Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google's Datacenter Network
We present our approach for overcoming the cost, operational complexity, and limited scale endemic to datacenter networks a decade ago.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Dawn of Computational Light Transport
What would the world look like if we had a chance to observe it with a trillion frame-per-second video camera? "Imaging the Propagation of Light through Scenes...
From Communications of the ACM
Imaging the Propagation of Light Through Scenes at Picosecond Resolution
We present a novel imaging technique, which we call femtophotography, to capture and visualize the propagation of light through table-top scenes with an effective...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Toward Reliable Programming For Unreliable Hardware
"Verifying Quantitative Reliability for Programs that Execute on Unreliable Hardware" by Carbin et al. addresses challenges related to a bug, how likely it is to...
From Communications of the ACM
Verifying Quantitative Reliability For Programs that Execute on Unreliable Hardware
We present Rely, a programming language that enables developers to reason about the quantitative reliability of an application — namely, the probability that it...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Why Didn't I Think of That?
Until now, the database in a Web application has been treated as a global variable, accessible to all. In "Ur/Web: A Simple Model for Programming the Web," Adam...
From Communications of the ACM
Ur/Web: A Simple Model For Programming the Web
This paper presents Ur/Web, a domain-specific, statically typed functional programming language that reduces the nest of Web standards for modern Web applications...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Combining Logic and Probability
In "Probabilistic Theorem Proving," Gogate and Domingos suggest how PTP could be turned in a fast approximate algorithm by sampling from the set of children of...
From Communications of the ACM
Probabilistic Theorem Proving
Many representation schemes combining first-order logic and probability have been proposed in recent years. We propose the first method that has the full power...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Mesa Takes Data Warehousing to New Heights
Producing reports at the scale of Google Ads, where billions of clicks happen per day, is the challenge addressed by the Mesa system described in "Mesa: A Geo-Replicated...
From Communications of the ACM
Mesa: A Geo-Replicated Online Data Warehouse For Google's Advertising System
Mesa is a highly scalable analytic data warehousing system that stores critical measurement data related to Google's Internet advertising business. This paper presents...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Computing with the Crowd
What kinds of problems can be solved with combined human and machine computation? "AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation," by...
From Communications of the ACM
Automan: A Platform For Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation
We introduce AutoMan, the first fully automatic crowdprogramming system.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Veritesting Tackles Path-Explosion Problem
"Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting" by Avgerinos et al. proposes an effective technique called veritesting that addresses the scalability limitations...
From Communications of the ACM
Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting
In this article, we present a new technique for generating formulas called veritesting that alternates between static symbolic execution (SSE) and dynamic symbolic...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Breakthrough in Software Obfuscation
In "Hiding Secrets in Software," Garg et al. construct a "one-way compiler" of the type envisioned by Diffie and Hellman.
From Communications of the ACM
Hiding Secrets in Software: A Cryptographic Approach to Program Obfuscation
Can we hide secrets in software? Can we make programs unintelligible while preserving their functionality? Why would we even want to do this? In this article, we...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Software Is Natural
"On the Naturalness of Software" by Hindle et al. takes an entirely new approach to providing tools to help build software.
From Communications of the ACM
On the Naturalness of Software
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...
From Communications of the ACM