Communications of the ACM
Moving Forward
As my tenure as ACM president ends, I find myself reflecting on the past two years.Celebrations!
There is a rhythm in the affairs of the Association for Computing Machinery and June marks our annual celebration of award recipients and the biennial election of new officers.DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor
No Backdoor Required or Expected
I was disappointed by Eugene H. Spafford's "The Strength of Encryption" (Mar. 2016) which conflated law enforcement requests for access to the contents of specific smartphones with the prospect of the government requiring backdoors …DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
The Solution to AI, What Real Researchers Do, and Expectations For CS Classrooms
John Langford on AlphaGo, Bertrand Meyer on Research as Research, and Mark Guzdial on correlating CS classes with laboratory results.COLUMN: News
The Key to Privacy
40 years ago, Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman introduced the public key cryptography used to secure today's online transactions.What Happens When Big Data Blunders?
Big data is touted as a cure-all for challenges in business, government, and healthcare, but as disease outbreak predictions show, big data often fails.Reimagining Search
Search engine developers are moving beyond the problem of document analysis, toward the elusive goal of figuring out what people really want.What's Next For Digital Humanities?
New computational tools spur advances in an evolving field.COLUMN: Inside risks
The Risks of Self-Auditing Systems
Unforeseen problems can result from the absence of impartial independent evaluations.COLUMN: Kode Vicious
What Are You Trying to Pull?
A single cache miss is more expensive than many instructions.COLUMN: The profession of IT
How to Produce Innovations
Making innovations happen is surprisingly easy, satisfying, and rewarding if you start small and build up.COLUMN: Interview
An Interview with Yale Patt
ACM Fellow Professor Yale Patt reflects on his career in industry and academia.COLUMN: Viewpoint
Computer Science Should Stay Young
Seeking to improve computer science publication culture while retaining the best aspects of the conference and journal publication processes.Privacy Is Dead, Long Live Privacy
Protecting social norms as confidentiality wanes.A Byte Is All We Need
A teenager explores ways to attract girls into the magical world of computer science.SECTION: Practice
Nine Things I Didn't Know I Would Learn Being an Engineer Manager
Many of the skills aren't technical at all.The Flame Graph
This visualization of software execution is a new necessity for performance profiling and debugging.Standing on Distributed Shoulders of Giants
Farsighted physicists of yore were danged smart!SECTION: Contributed articles
Improving API Usability
Human-centered design can make application programming interfaces easier for developers to use.Physical Key Extraction Attacks on PCs
Computers broadcast their secrets via inadvertent physical emanations that are easily measured and exploited.SECTION: Review articles
Randnla: Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra
Randomization offers new benefits for large-scale linear algebra computations.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Veritesting Tackles Path-Explosion Problem
"Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting" by Avgerinos et al. proposes an effective technique called veritesting that addresses the scalability limitations of path merging in symbolic execution.Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting
In this article, we present a new technique for generating formulas called veritesting that alternates between static symbolic execution (SSE) and dynamic symbolic execution (DSE).Technical Perspective: Computing with the Crowd
What kinds of problems can be solved with combined human and machine computation? "AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation," by Barowy et al., provides the first steps toward answering this question …Automan: A Platform For Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation
We introduce AutoMan, the first fully automatic crowdprogramming system.COLUMN: Last byte
