Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
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
SimPL: An Algorithm For Placing VLSI Circuits
VLSI placement optimizes locations of circuit components so as to reduce interconnect. We propose an algorithm for large-scale placement that outperforms prior...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Ray-Tracing Engine That Could
It has been an open question whether it is possible to build GPU-targeted high-performance software systems that are themselves programmable. "GPU Ray Tracing" shows...
From Communications of the ACM
GPU Ray Tracing
The NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine builds on the key observation that most ray tracing algorithms can be implemented using a small set of programmable operations...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Understanding Pictures of Rooms
The rich world is getting older, so we will see many efforts to build robots that can provide some in-home care for frail people. These robots will need computer...
From Communications of the ACM
Discriminative Learning with Latent Variables For Cluttered Indoor Scene Understanding
We address the problem of understanding an indoor scene from a single image in terms of recovering the room geometry (floor, ceiling, and walls) and furniture layout...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Is Dark Silicon Real?
The microprocessor chip R&D community has been well aware of the so-called "power wall" challenge for over a decade. The following work by Esmaeilzadeh et al. is...
From Communications of the ACM
Power Challenges May End the Multicore Era
Tthe microprocessor industry has shifted to multicore scaling as its principal strategy for continuing performance growth. However, while transistor count increases...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Finding People in Depth
The following article by Shotton et al. describes a landmark computer vision system that takes a single depth image containing a person and automatically estimates...
From Communications of the ACM
Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from Single Depth Images
We propose a new method to quickly and accurately predict human pose — the 3-D positions of body joints — from a single depth image, without depending on information...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Visualization, Understanding, and Design
Photographs capture the moment; paintings convey perception, impression, and feeling; illustrations tell stories. Computer graphics aims to enrich all these artistic...
From Communications of the ACM
Illustrating How Mechanical Assemblies Work
How-things-work visualizations use a variety of visual techniques to depict the operation of complex mechanical assemblies. We present an automated approach for...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Natural Algorithms in a Networked World
How do birds flock and fish school? How do individuals in a social network reach agreement, even though they are often only influenced by other like-minded individuals...
From Communications of the ACM
Natural Algorithms and Influence Systems
Algorithms lay the grounds for numerical simulations and, crucially, provide a powerful framework for their analysis. The new area of natural algorithms may reprise...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Open Platforms For Computational Photography
A fundamental impediment to the widespread development and deployment of in-camera algorithms is the lack of a clean open architecture for controlling camera...
From Communications of the ACM
The Frankencamera: An Experimental Platform For Computational Photography
Progress in computational photography has been hampered by the lack of a portable, programmable camera with sufficient image quality and computing power. To address...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Example-Driven Program Synthesis For End-User Programming
As information technology has come to permeate our society, broader classes of users have developed the need for more sophisticated data manipulation and processing...
From Communications of the ACM
Spreadsheet Data Manipulation Using Examples
Millions of computer end users need to perform tasks over large spreadsheet data, yet lack the programming knowledge to do such tasks automatically. We present...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Best Algorithms + Best Computers = Powerful Match
Say you want to simulate the motion over time of the stars in a galaxy to learn about how galaxies formed and why the universe appears as it does. Is it feasible...
From Communications of the ACM