Communications of the ACM
Giving Students the Competitive Edge
The annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) shines the spotlight on the next generation of problem solvers during their university years. Allow me to recap the highlights of the 36th Annual ACM-ICPC World …DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor
Composable Trees For Configurable Behavior
I concur wholeheartedly with the composability benefits outlined in "Why LINQ Matters: Cloud Composability Guaranteed" (Apr. 2012) due to my experience using composability principles to design and implement the message-dissemination …DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Machine Learning and Algorithms; Agile Development
John Langford poses questions about the direction of research for machine learning and algorithms. Ruben Ortega shares lessons about agile development practices like Scrum.COLUMN: News
Cosmic Simulations
With the help of supercomputers, scientists are now able to create models of large-scale astronomical events.DARPA Shredder Challenge Solved
The eight-person winning team used original computer algorithms to narrow the search space and then relied on human observation to move the pieces into their final positions.Advertising Gets Personal
Online behavioral advertising and sophisticated data aggregation have changed the face of advertising and put privacy in the crosshairs.Broader Horizons
ACM's Committee for Women in Computing (ACM-W) is widening its reach to involve women in industry as well as academia, including community college faculty and students.COLUMN: Emerging markets
Inside the Hermit Kingdom: IT and Outsourcing in North Korea
North Korea has a sizeable IT sector. Some 10,000 professionals work in the field, and many more have IT degrees. They are already engaged in outsourcing contracts for other countries, and are keen to expand further.COLUMN: Education
Will Massive Open Online Courses Change How We Teach?
Sharing recent experiences with the massive open artificial intelligence course developed and conducted by Stanford faculty Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.COLUMN: Privacy and security
The Politics of 'Real Names'
Power, context, and control in networked publics.COLUMN: Kode Vicious
A System Is Not a Product
Stopping to smell the code before wasting time reentering configuration data.COLUMN: Economic and business dimensions
The Internet Is Everywhere, but the Payoff Is Not
Examining the uneven patterns of Internet economics.COLUMN: Viewpoint
Internet Elections: Unsafe in Any Home?
Experiences with electronic voting suggest elections should not be conducted via the Internet.The Ethics of Software Engineering Should Be an Ethics For the Client
Viewing software engineering as a communicative art in which client engagement is essential.SECTION: Practice
Openflow: A Radical New Idea in Networking
An open standard that enables software-defined networking.Extending the Semantics of Scheduling Priorities
Increasing parallelism demands new paradigms.Multitier Programming in Hop
A first step toward programming 21st-century applications.SECTION: Contributed articles
The Loss of Location Privacy in the Cellular Age
How to have the best of location-based services while avoiding the growing threat to personal privacy.To Be or Not To Be Cited in Computer Science
Traditional bias toward journals in citation databases diminishes the perceived value of conference papers and their authors.Process Mining
Using real event data to X-ray business processes helps ensure conformance between design and reality.SECTION: Review articles
Quantum Money
Imagine money you can carry and spend without a trace.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Example-Driven Program Synthesis For End-User Programming
As information technology has come to permeate our society, broader classes of users have developed the need for more sophisticated data manipulation and processing. The following paper focuses on an important emerging area …Spreadsheet Data Manipulation Using Examples
Millions of computer end users need to perform tasks over large spreadsheet data, yet lack the programming knowledge to do such tasks automatically. We present a methodology that allows end users to automate such repetitive tasks …Technical Perspective: Proving Programs Continuous
Proving a program's correctness is usually an all-or-nothing game.Continuity and Robustness of Programs
Computer scientists have long believed that software is different from physical systems in one fundamental way: while the latter have continuous dynamics, the former do not. In this paper, we argue that notions of continuity …COLUMN: Last byte
