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Communications of the ACM

Table of Contents


ACM Books to Launch

ACM is launching a new book program called ACM Books that will enhance its already rich journal and conference publication portfolio. We will begin publishing books in 2014.
DEPARTMENT: From the president

Software at Scale

I have been thinking about the implications of the increasing number of programmable devices and appliances that surround us. For one thing, they all require software to function. Who will write all that software?
DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor

Free the Digital Natives

James Geller raised important questions in his letter to the editor "Beware BYOD" (Sept. 2013) but mixed learning and assessment with the practicalities of supporting multiple devices.
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM

The Lure of Live Coding; The Attraction of Small Data

Mark Guzdial ponders a new set of research questions, while Valerie Barr considers the utility of one person's data.
COLUMN: News

Life Points the Way to a New Template For Chipmaking

While significant obstacles remain, researchers are optimistic about using DNA to guide graphene into complex circuit shapes on silicon.

Seeing the Big Picture

Lensless cameras and other advances in digital imaging, computational optics, signal processing, and big data are transforming how we think about photography.

CS Enrollments Rise . . . at the Expense of the Humanities?

A growing proportion of U.S. college students are earning degrees in computer and information sciences, surprising some in academia.
COLUMN: Emerging markets

Information Technology Impact Sourcing

New ways to contract IT work to base-of-the-pyramid suppliers.
COLUMN: Historical reflections

Patrick Blackett: Providing 'White Heat' to the British Computing Revolution

Reflections on a Nobel Prize-winning physicist's early contributions to computing.
COLUMN: The profession of IT

Design Thinking

Design thinking is the newest fashion for finding better solutions to problems. Combining it with computational thinking offers some real possibilities for improving software design.
COLUMN: Kode Vicious

A Lesson in Resource Management

Waste not memory, want not memory — unless it doesn't matter.
COLUMN: Broadening participation

Bringing Young Women Into Computing Through the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Program

A program to encourage and support girls and women in pursuing their computer science interests.
COLUMN: Viewpoint

From MOOCs to SPOCs

Supplementing the classroom experience with small private online courses.
SECTION: Practice

Making the Web Faster with HTTP 2.0

HTTP continues to evolve.

The Challenge of Cross-Language Interoperability

Interfacing between languages is becoming more important

Intermediate Representation

The increasing significance of intermediate representations in compilers.
SECTION: Contributed articles

Data Science and Prediction

Big data promises automated actionable knowledge creation and predictive models for use by both humans and computers.

Legal Aspects of Interface Accessibility in the U.S.

Accessible information technology is not just good design and a clever way to win new users, it is the law.
SECTION: Review articles

Replicated Data Consistency Explained Through Baseball

A broader class of consistency guarantees can, and perhaps should, be offered to clients that read shared data.

A Survey of Mobility in Information-Centric Networks

'Where's' in a name?
SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: The Cleanest Garbage Collection

In quite a tour de force, the authors of the following paper have built a provably correct real-time garbage collector for reconfigurable hardware (field programmable gate arrays).

And Then There Were None: A Stall-Free Real-Time Garbage Collector For Reconfigurable Hardware

We present a garbage collector synthesized directly to hardware, capable of collecting a heap of uniform objects completely concurrently. These heaps are composed entirely of objects of a fixed shape. Thus, the size of the data …
COLUMN: Last byte

Puzzled: Solutions and Sources

Last month (November 2013) we posted three tricky puzzles concerning coin flipping. Here, we offer solutions to all three. How did you do?

Q&A: Securing the Risk

Peter G. Neumann views computers and their related issues holistically.