Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Relational Query Optimization: Data Management Meets Statistical Estimation
Relational systems have made it possible to query large collections of data in a declarative style through languages such as SQL. There is a key component that...
From Communications of the ACM
Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion
We all receive spam advertisements, but few of us have encountered a person who admits to following through on an offer and making a purchase. And yet, the relentlessness...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: They Do Click, Don't They?
You never click on advertisements received in spam or in phishing messages, do you? Nobody does. So, if that is...
From Communications of the ACM
Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality?: An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista
Existing literature on distributed development in software engineering and other fields discusses various challenges,...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Maintaining Quality in the Face of Distributed Development
It was a problem that should not have taken three weeks to solve. The documentation claimed that if a function was called...
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
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
Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Visualization
This article describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Finding and Telling Stories with Data
Visual analysis, a powerful method for finding and telling stories with data, is moving from research into widespread use.
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
Technical Perspective: The Polaris Tableau System
Jim Gray nominated the Polaris paper for the Research Highlights section and wrote the first draft of this Technical Perspective in November 2006. David Patterson...
From Communications of the ACM
Zyzzyva: Speculative Byzantine Fault Tolerance
A longstanding vision in distributed systems is to build reliable systems from unreliable components. An enticing formulation of this vision is Byzantine fault-tolerant...
From Communications of the ACM