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Communications of the ACM

Table of Contents


DEPARTMENT: Cerf's up

Turing Test 2

Computer programs are being used to emulate humans to fool less-sophisticated programs into treating computer-generated actions as if they originate from a human. This is an important practical problem.
DEPARTMENT: Editorial

Toward Sustainable Access: Where Are We Now?

The publishing landscape is changing, and ACM with it. We take this opportunity to describe what ACM thinks about recent trends, recent changes, and the future.
DEPARTMENT: Vardi's insights

How We Lost the Women in Computing

We cannot understand the current gender disparity in computing without understanding the history of women in computing. How did we lose the women in computing? They did not just leave; they were pushed out.
DEPARTMENT: ACM's election

ACM's 2018 General Election

Meet the candidates who introduce their plans—and stands—for the Association.
DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor

Get ACM (and Communications) Out of Politics

Recent editorial policy seems to have let ACM morph into what I would call the left-leaning ACM.
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM

Commenting on Code, Considering Data's Bottleneck

Edwin Torres considers the enduring value of code comments, while Walid Saba wonders if we have overreacted to the knowledge acquisition bottleneck.
COLUMN: News

Shrinking Machines, Cellular Computers

Scientists are using DNA and RNA to build the world's tiniest robots and computing devices.

Using Functions for Easier Programming

Functional programming languages automate many of the details underlying specific operations.

Finding a Healthier Approach to Managing Medical Data

Researchers are exploring ways to put medical data to greater use while better protecting privacy.
COLUMN: Law and technology

Is the Law Ready for Driverless Cars?

Yes, with one big exception.
COLUMN: Privacy and security

Putting Trust in Security Engineering

Proposing a stronger foundation for an engineering discipline to support the design of secure systems.
COLUMN: Education

Scale or Fail

Moving beyond self-selected computer science education in Switzerland.
COLUMN: Viewpoint

The March Into the Black Hole of Complexity

Addressing the root causes of rapidly increasing software complexity.

Science, Policy, and Service

Some thoughts on the way forward.
SECTION: Practice

Research for Practice: Cluster Scheduling for Datacenters

Expert-curated guides to the best of CS research.

Canary Analysis Service

Automated canarying quickens development, improves production safety, and helps prevent outages.

How Is Your Week Going So Far?

Praise matters just as much as money.
SECTION: Contributed articles

More Than the Code: Learning Rules of Rejection in Writing Programs

A teacher and students coding together make explicit the unwritten rules of programming.

Internet Freedom in West Africa: Technical Support for Journalists and Democracy Advocates

The U.S. State Department's Internet Freedom agenda is being adapted to help them communicate without DNS and IP address filtering.

Data Acquisition in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The data comes from multiple optimal sources in parallel, helping reduce addressing and data-acquisition latency.
SECTION: Review articles

Speech Emotion Recognition: Two Decades in a Nutshell, Benchmarks, and Ongoing Trends

Tracing 20 years of progress in making machines hear our emotions based on speech signal properties.
SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: Breaking the Mold of Machine Learning

"Never-Ending Learning" is the latest and one of the most compelling incarnations of Tom Mitchell and his collaborators' research investigating how to broaden the machine learning field.

Never-Ending Learning

In this paper we define more precisely the never-ending learning paradigm for machine learning, and present one case study: the Never-Ending Language Learner (NELL), which achieves a number of the desired properties of a never …
COLUMN: Last byte

Free Press

When all online news and comment can be digitally manipulated, some might recall a more trustworthy way to spread the word.