Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: An Experiment in Determinism
It is widely held that parallel programming is far more difficult and error prone than writing sequential code. In particular, the myriad allowable interleavings...
From Communications of the ACM
Efficient System-Enforced Deterministic Parallelism
We introduce a new parallel programming model addressing the issues facing current methods of executing parallel programs deterministically, and use Determinator...
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
Technical Perspective: The Benefits of Capability-Based Protection
Affordable personal computing hardware and the usable GUI-based PC operating systems made the vision of "a computer on every desktop and in every home" a reality...
From Communications of the ACM
A Taste of Capsicum: Practical Capabilities For Unix
Capsicum is a lightweight operating system capability and sandbox framework planned for inclusion in FreeBSD 9. Capsicum extends, rather than replaces, UNIX APIs...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Compiling What to How
The following paper by Viktor Kuncak et al. integrates declarative programming into a general-purpose language, allowing one to escape the host language when...
From Communications of the ACM
Software Synthesis Procedures
Automated synthesis of program fragments from specifications can make programs easier to write and easier to reason about. To integrate synthesis into programming...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Safety First!
Software misbehaves all too often. This is a truism, but also the driving force behind many computing techniques intended to increase software reliability, safety...
From Communications of the ACM
Safe to the Last Instruction: Automated Verification of a Type-Safe Operating System
High-level computer applications build on services provided by lower-level software layers. Unfortunately, today's low-level software still suffers from a steady...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Making Untrusted Code Useful
The following paper combines two important themes in secure computing: assurance and information flow control. For high assurance, a system's Trusted Computing...
From Communications of the ACM
Making Information Flow Explicit in HiStar
Features of the new HiStar operating system permit several novel applications, including privacy-preserving, untrusted virus scanners and a dynamic Web server with...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Making Browser Extensions Secure
Vulnerabilities in browsers and their extensions have become the primary venue through which cyber criminals compromise the security...
From Communications of the ACM
Vetting Browser Extensions For Security Vulnerabilities with VEX
The browser has become the de facto platform for everyday computation and a popular target for attackers of computer systems. Among the many potential attacks that...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Sketches Get Sketchier
Are data synopses — such as the hash-based sketches discussed by Li and König — still needed for querying massive...
From Communications of the ACM
Theory and Applications of b-Bit Minwise Hashing
Efficient (approximate) computation of set similarity in very large datasets is a common task with many applications inminwise hashing...
From Communications of the ACM
Debugging in the (Very) Large: Ten Years of Implementation and Experience
Windows Error Reporting (WER) is a distributed system that automates the processing of error reports coming from an installed base of a billion machines. WER has...
From Communications of the ACM