Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Illustrating How Mechanical Assemblies Work
How-things-work visualizations use a variety of visual techniques to depict the operation of complex mechanical assemblies. We present an automated approach for...
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: The Realities of Home Broadband
Buying residential broadband services seems relatively simple: pick among a small number of plans, and then compare similar plans by price. Unfortunately, reality...
From Communications of the ACM
Measuring Home Broadband Performance
We present the results from the first study of Internet access link performance measured directly from home routers. Our findings provide a snapshot of access network...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Graph Embeddings and Linear Equations
Algorithmic advances can come from the most unexpected places. The following paper describes an emerging approach to solving linear systems of equations that...
From Communications of the ACM
A Fast Solver For a Class of Linear Systems
The solution of linear systems is a problem of fundamental theoretical importance but also one with a myriad of applications in numerical mathematics, engineering...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A High-Dimensional Surprise
High-dimensional space is a counterintuitive place, where natural geometric intuitions from the familiar three-dimensional world may lead us badly astray.
From Communications of the ACM
Spherical Cubes: Optimal Foams from Computational Hardness Amplification
Foam problems are about how to best partition space into bubbles of minimal surface area. We investigate the case where one unit-volume bubble is required to tile...
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: Innovative Interaction: From Concept to the Wild
The history of the relationship between writing systems and technology is as long as it is varied. Likewise, the challenge of entering text using portable gadgets...
From Communications of the ACM
The Word-Gesture Keyboard: Reimagining Keyboard Interaction
As computing technologies expanded beyond the confines of the desktop, the need for effective text entry methods alternative to the ubiquitous desktop keyboards...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Proving Programs Continuous
Proving a program's correctness is usually an all-or-nothing game.
From Communications of the ACM
Continuity and Robustness of Programs
Computer scientists have long believed that software is different from physical systems in one fundamental way: while the latter have continuous dynamics, the former...
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: Why Study the Price of Anarchy?
In 1999, Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou initiated the study of "How much worse off are we due to selfishness?" They compared the worst case pure...
From Communications of the ACM
Intrinsic Robustness of the Price of Anarchy
The price of anarchy, defined as the ratio of the worst-case objective function value of a Nash equilibrium of a game and that of an optimal outcome, quantifies...
From Communications of the ACM