Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
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: 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: 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
A Massively Parallel Adaptive Fast Multipole Method on Heterogeneous Architectures
We describe a parallel fast multipole method for highly nonuniform distributions of particles. We employ both distributed memory parallelism and shared memory parallelism...
From Communications of the ACM
Searching the Village: Models and Methods For Social Search
With Aardvark, a social search engine, users ask a question, either by IM, e-mail, Web input, text message, or voice. Aardvark then routes the question to the person...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Who Knows?: Searching For Expertise on the Social Web
It is difficult to remember what people had to do to find the answer to a question before the Web. One option might be to call a friend who might know the answer...
From Communications of the ACM
Asynchronous Contact Mechanics
Physicists have long observed physical phenomena and developed mathematical models to describe them. The advent of computers has allowed us to implement these...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Building Robust Dynamical Simulation Systems
Computational power has been widely used to predict the behavior of dynamical systems using computer simulations, which are often used as an adjunct to or substitute...
From Communications of the ACM
The Grand Challenge of Computer Go: Monte Carlo Tree Search and Extensions
The ancient oriental game of Go has long been considered a grand challenge for artificial intelligence. However, computer Go programs based on Monte-Carlo tree...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A New Way to Search Game Trees
Researchers in artificial intelligence know that computers still lag far behind human levels of play in many games of strategy. One such contest of wits is Go...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Where Do People Draw Lines?
Computer graphics once focused exclusively on realism. The field eventually broadened to include other pictorial...
From Communications of the ACM