Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: SQL on an Encrypted Database
There is some risk in trusting the cloud providers with sensitive data. Why not encrypt the data stored in cloud services?
From Communications of the ACM
CryptDB: Processing Queries on an Encrypted Database
An ideal solution to satisfying the dual goals of protecting data confidentiality and running computations is to enable a server to compute over encrypted data,...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: For Better or Worse, Benchmarks Shape a Field
Like other IT fields, computer architects initially reported incomparable results. We quickly saw the folly of this approach. We then went through a sequence...
From Communications of the ACM
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Power, Performance, and Upheaval
The past 10 years have delivered two significant revolutions. Microprocessor design has been transformed — leading to multicore processors. And an entirely new...
From Communications of the ACM
Exact Matrix Completion via Convex Optimization
Suppose that one observes an incomplete subset of entries selected from a low-rank matrix. When is it possible to complete the matrix and recover the entries that...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Reconstructing the Unknown, Balancing Structure and Uncertainty
The problem of estimating or reconstructing an unknown structured object from incomplete, partial, noisy measurements is a fundamental one in scientific and technological...
From Communications of the ACM
Searching the Village: Models and Methods For Social Search
With Aardvark, a social search engine, users ask a question, either by IM, e-mail, Web input, text message, or voice. Aardvark then routes the question to the person...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Who Knows?: Searching For Expertise on the Social Web
It is difficult to remember what people had to do to find the answer to a question before the Web. One option might be to call a friend who might know the answer...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Benefits of Capability-Based Protection
Affordable personal computing hardware and the usable GUI-based PC operating systems made the vision of "a computer on every desktop and in every home" a reality...
From Communications of the ACM
A Taste of Capsicum: Practical Capabilities For Unix
Capsicum is a lightweight operating system capability and sandbox framework planned for inclusion in FreeBSD 9. Capsicum extends, rather than replaces, UNIX APIs...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Content-Centric Networking
Much has changed in the 50 years since the invention of packet switching and the early network designs and deployments that...
From Communications of the ACM
Networking Named Content
Current network use is dominated by content distribution and retrieval yet current networking protocols are designed for conversations between hosts. We present...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Power Efficiency as the #1 Design Constraint
Moore's Law, and associated observations by Bob Dennard, describe key technical...
From Communications of the ACM
Understanding Sources of Ineffciency in General-Purpose Chips
To better understand what improvement in processor efficiency is possible, we quantify the performance and energy overheads of a 720p HD H.264 encoder running on...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Making Browser Extensions Secure
Vulnerabilities in browsers and their extensions have become the primary venue through which cyber criminals compromise the security...
From Communications of the ACM
Vetting Browser Extensions For Security Vulnerabilities with VEX
The browser has become the de facto platform for everyday computation and a popular target for attackers of computer systems. Among the many potential attacks that...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Skintroducing the Future
Two critical goals for mobile devices seem intrinsically in conflict. For carrying, the smaller the better. Yet for...
From Communications of the ACM
Skinput: Appropriating the Skin as an Interactive Canvas
Skinput is a technology that appropriates the skin as an input surface by analyzing mechanical vibrations that propagate through the body. Specifically, we resolve...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Sketches Get Sketchier
Are data synopses — such as the hash-based sketches discussed by Li and König — still needed for querying massive...
From Communications of the ACM