acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

Table of Contents


Openism, IPism, Fundamentalism, and Pragmatism

Ownership of intellectual property is fast becoming a battleground in the 21st century, with today's economy being increasingly driven by large corporations dependent on these intangible assets.

ACM and the Professional Programmer

ACM has not grown in a way commensurate with the evident growth of programmers in the profession. The question is whether and how ACM can adapt its activities and offerings to increase the participation of these professionals …
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM

Why the U.S. Is Not Ready For Mandatory CS Education

Mark Guzdial considers the consequences of requiring all schoolchildren to study computer science.
COLUMN: News

Researchers Probe Security Through Obscurity

Obfuscation protects code by making it so impenetrable that access to it won't help a hacker understand how it works.

Surgical Robots Deliver Care More Precisely

Computer-controlled robotic surgical systems and tumor-targeting radiation systems provide a greater level of precision in treatment than doctors alone can provide.

Hello, My Name Is . . .

Facial recognition and privacy concerns.
COLUMN: Privacy and security

Can You Engineer Privacy?

The challenges and potential approaches to applying privacy research in engineering practice.
COLUMN: Education

Fostering Computational Literacy in Science Classrooms

An agent-based approach to integrating computing in secondary-school science courses.
COLUMN: Global computing

Private Then Shared?

Designing for the mobile phone to shared PC pipeline.
COLUMN: Kode Vicious

Forked Over

Shortchanged by open source.
COLUMN: Viewpoint

Researching the Robot Revolution

Considering a program for cross-disciplinary research between computer scientists and economists studying the effects of computers on work.

Slow Search

Seeking to enrich the search experience by allowing for extra time and alternate resources.
SECTION: Practice

Bringing Arbitrary Compute to Authoritative Data

Many disparate use cases can be satisfied with a single storage system.

Quality Software Costs Money - Heartbleed Was Free

How to generate funding for free and open source software.

Undergraduate Software Engineering

Addressing the needs of professional software development.
SECTION: Contributed articles

Reshaping Terrorist Networks

To destabilize terrorist organizations, the <code>STONE</code> algorithms identify a set of operatives whose removal would maximally reduce lethality.

Example-Based Learning in Computer-Aided STEM Education

Example-based reasoning techniques developed for programming languages also help automate repetitive tasks in education.
SECTION: Review articles

Efficient Maximum Flow Algorithms

Though maximum flow algorithms have a long history, revolutionary progress is still being made.
SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: Getting Consensus For Data Replication

The following paper is a breakthrough in which the authors offer a formula to calculate the probability of reading data that was not written by one of the K most recent writes.

Quantifying Eventual Consistency with PBS

Eventual consistency is often "good enough" for practitioners given its latency and availability benefits. In this work, we explain this phenomenon and demonstrate that eventually consistent systems regularly return consistent …
COLUMN: Last byte

Puzzled: Paths and Matchings

Consider two simple games played by Alice and Bob on a checkerboard or, more generally, on a graph. The games look different, but, as we know, looks can be deceiving . . .