Communications of the ACM
The Ritual of Academic-Unit Review
Why is it that academic-unit reviews accomplish so little in spite of the significant effort both by the reviewed units and reviewing committees? There are three main reasons, I believe.The Power of Big Ideas
Big ideas are, in some ways, organizing principles that point in the direction of useful research, development, and engineering. Interestingly, these simply stated goals may also motivate the development of business models for …DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor
Rethinking Computational Thinking
How important are skills in computational thinking for computing app constructors and for computing users in general?DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Progress in Computational Thinking, and Expanding the HPC Community
Jeannette Wing considers the proliferation of computational thinking, while Dan Stanzione hopes to bring more HPC practitioners to SC16.COLUMN: News
Graph Matching in Theory and Practice
A theoretical breakthrough in graph isomorphism excites complexity experts, but will it lead to any practical improvements?Accelerating Search
The latest in machine learning helps high-energy physicists handle the enormous amounts of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.Booming Enrollments
The Computing Research Association works to quantify the extent, and causes, of a jump in undergraduate computer science enrollments.Legal Advice on the Smartphone
New apps help individuals contest traffic, parking tickets.COLUMN: Legally speaking
Apple v. Samsung and the Upcoming Design Patent Wars?
Assessing an important recent design patent infringement court decision.COLUMN: Historical reflections
How Charles Bachman Invented the DBMS, a Foundation of Our Digital World
His 1963 Integrated Data Store set the template for all subsequent database management systems.COLUMN: Computing ethics
Big Data Analytics and Revision of the Common Rule
Reconsidering traditional research ethics given the emergence of big data analytics.COLUMN: Viewpoint
Turing's Red Flag
A proposal for a law to prevent artificial intelligence systems from being mistaken for humans.Inverse Privacy
Seeking a market-based solution to the problem of a person's unjustified inaccessibility to their private information.SECTION: Practice
Should You Upload or Ship Big Data to the Cloud?
The accepted wisdom does not always hold true.The Small Batches Principle
Reducing waste, encouraging experimentation, and making everyone happy.Statistics For Engineers
Applying statistical techniques to operations data.SECTION: Contributed articles
Formula-Based Software Debugging
Satisfiability modulo theory solvers can help automate the search for the root cause of observable software errors.Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository
Google's monolithic repository provides a common source of truth for tens of thousands of developers around the world.λ > 4: An Improved Lower Bound on the Growth Constant of Polyominoes
The universal constant λ, the growth constant of polyominoes (think Tetris pieces), is rigorously proved to be greater than 4.SECTION: Review articles
The Rise of Social Bots
Today's social bots are sophisticated and sometimes menacing. Indeed, their presence can endanger online ecosystems as well as our society.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Combining Logic and Probability
In "Probabilistic Theorem Proving," Gogate and Domingos suggest how PTP could be turned in a fast approximate algorithm by sampling from the set of children of a branch point.Probabilistic Theorem Proving
Many representation schemes combining first-order logic and probability have been proposed in recent years. We propose the first method that has the full power of both graphical model inference and first-order theorem proving …Technical Perspective: Mesa Takes Data Warehousing to New Heights
Producing reports at the scale of Google Ads, where billions of clicks happen per day, is the challenge addressed by the Mesa system described in "Mesa: A Geo-Replicated Online Data Warehouse for Google's Advertising System."Mesa: A Geo-Replicated Online Data Warehouse For Google's Advertising System
Mesa is a highly scalable analytic data warehousing system that stores critical measurement data related to Google's Internet advertising business. This paper presents the Mesa system and reports the performance and scale that …COLUMN: Last byte
