Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
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
Technical Perspective: For Better or Worse, Benchmarks Shape a Field
Like other IT fields, computer architects initially reported incomparable results. We quickly saw the folly of this approach. We then went through a sequence...
From Communications of the ACM
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Power, Performance, and Upheaval
The past 10 years have delivered two significant revolutions. Microprocessor design has been transformed — leading to multicore processors. And an entirely new...
From Communications of the ACM
Lightweight Modular Staging: A Pragmatic Approach to Runtime Code Generation and Compiled DSLs
Good software engineering practice demands generalization and abstraction, whereas high performance demands specialization and concretization. These goals are at...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Fox and the Hedgehog
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Philosophers have used this line, attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, to capture...
From Communications of the ACM
Exact Matrix Completion via Convex Optimization
Suppose that one observes an incomplete subset of entries selected from a low-rank matrix. When is it possible to complete the matrix and recover the entries that...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Reconstructing the Unknown, Balancing Structure and Uncertainty
The problem of estimating or reconstructing an unknown structured object from incomplete, partial, noisy measurements is a fundamental one in scientific and technological...
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
Asynchronous Contact Mechanics
Physicists have long observed physical phenomena and developed mathematical models to describe them. The advent of computers has allowed us to implement these...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Building Robust Dynamical Simulation Systems
Computational power has been widely used to predict the behavior of dynamical systems using computer simulations, which are often used as an adjunct to or substitute...
From Communications of the ACM