An Issue of Teamwork

This column was supposed to write itself. When Editor-in-Chief Moshe Vardi first asked me to tell readers how a typical issue of Communications comes together, I remember thinking "piece of cake."

Diane Crawford

In the Virtual Extension

Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.

CACM Staff

Connecting Women and Technology

Guest blogger Valerie Barr writes about highlights of the ninth Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, including keynote speeches by Megan Smith and Francine Berman.

Valerie Barr

Where the Data Is

The vast Internet delivers only a sliver of the information the average American consumes each day, according to a recent report by the University of California, San Diego ( …

David Roman

Alternate Interface Technologies Emerge

Researchers working in human-computer interaction are developing new interfaces to produce greater efficiencies in personal computing and enhance miniaturization in mobile devices.

Kirk L. Kroeker

Type Theory Comes of Age

Type systems are moving beyond the realm of data structure and into more complex domains like security and networking.

Alex Wright

Improving Disaster Management

Social networking, sophisticated imaging, and dual-use technologies promise improved disaster management, but they must be adopted by governments and aid agencies if more lives are to be saved in the wake of crises.

Sarah Underwood

ACM Fellows Honored

Forty-seven men and women are inducted as 2009 ACM Fellows.

CACM Staff

Not Seeing the Crime For the Cameras?

Why it is difficult — but essential — to monitor the effectiveness of security technologies.

M. Angela Sasse

Why an Informatics Degree?

Isn't computer science enough?

Dennis P. Groth, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason

The Need For a National Cybersecurity R&D Agenda

Government-funded initiatives, in cooperation with private-sector partners in key technology areas, are fundamental to cybersecurity technical transformation.

Douglas Maughan

Open Access to Scientific Publications

In his July 2009 Communications editor's letter "Open, Closed, or Clopen Access?", editor-in-chief Moshe Vardi addressed the question of open access to this magazine and to …

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon

Taking Your Network's Temperature

A prescription for capturing data to diagnose and debug a networking problem.

George V. Neville-Neil

An Interview with Michael Rabin

Michael O. Rabin, co-recipient of the 1976 ACM A.M. Turing Award, discusses his innovative algorithmic work with Dennis Shasha.

Dennis Shasha, Michael Rabin

Power-Efficient Software

Power-manageable hardware can help save energy, but what can software developers do to address the problem?

Eric Saxe

Managing Contention For Shared Resources on Multicore Processors

Contention for caches, memory controllers, and interconnects can be eased by contention-aware scheduling algorithms.

Alexandra Fedorova, Sergey Blagodurov, Sergey Zhuravlev

Software Model Checking Takes Off

A translator framework enables the use of model checking in complex avionics systems and other industrial settings.

Steven P. Miller, Michael W. Whalen, Darren D. Cofer

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World

How Coverity built a bug-finding tool, and a business, around the unlimited supply of bugs in software systems.

Al Bessey, Ken Block, Ben Chelf, Andy Chou, Bryan Fulton, Seth Hallem, Charles Henri-Gros, Asya Kamsky, Scott McPeak, Dawson Engler

Assessing the Changing U.S. IT R&D Ecosystem

The National Academy of Sciences recommends what the U.S. government should do to help maintain American IT leadership.

Eric Benhamou, Jon Eisenberg, Randy H. Katz

Recent Progress in Quantum Algorithms

What quantum algorithms outperform classical computation and how do they do it?

Dave Bacon, Wim van Dam

Technical Perspective: Strange Effects in High Dimension

In studying the genetic basis of a disease, it is now common to select a set of relevant genes G, and to measure how strongly they are expressed in cell samples from a group …

Sanjoy Dasgupta

Faster Dimension Reduction

Data represented geometrically in high-dimensional vector spaces can be found in many applications. The need to manipulate such data in huge corpora and to support various query types gives rise to the question of how to represent …

Nir Ailon, Bernard Chazelle

Technical Perspective: Want to Be a Bug Buster?

Microprocessor performance has increased exponentially. These chips with ever increasing complexity are not always fully functional on the first attempt, they need to be debugged …

Shekhar Y. Borkar

Post-Silicon Bug Localization For Processors Using IFRA

IFRA overcomes major challenges associated with a very expensive step in post-silicon validation of processors — pinpointing a bug location and the instruction sequence that exposes the bug from a system failure, such as a crash …

Sung-Boem Park, Subhasish Mitra

Puzzled: Breaking Chocolate Bars

Welcome to three new puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is (as yet) unsolved. In each, the issue is how your intuition matches up with the mathematics.

Peter Winkler

Reversing the Landslide in Computer-Related Degree Programs

There is growing concern that a technologically educated workforce will not be available to meet the needs of the job market in information technology in the coming years, primarily because students are turning away from academic …

Irma Becerra-Fernandez, Joyce Elam, Susan Clemmons

Practical Intelligence in IT: Assessing Soft Skills of IT Professionals

What qualities make a successful IT professional? When companies hire IT professionals, their focus is often on the "hard" skills needed to perform the work, such as years of Java programming experience. However, there is a growing …

Damien Joseph, Soon Ang, Roger H. L. Chang, Sandra A. Slaughter

Wireless Insecurity: Examining User Security Behavior on Public Networks

Wireless access points are increasingly serving as entry points to the Internet, increasing connectivity options and security concerns. Particularly significant are public access points, commonly known as hotspots, which are …

Tim Chenoweth, Robert Minch, Sharon Tabor

Informatics Creativity: A Role For Abductive Reasoning?

Despite the fact that creative problem solving is desirable at all levels, it is constantly in short supply. Part of the problem may be that while some technology trainers advocate the search for creative solutions, the learning …

John Minor Ross

Designs for Effective Implementation of Trust Assurances in Internet Stores

Improving customer trust in an Internet store is an important goal in B2C electronic commerce because it leads to outcomes important for the success of an Internet store, such as reduced customer risk perceptions in transacting …

Dongmin Kim, Izak Benbasat

Taking a Flexible Approach to ASPs

In 2001, subscription-based application service providers (ASPs) represented the new paradigm for application deployment. It was anticipated that ASP spending would reach $7.8 billion by 2004. However, this turned out not to …

Farheen Altaf, David Schuff

Managing a Corporate Open Source Software Asset

We define corporate open source (COS) as applying the precepts and methodologies prevalent in the open source development community for creating industrial-strength software projects in a corporation for internal use. Our ongoing …

Vijay K. Gurbani, Anita Garvert, James D. Herbsleb

It Takes Two to Tango: How Relational Investments Improve IT Outsourcing Partnerships

The IT outsourcing industry landscape is dotted with broken contracts - results of unsuccessful client-vendor (C-V) partnerships. Approximately 78% C-V partnerships fail in the long term, inflicting high transition costs on clients …

Nikhil Mehta, Anju Mehta