Communications of the ACM
Incentivizing Quality and Impact in Computing Research
Developing consensus on how the computing-research publication culture should be changed has proven to be exceedingly hard. The Computing Research Association has now addressed this issue head-on in its new Best Practice Memo …Cascade Failure
Anyone with a collection of DVD or CD-ROM disks will appreciate that we cannot rely in the long term on specialized format devices being available. It is worth some effort to pay attention to the nature of these dependencies …DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor
Abolish Software Warranty Disclaimers
Carl Landwehr was right to suggest in his Viewpoint "We Need a Building Code for Building Code" (Feb. 2015) that there should be a building code for software.DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Introducing Young Women to CS, and Supporting Advanced Research Environments
Joel Adams talks about starting a chapter of Girls Who Code, while Daniel A. Reed considers an issue with cyberinfrastructure.COLUMN: News
Is 'Good Enough' Computing Good Enough?
The energy-accuracy trade-off in approximate computing.Putting the Data Science into Journalism
News organizations increasingly use techniques like data mining, Web scraping, and data visualization to uncover information that would be impossible to identify and present manually.Robots With a Human Touch
Empowering smart machines with tactile feedback could lead to tremendous new applications.COLUMN: Economic and business dimensions
Life of IP
Seeking to balance intellectual property protection with incentives for investment in innovation.COLUMN: Education
What Are We Doing When We Teach Computing in Schools?
Research on the cognitive, educational, and policy dimensions of teaching computing is critical to achieving "computer literacy."COLUMN: Law and technology
Oracle v. Google: A High-Stakes Legal Fight for the Software Industry
Copyrighting APIs threatens significant harm to both consumers and the software industry.COLUMN: Viewpoint
Teach Foundational Language Principles
Industry is ready and waiting for more graduates educated in the principles of programming languages.Managing Your Digital Life
Everyone should be able to manage their personal data with a personal information management system.SECTION: Practice
There Is No Now
Problems with simultaneity in distributed systems.Parallel Processing with Promises
A simple method of writing a collaborative system.
SECTION: Contributed articles
Privacy Behaviors After Snowden
Despite continuing media coverage, the public's privacy behaviors have hardly changed.Decoding Femininity in Computer Science in India
The benefits in school and the job market so far outweigh any potential gender bias that few women are deterred.SECTION: Review articles
Optimization as Motion Selection Principle in Robot Action
Robots move to act. While actions operate in a physical space, motions begin in a motor control space. So how do robots express actions in terms of motions?SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Programming Multicore Computers
"Can Traditional Programming Bridge the Ninja Performance Gap for Parallel Computing Applications" advocates an appealing division of labor between a developer and a compiler to increase the opportunities for the compiler to …Can Traditional Programming Bridge the Ninja Performance Gap for Parallel Computing Applications?
Current processor trends of integrating more cores with SIMD units have made it more to extract performance from applications. It is believed that traditional approaches to programming do not apply to these processors. We question …COLUMN: Last byte
Upstart Puzzles: Strategic Friendship
Consider the following game (first posed to my close friend Dr. Ecco) played among several entities. Each entity Ei has a certain force Fi and a certain wealth Wi.
Previous Issue
Next Issue
View the Digital Library
View the Digital Edition
Download a PDF of this issue