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Communications of the ACM

Table of Contents


DEPARTMENT: From the President

To the Members of ACM

This is an update on the efforts of the ACM Executive Committee and Council to draft a longer-term strategic plan for our organization.
DEPARTMENT: Cerf's Up

On QR Codes and Safety

The QR code, a convenient mechanism for delivering digital information to a reader, does not come with any human-readable way to ascertain safety. You have no way to tell whether it is potentially malicious.
DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor

Neighborhood Watch

Vinton G. Cerf wonders "whether there is any possibility of establishing 'watcher networks'" in his October 2022 Communications "Cerf's Up" column. Philip K. Dick describes this problem in his story The Minority Report.
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM

What is Data Science?

Koby Mike and Orit Hazzan consider why multiple definitions are needed to pin down data science.
COLUMN: News

Post-Quantum Cryptography

Cryptographers seek algorithms quantum computers cannot break.

Computational Linguistics Finds Its Voice

Advances in artificial intelligence permit computers to converse with humans in seemingly realistic ways.

Can AI Demonstrate Creativity?

When fed a sufficient amount of training data, artificial intelligence techniques can be used to generate new ideas in several different ways. Is that creativity?
SECTION: Education

Four Ways to Add Active Learning to Computing Courses

How active-learning techniques can benefit students in computing courses.
COLUMN: Kode Vicious

The Elephant in the Room

It is time to get the POSIX elephant off our necks.
COLUMN: Computing Ethics

Ethical AI is Not about AI

The equation Ethics + AI = Ethical AI is questionable.
COLUMN: Viewpoint

Software Engineering of Machine Learning Systems

Seeking to make machine learning more dependable.

Building Machine Learning Models Like Open Source Software

Proposing a community-based system for model development.

The Premature Obituary of Programming

Why deep learning will not replace programming.

An Analysis of Black Faculty in CS Research Departments

Exploring Black faculty at computer science research departments where Ph.D. programs exist.
SECTION: Practice

From Zero to 100

Demystifying zero trust and its implications on enterprise people, process, and technology.

The Arrival of Zero Trust: What Does it Mean?

A discussion of zero-trust enterprise efforts in cybersecurity.
SECTION: Contributed Articles

Extracting the Essential Simplicity of the Internet

Looking past inessential complexities to explain the Internet's simple yet daring design.

(Re)Use of Research Results (Is Rampant)

Prior pessimism about reuse in software engineering research may have been a result of using the wrong methods to measure the wrong things.

HPC Forecast: Cloudy and Uncertain

An examination of how the technology landscape has changed and possible future directions for HPC operations and innovation.
SECTION: Review Articles

The Lean Data Scientist: Recent Advances Toward Overcoming the Data Bottleneck

A taxonomy of the methods used to obtain quality datasets enhances existing resources.
SECTION: Research Highlights

Technical Perspective: Beautiful Symbolic Abstractions for Safe and Secure Machine Learning

"Proving Data-Poisoning Robustness in Decision Trees," by Samuel Drews et al., addresses the challenge of processing an intractably large set of trained models when enumeration is infeasible in a clean, beautiful, and elegant …

Proving Data-Poisoning Robustness in Decision Trees

We present a sound verification technique based on abstract interpretation and implement it in a tool called Antidote, which abstractly trains decision trees for an intractably large space of possible poisoned datasets.
COLUMN: Last Byte

Aftermath Impact

An ancient Roman dispatched to find the greatest technological advances of the time may lose something of far greater importance.