"On the Naturalness of Software" by Hindle et al. takes an entirely new approach to providing tools to help build software.Gail C. Murphy From Communications of the ACM | May 2016
We begin with the conjecture that most software is natural, with all the attendant constraints and limitations — and thus, like natural language, it is also likely...Abram Hindle, Earl T. Barr, Mark Gabel, Zhendong Su, Premkumar Devanbu From Communications of the ACM | May 2016
"A Fistful of Bitcoins" examines, in the context of Bitcoin, what we could learn by studying the patterns encoded in a complete record of every single financial...Emin GÜn Sirer From Communications of the ACM | April 2016
Bitcoin has the unintuitive property that while the ownership of money is implicitly anonymous, its flow is globally visible. In this paper we explore this unique...Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole, Grant Jordan, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage From Communications of the ACM | April 2016
"Secure Multiparty Computations on Bitcoin" introduces an exciting new idea for how to provide fairness: leverage Bitcoin’s existing infrastructure for distributed...David Wagner From Communications of the ACM | April 2016
In this work, we propose to use Bitcoin to design fully decentralized protocols that are secure even if no trusted third party is available.Marcin Andrychowicz, Stefan Dziembowski, Daniel Malinowski, Ćukasz Mazurek From Communications of the ACM | April 2016
In "Learning to Name Objects," the authors offer a method to determine a basic-level category name for an object in an image.David Forsyth From Communications of the ACM | March 2016
This paper looks at the problem of predicting category labels that mimic how human observers would name objects.Vicente Ordonez, Wei Liu, Jia Deng, Yejin Choi, Alexander C. Berg, Tamara L. Berg From Communications of the ACM | March 2016
In "A Differential Approach to Undefined Behavior Detection," Wang et al. hypothesize that any time a compiler is able to delete code by using reasoning based on...John Regehr From Communications of the ACM | March 2016
This paper studies undefined behavior arising in systems programming languages such as C/C++. We introduce a new static checker called STACK that precisely identifies...Xi Wang, Nickolai Zeldovich, M. Frans Kaashoek, Armando Solar-Lezama From Communications of the ACM | March 2016
The authors of "Stochastic Program Optimization" have developed a stochastic search technique and applied it to program optimization.
Sumit Gulwani From Communications of the ACM | February 2016
By encoding constraints of transformation correctness as terms in a cost function, and using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler to explore the space of all possible...Eric Schkufza, Rahul Sharma, Alex Aiken From Communications of the ACM | February 2016
The system described in "Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation" refines an important theoretical advance by Gennaro et al. Together, these two works represent...Michael Mitzenmacher, Justin Thaler From Communications of the ACM | February 2016
We introduce Pinocchio, a built system for efficiently verifying general computations while relying only on cryptographic assumptions.
Bryan Parno, Jon Howell, Craig Gentry, Mariana Raykova From Communications of the ACM | February 2016
Hybrid human/computer database systems promise to greatly expand the usefulness of query processing by incorporating the crowd. Such systems raise many implementation...Beth Trushkowsky, Tim Kraska, Michael J. Franklin, Purnamrita Sarkar From Communications of the ACM | January 2016
"Bare-Metal Performance for Virtual Machines with Exitless Interrupts" shows how to enable a virtual machine to attain "bare metal" performance from high-speed...Steve Hand From Communications of the ACM | January 2016
We present ExitLess Interrupts (ELI), a software-only approach for handling interrupts within guest virtual machines directly and securely.Nadav Amit, Abel Gordon, Nadav Har'El, Muli Ben-Yehuda, Alex Landau, Assaf Schuster, Dan Tsafrir From Communications of the ACM | January 2016
"NoDB: Efficient Query Execution on Raw Data Files" investigates extending a DBMS so it can use the file data in situ, without having to load it first.David Maier From Communications of the ACM | December 2015
We here present the design and roadmap of a new paradigm in database systems, called NoDB, which do not require data loading while still maintaining the whole feature...Ioannis Alagiannis, Renata Borovica-Gajic, Miguel Branco, Stratos Idreos, Anastasia Ailamaki From Communications of the ACM | December 2015
"Software Dataplane Verification" takes existing static checking of networks to a new level by checking the real code in the forwarding path of a Click router using...George Varghese From Communications of the ACM | November 2015