Communications of the ACM
Revisiting ACM Europe
ACM Europe was launched in October 2009 in Paris. Since then, the ACM Europe Council has grown to 21 members with a good mix of nationality (although mostly European, of course), gender, and research interests.DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor
Credit Non-Anonymous Reviewers with a Name
I agree with Bertrand Meyer's blog "Fixing the Process of Computer Science Refereeing" (Nov. 2011) and "Why I Sign My Reviews" in favor of open reviewing but suggest we go further with the quality of refereeing by rewarding …DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Researchers' Big Data Crisis; Understanding Design and Functionality
Michael Stonebraker issues a call to arms about research groups' data-management problems. Jason Hong discusses the nature of functionality with respect to design.COLUMN: News
The Science of Better Science
Researchers are exploring networked computational analysis, formal classification, and topic modeling to better identify relevant scientists, ideas, and trends.The War Against Botnets
Increasingly sophisticated botnets have emerged during the last several years. However, security researchers, businesses, and governments are attacking botnets from a number of different angles — and sometimes winning.The Social Life of Robots
Researchers are trying to build robots capable of working together with minimal human supervision. But will they ever learn to get along?ACM Fellows Inducted
Forty-six men and women are recognized as 2011 ACM Fellows.COLUMN: Economic and business dimensions
Incentive Auctions
Reallocating valuable wireless spectrum can generate billions of dollars in revenue to the U.S. federal government while also benefiting consumers.COLUMN: Education
Peer Instruction: A Teaching Method to Foster Deep Understanding
How the computing education community can learn from physics education.COLUMN: Inside risks
Yet Another Technology Cusp: Confusion, Vendor Wars, and Opportunities
Considering the unexpected risks associated with seemingly minor technological changes.COLUMN: Kode Vicious
Wanton Acts of Debuggery
Keep your debug messages clear, useful, and not annoying.COLUMN: Privacy and security
Emotion and Security
Examining the role of human emotional response in making complex security-related decisions.COLUMN: Viewpoint
What Have We Learned About Software Engineering?
Upon closer examination, everything old appears to be new again in the realm of software engineering.SECTION: Practice
Bufferbloat: What's Wrong With the Internet?
A discussion with Vint Cerf, Van Jacobson, Nick Weaver, and Jim Gettys.You Don't Know Jack About Shared Variables or Memory Models
Data races are evil.Advances and Challenges in Log Analysis
Logs contain a wealth of information to help manage systems.SECTION: Contributed articles
Text-Mining the Voice of the People
Statistical techniques help public leaders turn text in unstructured citizen feedback into responsive e-democracy.Programming By Optimization
Avoid premature commitment, seek design alternatives, and automatically generate performance-optimized software.Software as a Service For Data Scientists
Globus Online manages fire-and-forget file transfers for big-data, high-performance scientific collaborations.SECTION: Review articles
Progress and Challenges in Intelligent Vehicle Area Networks
Vehicle area networks form the backbone of future intelligent transportation systems.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Compiling What to How
The following paper by Viktor Kuncak et al. integrates declarative programming into a general-purpose language, allowing one to escape the host language when a subproblem can be solved declaratively.Software Synthesis Procedures
Automated synthesis of program fragments from specifications can make programs easier to write and easier to reason about. To integrate synthesis into programming languages, software synthesis algorithms should behave in a predictable …Technical Perspective: Modeling High-Dimensional Data
Data in high dimension is difficult to visualize and understand. This has always been the case and is even more apparent now with the availability of large high-dimensional datasets and the need to make sense of them.Disentangling Gaussians
The Gaussian mixture model is one of the oldest and most widely used statistical models. Our work focuses on the case where the mixture consists of a small but unknown number of Gaussian "components" that may overlapCOLUMN: Last byte
