Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Where the Chips May Fall
The traditional approach to circuit design has been to build chips that work correctly at extreme-case process...
From Communications of the ACM
Apprenticeship Learning For Helicopter Control
Autonomous helicopter flight is widely regarded to be a highly challenging control problem. As helicopters are highly unstable and exhibit complicated dynamical...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Ultimate Pilot Program
In one scene from The Matrix, two leaders of the human resistance are trapped on the roof of a skyscraper. The only means of escape is by helicopter, which neither...
From Communications of the ACM
Securing Frame Communication in Browsers
Many Web sites embed third-party content in frames, relying on the browser's security policy to protect against malicious content. However, frames provide insufficient...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Reframing Security For the Web
The web has brought exciting new functionality while simultaneously requiring new mechanisms to make it secure. We've...
From Communications of the ACM
Scalable Synchronous Queues
In a thread-safe concurrent queue, consumers typically wait for producers to make data available. In a synchronous queue, producers similarly wait for consumers...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Highly Concurrent Data Structures
The advent of multicore architectures has produced a Renaissance in the study of highly concurrent data structures.
From Communications of the ACM
Lest We Remember: Cold-Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys
DRAM retains its contents for several seconds after power is lost. Although DRAM becomes less reliable when it is not refreshed, it is not immediately erased, and...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Chilly Sense of Security
Many systems rely on keeping a master key secret. But technological progress can undermine old assumptions.
From Communications of the ACM
Relative Fitness Modeling
Relative fitness is a new approach to modeling the performance of storage devices. In contrast to a conventional model, which predicts the performance of an application's...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Disk Array Models For Automating Storage Management
Large disk arrays are everywhere. When we shop at an Internet retailer, the product and account data come from a disk...
From Communications of the ACM
Building Secure Web Applications With Automatic Partitioning
Swift is a new, principled approach to building Web applications that are secure by construction. Swift automatically partitions application code while providing...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Tools For Information to Flow Securely and Swift-ly
Back in the old days of the Web (before 1995), Web browsers were fairly simple devices. The server's Web interface was simple enough that an auditor could at least...
From Communications of the ACM
Seam Carving For Media Retargeting
Traditional image resizing techniques are oblivious to the content of the image when changing its width or height. In contrast, media (i.e., image and video) retargeting...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Customizing Media to Displays
A mind-boggling array of displays differ greatly in resolutions and aspect ratios. But images and videos are captured at fixed resolutions and aspect ratios, and...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: One Size Fits All: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone
Beginning in the early to mid-1980s the relational model of data has dominated the DBMS landscape. Moreover, descendents of...
From Communications of the ACM
Breaking the Memory Wall in MonetDB
In this paper, we report how research around the MonetDB database system has led to a redesign of database architecture in order to take advantage of modern hardware...
From Communications of the ACM
Polaris: A System For Query, Analysis, and Visualization of Multidimensional Databases
In this paper, we address these demands by presenting the Polaris formalism, a visual query language for precisely describing a wide range of table-based graphical...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Safeguarding Online Information Against Failures and Attacks
Users need storage that is highly reliable (it is not lost) and highly available (accessible when needed). Guaranteeing...
From Communications of the ACM