Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Making Sleep Tracking More User Friendly
"LIBS: A Bioelectrical Sensing System from Human Ears for Staging Whole-Night Sleep Study" provides a nice balance in terms of minimizing the burden on users and...
From Communications of the ACM
LIBS: A Bioelectrical Sensing System from Human Ears for Staging Whole-Night Sleep Study
We explore a new form of wearable systems, called LIBS, that can continuously record biosignals such as brain wave, eye movements, and facial muscle contractions...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Backdoor Engineering
"Where Did I Leave My Keys?" by Checkoway et al. reports on the amazing independent reconstruction of a backdoor, discovered in the firmware of a VPN router commonly...
From Communications of the ACM
Where Did I Leave My Keys?: Lessons from the Juniper Dual EC Incident
In this paper, we describe the results of a full independent analysis of the ScreenOS randomness and VPN key establishment protocol subsystems, which we carried...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Rewards of Selfish Mining
"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...
From Communications of the ACM
Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable
We propose a practical modification to the Bitcoin protocol that protects Bitcoin in the general case.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Graph-Theoretic Framework Traces Task Planning
In "Time-Inconsistent Planning: A Computational Problem in Behavioral Economics," Kleinberg and Oren describe a graph-theoretic framework for task planning with...
From Communications of the ACM
Time-Inconsistent Planning: A Computational Problem in Behavioral Economics
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...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Designing Algorithms and the Fairness Criteria They Should Satisfy
"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...
From Communications of the ACM
Which Is the Fairest (Rent Division) of Them All?
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...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Can High Performance Be Portable?
"Halide: Decoupling Algorithms from Schedules for High-Performance Image Processing" by Ragan-Kelley et al. on the image processing language Halide explores a substantially...
From Communications of the ACM
Halide: Decoupling Algorithms from Schedules For High-Performance Image Processing
We propose a new programming language for image processing pipelines, called Halide, that separates the algorithm from its schedule.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Solving Imperfect Information Games
"Heads-Up Limit Hold'em Poker Is Solved," by Michael Bowling, et al., takes the counterfactual regret minimization method for approximating a Nash equilibrium to...
From Communications of the ACM
Heads-Up Limit Hold'em Poker Is Solved
This paper is an extended version of our original 2015 Science article, with additional results showing Cepheus' in-game performance against computer and human...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The State (and Security) of the Bitcoin Economy
"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...
From Communications of the ACM
A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names
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...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Interplay of Neuroscience and Cryptography
An ideal scheme for password storage would enable a password with more than 20 bits of randomness to be input and output from the brain of a human being who is...
From Communications of the ACM
Neuroscience Meets Cryptography: Crypto Primitives Secure Against Rubber Hose Attacks
We present a defense against coercion attacks using the concept of implicit learning from cognitive psychology. We use a carefully crafted computer game to allow...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Circuit Placement Challenges
For a semiconductor circuit with billions of transistors, finding desired locations of circuit components is a challenging task that substantially impacts circuit...
From Communications of the ACM