Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Learning To Do Program Verification
When you decide to use a piece of software, how do you know it will do what you need it to do? Will it be safe to run? Will it interfere...
From Communications of the ACM
Asserting and Checking Determinism For Multithreaded Programs
The trend towards processors with more and more parallel cores is increasing the need for software that can take advantage of...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Building Confidence in Multicore Software
Surprises may be fun in real life, but not so in software. One approach to avoiding surprises in software is to establish its...
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
Censored Exploration and the Dark Pool Problem
The success and proliferation of dark pool stock exchanges have created challenging and interesting problems in algorithmic trading—in particular, the problem of...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Learning to Act in Uncertain Environments
The problem of decision making in an uncertain environment arises in many diverse contexts. The key issue in effectively solving problems like this is known as...
From Communications of the ACM
Faster Dimension Reduction
Data represented geometrically in high-dimensional vector spaces can be found in many applications. The need to manipulate such data in huge corpora and to support...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Strange Effects in High Dimension
In studying the genetic basis of a disease, it is now common to select a set of relevant genes G, and to measure how strongly...
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
Designing Plush Toys With a Computer
We introduce Plushie, an interactive system that allows nonprofessional users to design their own original plush toys. We successfully demonstrated that nonprofessional...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Design Tools For the Rest of Us
There are many who believe we are on the verge of the biggest change in the way products are made since the Industrial...
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
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