Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Combining Logic and Probability
In "Probabilistic Theorem Proving," Gogate and Domingos suggest how PTP could be turned in a fast approximate algorithm by sampling from the set of children of...
From Communications of the ACM
Probabilistic Theorem Proving
Many representation schemes combining first-order logic and probability have been proposed in recent years. We propose the first method that has the full power...
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: 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: Catching Lies (and Mistakes) in Offloaded Computation
The system described in "Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation" refines an important theoretical advance by Gennaro et al. Together, these two works represent...
From Communications of the ACM
Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation
We introduce Pinocchio, a built system for efficiently verifying general computations while relying only on cryptographic assumptions.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Enlisting the Power of the Crowd
An important contribution of "Answering Enumeration Queries with the Crowd" is the observation that by using the crowd for the collection of new data, we are departing...
From Communications of the ACM
Answering Enumeration Queries with the Crowd
Hybrid human/computer database systems promise to greatly expand the usefulness of query processing by incorporating the crowd. Such systems raise many implementation...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: In-Situ Database Management
"NoDB: Efficient Query Execution on Raw Data Files" investigates extending a DBMS so it can use the file data in situ, without having to load it first.
From Communications of the ACM