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...William Gropp From Communications of the ACM | May 2012
We describe a parallel fast multipole method for highly nonuniform distributions of particles. We employ both distributed memory parallelism and shared memory parallelism...Ilya Lashuk, Aparna Chandramowlishwaran, Harper Langston, Tuan-Anh Nguyen, Rahul Sampath, Aashay Shringarpure, Richard Vuduc, Lexing Ying, Denis Zorin, George Biros From Communications of the ACM | May 2012
Physicists have long observed physical phenomena and developed mathematical models to describe them. The advent of computers has allowed us to implement these...David Harmon, Etienne Vouga, Breannan Smith, Rasmus Tamstorf, Eitan Grinspun From Communications of the ACM | April 2012
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...Dinesh Manocha From Communications of the ACM | April 2012
The ancient oriental game of Go has long been considered a grand challenge for artificial intelligence. However, computer Go programs based on Monte-Carlo tree...Sylvain Gelly, Levente Kocsis, Marc Schoenauer, Michèle Sebag, David Silver, Csaba Szepesvári, Olivier Teytaud From Communications of the ACM | March 2012
Researchers in artificial intelligence know that computers still lag far behind human levels of play in many games of strategy. One such contest of wits is Go...Michael L. Littman From Communications of the ACM | March 2012
Affordable personal computing hardware and the usable GUI-based PC operating systems made the vision of "a computer on every desktop and in every home" a reality...Steven D. Gribble From Communications of the ACM | March 2012
Capsicum is a lightweight operating system capability and sandbox framework planned for inclusion in FreeBSD 9. Capsicum extends, rather than replaces, UNIX APIs...Robert N. M. Watson, Jonathan Anderson, Ben Laurie, Kris Kennaway From Communications of the ACM | March 2012
Computer graphics once focused exclusively on realism. The field eventually broadened to include other pictorial...Frédo Durand From Communications of the ACM | January 2012
This paper presents the results of a study in which artists made line drawings intended to convey specific 3D shapes.Forrester Cole, Aleksey Golovinskiy, Alex Limpaecher, Heather Stoddart Barros, Adam Finkelstein, Thomas Funkhouser, Szymon Rusinkiewicz From Communications of the ACM | January 2012
In a social network, nodes correspond to people or other social entities, and edges correspond to social links between them. We describe a family of attacks such...Lars Backstrom, Cynthia Dwork, Jon Kleinberg From Communications of the ACM | December 2011
In a breakthrough contribution, the authors of the paper that follows have developed an efficient way to find approximate nearest neighbors for the case of database...William T. Freeman From Communications of the ACM | November 2011
This paper presents a new randomized algorithm for quickly finding approximate nearest neighbor matches between image patches. Our algorithm offers substantial...Connelly Barnes, Dan B. Goldman, Eli Shechtman, Adam Finkelstein From Communications of the ACM | November 2011
To better understand what improvement in processor efficiency is possible, we quantify the performance and energy overheads of a 720p HD H.264 encoder running on...Rehan Hameed, Wajahat Qadeer, Megan Wachs, Omid Azizi, Alex Solomatnikov, Benjamin C. Lee, Stephen Richardson, Christos Kozyrakis, Mark Horowitz From Communications of the ACM | October 2011
A typical machine learning program uses weighted combinations of features to discriminate between classes or to predict...Geoffrey E. Hinton From Communications of the ACM | October 2011
There has been much interest in unsupervised learning of hierarchical generative models such as deep belief networks (DBNs); however, scaling such models to full...Honglak Lee, Roger Grosse, Rajesh Ranganath, Andrew Y. Ng From Communications of the ACM | October 2011
Nearly 460,000 Flickr pictures were used to create detailed three-dimensional geometry and colors of famous landmarks and...Carlo Tomasi From Communications of the ACM | October 2011
We present a system that can reconstruct 3D geometry from large, unorganized collections of photographs. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is possible...Sameer Agarwal, Yasutaka Furukawa, Noah Snavely, Ian Simon, Brian Curless, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski From Communications of the ACM | October 2011
The search for efficient image denoising methods is still a valid challenge at the crossing of functional analysis and statistics. In spite of the sophistication...Antoni Buades, Bartomeu Coll, Jean-Michel Morel From Communications of the ACM | May 2011