "Predatory Scholarly Publishing" (July 2012) reminded me of my own participation in the WSEAS flagship …DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Online Privacy; Replicating Research Results
Daniel Reed offers three ideas about the future of personal online information management. Ed H. Chi writes about replication of experiments and how experiments are often the beginning, rather than the end, of a scientific inquiry …COLUMN: News
Digging For Drug Facts
With the right approach, data mining can discover unexpected side effects and drug interactions.Redesigning the Data Center
Faced with rising electricity costs, leading companies have begun revolutionizing the way data centers work, from the hardware to the buildings themselves.Computer Science and the Three Rs
A growing sense of crisis prevails as computer science searches for its place in the K--12 curriculum.COLUMN: Technology strategy and management
Reflecting on the Facebook IPO
Exploring some factors that reflect a company's worth.COLUMN: The business of software
The Goldilocks Estimate
Balancing two extremes in project estimation.COLUMN: Inside risks
The Foresight Saga, Redux
Short-term thinking is the enemy of the long-term future.COLUMN: Kode Vicious
A Nice Piece of Code
Colorful metaphors and properly reusing functions.COLUMN: Viewpoint
Computing as If Infrastructure Mattered
Understanding the technical and social fundamentals of the computing infrastructure is essential in the continuously evolving technological realm.The Tyranny of the Clock
Promoting a clock-free paradigm that fits everything learned about programming since Turing.SECTION: Practice
Toward Higher Precision
An introduction to PTP and its significance to NTP practitioners.Fault Injection in Production
Making the case for resilience testing.A Generation Lost in the Bazaar
Quality happens only when someone is responsible for it.SECTION: Contributed articles
Experiments in Social Computation
Human subjects perform a computationally wide range of tasks from only local, networked interactions.Internet Voting in the U.S.
Internet voting is unachievable for the foreseeable future and therefore not inevitable. View a video of Barbara Simons entitled "Internet Voting: An Idea Whose Time Has Not Come."SECTION: Review articles
A Few Useful Things to Know About Machine Learning
Tapping into the "folk knowledge" needed to advance machine learning applications.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: A High-Dimensional Surprise
High-dimensional space is a counterintuitive place, where natural geometric intuitions from the familiar three-dimensional world may lead us badly astray.Spherical Cubes: Optimal Foams from Computational Hardness Amplification
Foam problems are about how to best partition space into bubbles of minimal surface area. We investigate the case where one unit-volume bubble is required to tile d-dimensional space in a periodic fashion according to the standard …Technical Perspective: Graph Embeddings and Linear Equations
Algorithmic advances can come from the most unexpected places. The following paper describes an emerging approach to solving linear systems of equations that relies heavily on techniques from graph theory.A Fast Solver For a Class of Linear Systems
The solution of linear systems is a problem of fundamental theoretical importance but also one with a myriad of applications in numerical mathematics, engineering, and science.COLUMN: Last byte
