Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
And Then There Were None: A Stall-Free Real-Time Garbage Collector For Reconfigurable Hardware
We present a garbage collector synthesized directly to hardware, capable of collecting a heap of uniform objects completely concurrently. These heaps are composed...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Progress in Visual Categorization
Our visual system helps us carry out our daily business. Our eyes and brain help us by measuring shapes, trajectories, and distances in world around us, and by...
From Communications of the ACM
Visual Object Detection with Deformable Part Models
We describe a state-of-the-art system for finding objects in cluttered images. Our system is based on deformable models that represent objects using local part...
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: Video Quality Assessment in the Age of Internet Video
With video delivery, it appears that once again "the Internet changes everything." In this changed environment, what measures of quality are most relevant, and...
From Communications of the ACM
Understanding the Impact of Video Quality on User Engagement
As Internet-based videos become mainstream, user expectation for high quality is constantly increasing. In this context, it is crucial for content providers to...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: High-Level Data Structures
This lifting of data structure thinking to the relational level has long inspired computer scientists. In "An Introduction to Data Representation Synthesis," the...
From Communications of the ACM
An Introduction to Data Representation Synthesis
We consider the problem of specifying combinations of data structures with complex sharing in a manner that is declarative and results in provably correct code.
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: SQL on an Encrypted Database
There is some risk in trusting the cloud providers with sensitive data. Why not encrypt the data stored in cloud services?
From Communications of the ACM
CryptDB: Processing Queries on an Encrypted Database
An ideal solution to satisfying the dual goals of protecting data confidentiality and running computations is to enable a server to compute over encrypted data,...
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: For Better or Worse, Benchmarks Shape a Field
Like other IT fields, computer architects initially reported incomparable results. We quickly saw the folly of this approach. We then went through a sequence...
From Communications of the ACM
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Power, Performance, and Upheaval
The past 10 years have delivered two significant revolutions. Microprocessor design has been transformed — leading to multicore processors. And an entirely new...
From Communications of the ACM
Lightweight Modular Staging: A Pragmatic Approach to Runtime Code Generation and Compiled DSLs
Good software engineering practice demands generalization and abstraction, whereas high performance demands specialization and concretization. These goals are at...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Fox and the Hedgehog
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Philosophers have used this line, attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, to capture...
From Communications of the ACM