Communications of the ACM
ACM's Challenges and Opportunities
ACM held a strategic planning retreat last November. The motivation was the realization that the ecosystem that supports scholarly and professional societies is undergoing rapid change, and this change is creating significant …Unconventional Computing
The prospect of increasingly unconventional computing methods that may force us to rethink how we analyze problems for purposes of getting computers to solve them for us.DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor
Responsible Programming Not a Technical Issue
Vinton G. Cerf's "Responsible Programming" (July 2014) raised the interesting question of whether it is responsible to produce software without using state-of-the-art defect-detection-and-validation tools. The answer is legal …DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Finding a Research Job, and Teaching CS in High School
John Langford considers how to stand out when seeking a research position, while Mark Guzdial suggests what teachers need to know to teach computer science at the high school level.COLUMN: News
Still Seeking the Optical Transistor
Optical information handling is a critical staple for communications and the Internet, but using light for computer-scale computation remains a distant dream.Gradual Evolution
Dynamically typed languages adopt features of static typing to cope with growth.Museums Go High-Tech with Digital Forensics
Scientists are using cutting-edge scanning and visualization techniques to wow visitors and find new stories in ancient artifacts.COLUMN: Technology strategy and management
The Bitcoin Ecosystem
Speculating on how the Bitcoin economy might evolve.COLUMN: Inside risks
Risks and Myths of Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage
Considering existing and new types of risks inherent in cloud services.COLUMN: Kode vicious
Outsourcing Responsibility
What do you do when your debugger fails you?COLUMN: The business of software
Vendor: Vidi, Vici
Some hidden costs of outsourcing.COLUMN: Viewpoint
Disrupting and Transforming the -University
Higher education institutions must modify their business models in response to technology-driven influences.A Turing Tale
Assessing the accuracy of popular descriptions of Alan Turing's influences and legacy.SECTION: Practice
Certificate Transparency
Public, verifiable, append-only logs.Security Collapse in the HTTPS Market
Assessing legal and technical solutions to secure HTTPS.Why Is It Taking So Long to Secure Internet Routing?
Routing security incidents can still slip past deployed security defenses.SECTION: Contributed articles
Reading News with Maps By Exploiting Spatial Synonyms
Use this map query interface to search the world, even when not sure what information you seek. (View a related original video at https://vimeo.com/106352925.)Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase
This collaboratively edited knowledgebase provides a common source of data for Wikipedia, and everyone else.SECTION: Review articles
Abstractions For Software-Defined Networks
New abstractions are critical for achieving SDN goals.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Attacking a Problem from the Middle
"Dissection: A New Paradigm for Solving Bicomposite Search Problems," by Itai Dinur, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir, presents an elegant new algorithm for solving a broad class of combinatorial optimization problems …Dissection: A New Paradigm For Solving Bicomposite Search Problems
In this paper, we introduce the new notion of bicomposite search problems, and show that they can be solved with improved combinations of time and space complexities by using a new algorithmic paradigm called dissection.COLUMN: Last byte
