Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Automatic Program Repair With Evolutionary Computation
There are many methods for detecting and mitigating software errors but few generic methods for automatically repairing errors once they are discovered. Recent...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Automated Patching Techniques: The Fix Is In
Finding bugs is technically demanding and yet economically vital. How much more difficult yet valuable would it be to...
From Communications of the ACM
Computing Arbitrary Functions of Encrypted Data
Suppose that you want to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. This separation is possible: we describe a "fully homomorphic"...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A First Glimpse of Cryptography's Holy Grail
We all know how to protect our private or most valuable data from unauthorized access: encrypt it. Still, the use of encryption to protect...
From Communications of the ACM
Post-Silicon Bug Localization For Processors Using IFRA
IFRA overcomes major challenges associated with a very expensive step in post-silicon validation of processors — pinpointing a bug location and the instruction...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Want to Be a Bug Buster?
Microprocessor performance has increased exponentially. These chips with ever increasing complexity are not always fully functional on...
From Communications of the ACM
Native Client: A Sandbox For Portable, -Untrusted X86 Native Code
Native Client is a sandbox for untrusted x86 native code. It aims to give browser-based applications the computational performance of native applications without...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Native Client: A Clever Alternative
Google's Native Client is an intriguing new system that allows untrusted x86 binaries to run safely on bare metal.
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
Optimistic Parallelism Requires Abstractions
Writing software for multicore processors is greatly simplified if we could automatically parallelize sequential programs. Although auto-parallelization has been...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Abstraction For Parallelism
Looking for some new insight into an old problem? The familiar problem of writing parallel applications and a...
From Communications of the ACM
Statistical Analysis of Circuit Timing Using Majorization
Future miniaturization of silicon transistors following Moore's Law may be in jeopardy as it becomes harder to precisely define the behavior and shape of nanoscale...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Where the Chips May Fall
The traditional approach to circuit design has been to build chips that work correctly at extreme-case process...
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
Formal Verification of a Realistic Compiler
This paper reports on the development and formal verification of CompCert, a compiler from Clight (a large subset of the C programming language) to PowerPC assembly...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Compiler's Story
In the early 1970s, pioneers like Floyd, Dijkstra, and Hoare argued that programs should be formally specified and proven...
From Communications of the ACM
Two Hardware-Based Approaches For Deterministic Multiprocessor Replay
Modern computer systems are inherently nondeterministic due to a variety of events that occur during an execution. The lack of repeatability that arises from this...
From Communications of the ACM