"Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable," by Eyal and Sirer, questions the 2009 Bitcoin white paper's implicit assumption of perfect information—that...Sharon Goldberg, Ethan Heilman From Communications of the ACM | July 2018
We propose a practical modification to the Bitcoin protocol that protects Bitcoin in the general case.
Ittay Eyal, Emin GÜn Sirer From Communications of the ACM | July 2018
In "Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling," Curtsinger and Berger describe causal profiling, which tell programmers exactly how much speed-up bang...Landon P. Cox From Communications of the ACM | June 2018
This paper introduces causal profiling. Unlike past profiling approaches, causal profiling indicates exactly where programmers should focus their optimization efforts...Charlie Curtsinger, Emery D. Berger From Communications of the ACM | June 2018
"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...Oren Etzioni From Communications of the ACM | May 2018
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)...T. Mitchell, W. Cohen, E. Hruschka, P. Talukdar, B. Yang, J. Betteridge, A. Carlson, B. Dalvi, M. Gardner, B. Kisiel, J. Krishnamurthy, N. Lao, K. Mazaitis, T. Mohamed, N. Nakashole, E. Platanios, A. Ritter, M. Samadi, B. Settles, R. Wang, D. Wijaya, A. Gupta, X. Chen, A. Saparov, M. Greaves, J. Welling From Communications of the ACM | May 2018
The authors of "Learning Topic Models—Provably and Efficiently," developed a new method for fitting topic models and at large scale.
David M. Blei From Communications of the ACM | April 2018
This article shows that some new theoretical algorithms that have provable guarantees can be adapted to yield highly practical tools for topic modeling.
Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge, Yoni Halpern, David Mimno, Ankur Moitra, David Sontag, Yichen Wu, Michael Zhu From Communications of the ACM | April 2018
When a serious security vulnerability is discovered in the SSL/TLS protocol, one would naturally expect a rapid response. "Analysis of SSL Certificate Reissues...Kenny Paterson From Communications of the ACM | March 2018
We use Heartbleed, a widespread OpenSSL vulnerability from 2014, as a natural experiment to determine whether administrators are properly managing their X.509 certificates...Liang Zhang, David Choffnes, Tudor Dumitraş, Dave Levin, Alan Mislove, Aaron Schulman, Christo Wilson From Communications of the ACM | March 2018
In "Time-Inconsistent Planning: A Computational Problem in Behavioral Economics," Kleinberg and Oren describe a graph-theoretic framework for task planning with...Nicole Immorlica From Communications of the ACM | March 2018
We propose a graph-theoretic model of tasks and goals, in which dependencies among actions are represented by a directed graph, and a time-inconsistent agent constructs...Jon Kleinberg, Sigal Oren From Communications of the ACM | March 2018
"Which Is the Fairest (Rent Division) of Them All?" focuses on the problem of rent division, and stands out in the variety of techniques applied to arrive at a...Vincent Conitzer From Communications of the ACM | February 2018
What is a fair way to assign rooms to several housemates, and divide the rent between them? We develop a general algorithmic framework that enables the computation...Kobi Gal, Ariel D. Procaccia, Moshe Mash, Yair Zick From Communications of the ACM | February 2018
What to do about buggy compilers? The authors of "Practical Verification of Peephole Optimizations with Alive" give us a compelling and practical answer.
Steve Zdancewic From Communications of the ACM | February 2018
We created Alive, a domain-specific language for writing correct peephole optimizations and for automatically either proving them correct or else generating counterexamples...Nuno P. Lopes, David Menendez, Santosh Nagarakatte, John Regehr From Communications of the ACM | February 2018
"Halide: Decoupling Algorithms from Schedules for High-Performance Image Processing" by Ragan-Kelley et al. on the image processing language Halide explores a substantially...Manuel Chakravarty From Communications of the ACM | January 2018
We propose a new programming language for image processing pipelines, called Halide, that separates the algorithm from its schedule.
Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Andrew Adams, Dillon Sharlet, Connelly Barnes, Sylvain Paris, Marc Levoy, Saman Amarasinghe, Frédo Durand From Communications of the ACM | January 2018
The incentive auction scenario provides the backdrop for the breathtaking research contribution presented by Newman et al. in "Deep Optimization for Spectrum Repacking...David C. Parkes From Communications of the ACM | January 2018
This paper describes the process by which we built the SAT-based Feasibility Checker, a crucial element of the 2016-17 U.S. FCC "incentive auction" design.
Neil Newman, Alexandre Fréchette, Kevin Leyton-Brown From Communications of the ACM | January 2018