Communications of the ACM
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From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Mesa Takes Data Warehousing to New Heights
Producing reports at the scale of Google Ads, where billions of clicks happen per day, is the challenge addressed by the Mesa system described in "Mesa: A Geo-Replicated...
From Communications of the ACM
Mesa: A Geo-Replicated Online Data Warehouse For Google's Advertising System
Mesa is a highly scalable analytic data warehousing system that stores critical measurement data related to Google's Internet advertising business. This paper presents...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Computing with the Crowd
What kinds of problems can be solved with combined human and machine computation? "AutoMan: A Platform for Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation," by...
From Communications of the ACM
Automan: A Platform For Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation
We introduce AutoMan, the first fully automatic crowdprogramming system.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Veritesting Tackles Path-Explosion Problem
"Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting" by Avgerinos et al. proposes an effective technique called veritesting that addresses the scalability limitations...
From Communications of the ACM
Enhancing Symbolic Execution with Veritesting
In this article, we present a new technique for generating formulas called veritesting that alternates between static symbolic execution (SSE) and dynamic symbolic...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Breakthrough in Software Obfuscation
In "Hiding Secrets in Software," Garg et al. construct a "one-way compiler" of the type envisioned by Diffie and Hellman.
From Communications of the ACM
Hiding Secrets in Software: A Cryptographic Approach to Program Obfuscation
Can we hide secrets in software? Can we make programs unintelligible while preserving their functionality? Why would we even want to do this? In this article, we...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Software Is Natural
"On the Naturalness of Software" by Hindle et al. takes an entirely new approach to providing tools to help build software.
From Communications of the ACM
On the Naturalness of Software
We begin with the conjecture that most software is natural, with all the attendant constraints and limitations — and thus, like natural language, it is also likely...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The State (and Security) of the Bitcoin Economy
"A Fistful of Bitcoins" examines, in the context of Bitcoin, what we could learn by studying the patterns encoded in a complete record of every single financial...
From Communications of the ACM
A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names
Bitcoin has the unintuitive property that while the ownership of money is implicitly anonymous, its flow is globally visible. In this paper we explore this unique...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Fairness and the Coin Flip
"Secure Multiparty Computations on Bitcoin" introduces an exciting new idea for how to provide fairness: leverage Bitcoin’s existing infrastructure for distributed...
From Communications of the ACM
Secure Multiparty Computations on Bitcoin
In this work, we propose to use Bitcoin to design fully decentralized protocols that are secure even if no trusted third party is available.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Taming the Name Game
In "Learning to Name Objects," the authors offer a method to determine a basic-level category name for an object in an image.
From Communications of the ACM
Learning to Name Objects
This paper looks at the problem of predicting category labels that mimic how human observers would name objects.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Stacking Up Undefined Behaviors
In "A Differential Approach to Undefined Behavior Detection," Wang et al. hypothesize that any time a compiler is able to delete code by using reasoning based on...
From Communications of the ACM
A Differential Approach to Undefined Behavior Detection
This paper studies undefined behavior arising in systems programming languages such as C/C++. We introduce a new static checker called STACK that precisely identifies...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Program Synthesis Using Stochastic Techniques
The authors of "Stochastic Program Optimization" have developed a stochastic search technique and applied it to program optimization.
From Communications of the ACM