The news flashed last September that Microsoft Research closed down its Silicon Valley Lab. While the specifics may have been surprising, these actions are entirely consistent with the historical pattern of the rise and …
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 5
Oral interaction with computers is increasingly common. Pretty much anywhere you use a keyboard, Google's applications now allow you to speak. This leads me to wonder whether it is possible to write significant programs by …
Vinton G. Cerf
Page 7
DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor
"Reading News with Maps by Exploiting Spatial Synonyms" (Oct. 2014) was an impressive and informative description of how a map-query interface should work. I am not sure if the authors intend to broaden their scope to include …
CACM Staff
Pages 8-9
This is an extraordinary time to be part of the world's largest educational and scientific society in computing. Membership is at a record high, ACM continues to expand its global reach, and ACM's position at the forefront of …
CACM Staff
Pages 11-15
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Valerie Barr considers outcomes from the Grace Hopper Celebration, while Michael Stonebraker ponders the past, present, and possible future of the "Hadoop stack."
Valerie Barr, Michael Stonebraker
Pages 18-19
COLUMN: News
Long relegated to the statistical backburner, Bayesian Inference is undergoing a renaissance.
Erica Klarreich
Pages 21-24
Transportation engineers and city planners are looking to information technology to redefine traffic management in urban areas. With the opportunity, however, comes risks.
Samuel Greengard
Pages 25-27
You would be surprised by how much they know about you, and what they are doing with your information.
Gary Anthes
Pages 28-30
The increase reflects the escalating impact of computing on daily life, through the innovations and technologies it enables.
Lawrence M. Fisher
Page 31
COLUMN: Technology strategy and management
Considering the evolving relationship between established companies and their sharing-economy counterparts.
Michael A. Cusumano
Pages 32-34
COLUMN: Law and technology
Searching for an answer to the question of how much responsibility search engine operators should bear for privacy-related issues connected to search engine results.
Lee A. Bygrave
Pages 35-37
COLUMN: The business of software
When more work means less done.
Phillip G. Armour
Pages 38-39
COLUMN: Historical reflections
Has the history of computing taken a tragic turn?
Thomas Haigh
Pages 40-44
COLUMN: Viewpoint
Time will tell if smartwatches will find their niche.
Reza Rawassizadeh, Blaine A. Price, Marian Petre
Pages 45-47
Yes, but this may not be as bad as it sounds…
Hermann Maurer
Pages 48-51
The Turing Award gives us a unique opportunity to become ambassadors of our wonderful field. It increases our outside visibility and enables us to build bridges to other disciplines.
Silvio Micali
Pages 52-53
SECTION: Practice
Use the database built for your access model.
Rick Richardson
Pages 54-61
Trust, but verify.
Geetanjali Sampemane
Pages 62-65
Designing locking primitives with performance in mind.
Davidlohr Bueso
Pages 66-74
SECTION: Contributed articles
Results showed more published papers, collaboration with U.S. colleagues, preference for English, and uneven research impact.
Virender Singh, Alicia Perdigones, José Luis Garcia, Ignacio Cañas-Guerroro, Fernando R. Mazarrón
Pages 76-85
The system should let users incrementally direct their search toward relevant, though not initially obvious, information.
Tuukka Ruotsalo, Giulio Jacucci, Petri Myllymäki, Samuel Kaski
Pages 86-92
SECTION: Review articles
Exploring the similarities and differences between distributed computations in biological and computational systems.
Saket Navlakha, Ziv Bar-Joseph
Pages 94-102
SECTION: Research highlights
"Neural Acceleration for General-Purpose Approximate Programs" demonstrates the significant advantages in cost, power, and latency through approximate computing.
Ravi Nair
Page 104
This paper describes a new approach that uses machine learning-based transformations to accelerate approximation-tolerant programs.
Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, Adrian Sampson, Luis Ceze, Doug Burger
Pages 105-115
COLUMN: Last byte
Human life is filled with illusions, so virtual worlds are not especially unreal.
William Sims Bainbridge
Pages 128-ff