Solving the Unsolvable

On June 16, 1902, philosopher Bertrand Russell sent a letter to Gottlob Frege in which he argued that Frege's logical system was inconsistent. The letter launched a "Foundational Crisis" in mathematics, triggering an almost anguished …

Moshe Y. Vardi

Practical Research Yields Fundamental Insight, Too

Tim Wu's viewpoint "Bell Labs and Centralized Innovation" (May 2011) was inaccurate regarding a specific example of research at Bell Labs.

CACM Staff

In the Virtual Extension

To ensure the timely publication of articles, Communications created the Virtual Extension which brings readers high-quality articles in an online-only format. The following articles are now available in their entirety to ACM …

CACM Staff

Reviewing Peer Review

Jeannette M. Wing discusses peer review and its importance in terms of public trust. Ed H. Chi writes about alternatives, such as open peer commentary.

Jeannette M. Wing, Ed H. Chi

ACM Aggregates Publication Statistics in the ACM Digital Library

It is now possible to click on any author's name inside the ACM Digital Library and view a complete record of that author's publication history. Currently, over one million author pages exist in the …

Scott E. Delman

Weighing Watson's Impact

Does IBM's Watson represent a distinct breakthrough in machine learning and natural language processing or is the 2,880-core wunderkind merely a solid feat of engineering?

Kirk L. Kroeker

Automotive Autonomy

Self-driving cars are inching closer to the assembly line, thanks to promising new projects from Google and the European Union.

Alex Wright

Brave, New Social World

How three different individuals in three different countries — Brazil, Egypt, and Japan — use Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media tools.

Dennis McCafferty

ACM Award Recipients

Craig Gentry, Kurt Mehlhorn, and other computer scientists are honored for their research and service.

CACM Staff

Driving Power in Global Supply Chains

Supply chains are increasingly global. We pour energy into managing them efficiently, with their risks and rewards. Yet we do not know enough about how profits are …

Mari Sako

Values in Design

Focusing on socio-technical design with values as a critical component in the design process.

Cory Knobel, Geoffrey C. Bowker

Too Many Copyrights?

Reinstituting formalities — notice of copyright claims and registration requirements — could help address problems related to too many copyrights that last for too many years.

Pamela Samuelson

The Status of Women of Color in Computer Science

Addressing the challenges of increasing the number of women of color in computing and ensuring their success.

Maria (Mia) Ong

Non-Myths About Programming

Viewing computer science in a broader context to dispel common misperceptions and provide more accurate guidance to students who are deliberating its study.

Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari

Passing a Language Through the Eye of a Needle

How the embeddability of Lua impacted its design.

Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique De Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes

DSL For the Uninitiated

Domain-specific languages bridge the semantic gap in programming.

Debasish Ghosh

Microsoft's Protocol Documentation Program: Interoperability Testing at Scale

A discussion with Nico Kicillof, Wolfgang Grieskamp, and Bob Binder.

CACM Staff

Algorithmic Composition: Computational Thinking in Music

The composer still composes but also gets to take a programming-enabled journey of musical discovery.

Michael Edwards

A Decade of Software Model Checking with SLAM

SLAM is a program-analysis engine used to check if clients of an API follow the API's stateful usage rules.

Thomas Ball, Vladimir Levin, Sriram K. Rajamani

Searching For Jim Gray: A Technical Overview

The volunteer search for Jim Gray, lost at sea in 2007, highlights the challenges of computer-aided emergency response.

Joseph M. Hellerstein, David L. Tennenhouse

The Case For RAMCloud

With scalable high-performance storage entirely in DRAM, RAMCloud will enable a new breed of data-intensive applications.

John Ousterhout, Parag Agrawal, David Erickson, Christos Kozyrakis, Jacob Leverich, David Mazières, Subhasish Mitra, Aravind Narayanan, Diego Ongaro, Guru Parulkar, Mendel Rosenblum, Stephen M. Rumble, Eric Stratmann, Ryan Stutsman

Cellular Telephony and the Question of Privacy

A private overlay may ease concerns over surveillance tools supported by cellular networks.

Stephen B. Wicker

Workload Management For Power Efficiency in Virtualized Data Centers

Power-aware dynamic application placement can address underutilization of servers as well as the rising energy costs in a data center.

Gargi Dasgupta, Amit Sharma, Akshat Verma, Anindya Neogi, Ravi Kothari

Technical Perspective: FAWN: A Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes

The emergence of wimpy processors and FLASH met a promising deployment scenario in the field of large-scale data centers. The energy efficiency potential of these technologies could lower the costs of warehouse-scale computing …

Luiz André Barroso

FAWN: A Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes

This paper presents a fast array of wimpy nodes — FAWN — an approach for achieving low-power data-intensive data-center computing.

David G. Andersen, Jason Franklin, Michael Kaminsky, Amar Phanishayee, Lawrence Tan, Vijay Vasudevan

Technical Perspective: Is Scale Your Enemy, Or Is Scale Your Friend?

Scale has been the single most important force driving changes in system software over the last decade. Its impact is most obvious in the Web arena, however, it also impacts …

John Ousterhout

Debugging in the (Very) Large: Ten Years of Implementation and Experience

Windows Error Reporting (WER) is a distributed system that automates the processing of error reports coming from an installed base of a billion machines. WER has collected billions of error reports in 10 years of operation.

Kinshuman Kinshumann, Kirk Glerum, Steve Greenberg, Gabriel Aul, Vince Orgovan, Greg Nichols, David Grant, Gretchen Loihle, Galen Hunt

Future Tense: My Office Mate

I became a biocomputational zombie for science . . . and for love.

Rudy Rucker