Artificial Intelligence: Past and Future

The most dramatic chess match of the 20th century was the May 1997 rematch between the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue and world champion Garry Kasparov, which Deep Blue won. While this victory was considered by many a triumph for …

Moshe Y. Vardi

Software Engineering Is Engineering

I was confounded by the conclusion of Michael Davis's Viewpoint "Will Software Engineering Ever Be Engineering?" (Nov. 2011), mainly because anything I can do in code I can also do in digital hardware, analog hardware, fluidics …

CACM Staff

ACM President's Letter

Early in 2011, IEEE Computer Society President Sorel Reisman and I began discussing how IEEE-CS and ACM could work together more cooperatively. We …

Alain Chesnais

ACM's Annual Report

FY11 was a defining year for ACM as the largest educational and scientific computing society in the world. Many of the initiatives we have set forth over the last few years have taken root and we now see tangible evidence of …

Alain Chesnais

Understanding CS1 Students; Defective Software

Mark Guzdial writes about why teachers must grasp introductory CS students' theories about computing. Bertrand Meyer argues for the necessity of analyzing large-scale software disasters and publishing a detailed technical study …

Mark Guzdial, Bertrand Meyer

eBooks Will Abound in the ACM Digital Library

ACM is preparing to offer a new and exciting member benefit for 2012; eBooks accessible via the ACM Digital Library! Expanding the eBooks Collections in the ACM Learning Center, ACM will make available full-text versions of eBook …

Scott Delman

Better Medicine Through Machine Learning

Computers that tease out patterns from clinical data could improve patient diagnosis and care.

Neil Savage

Revamping Storage Performance

Great strides are being made in finding fast alternatives to the slow disks that dominate storage systems, but fast media are not nearly enough.

Gary Anthes

Law and Disorder

International law has always been a murky and Byzantine area. However, the Internet and digital technology have raised the stakes, the risks, and the challenges.

Samuel Greengard

Celebration Time

The centennial celebrations of Alan Turing's birth might help turn a quiet British genius into an iconic global hero.

Sarah Underwood

Analyzing Apple Products

Researchers untangle the complex web of Apple's global supply chain — and offer lessons for managers and policymakers trying to chart the future course of U.S. industry.

Alex Wright

John McCarthy, 1927 - 2011

Winner of the 1971 A.M. Turing Award, John McCarthy was a founder of artificial intelligence and inventor of the Lisp programming language.

Paul Hyman

The Yin and Yang of Copyright and Technology

Examining the recurring conflicts between copyright and technology from piano rolls to domain-name filtering.

Randal C. Picker

The Difference Engine

Observations on cognitive diversity and team performance.

Phillip G. Armour

The IBM PC: From Beige Box to Industry Standard

Looking back at three decades of PC platform evolution.

Thomas Haigh

Interfaces For the Ordinary User: Can We Hide Too Much?

Increasing the visibility and access to underlying file structure on consumer devices can vastly improve the user experience.

Kai A. Olsen, Alessio Malizia

An Interview with Stephen A. Cook

Stephen A. Cook, winner of the 1982 A.M. Turing Award, reflects on his career.

Philip L. Frana

Creating Languages in Racket

Sometimes you just have to make a better mousetrap.

Matthew Flatt

Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet

Networks without effective AQM may again be vulnerable to congestion collapse.

Jim Gettys, Kathleen Nichols

I/O Virtualization

Decoupling a logical device from its physical implementation offers many compelling advantages.

Carl Waldspurger, Mendel Rosenblum

The State of Phishing Attacks

Looking past the systems people use, they target the people using the systems.

Jason Hong

Flexible Experimentation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Virtual testbeds model them by seamlessly integrating physical, simulated, and emulated sensor nodes and radios in real time.

Geoff Coulson, Barry Porter, Ioannis Chatzigiannakis, Christos Koninis, Stefan Fischer, Dennis Pfisterer, Daniel Bimschas, Torsten Braun, Philipp Hurni, Markus Anwander, Gerald Wagenknecht, Sándor P. Fekete, Alexander Kröller, Tobias Baumgartner

Long-Term Confidentiality of PKI

How to guarantee files encrypted and transmitted today stay confidential for years to come.

Chi-Sung Laih, Shang-Ming Jen, Chia-Yu Lu

(Computer) Vision Without Sight

Computer vision holds the key for the blind or visually impaired to explore the visual world.

Roberto Manduchi, James Coughlan

Technical Perspective: Where Do People Draw Lines?

Computer graphics once focused exclusively on realism. The field eventually broadened to include other pictorial styles. The breadth of situations in which line drawings are …

Frédo Durand

Where Do People Draw Lines?

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

Technical Perspective: Content-Centric Networking

Much has changed in the 50 years since the invention of packet switching and the early network designs and deployments that would evolve into today's Internet. The designs …

Jim Kurose

Networking Named Content

Current network use is dominated by content distribution and retrieval yet current networking protocols are designed for conversations between hosts. We present Content-Centric Networking which uses content chunks as a primitive …

Van Jacobson, Diana K. Smetters, James D. Thornton, Michael Plass, Nick Briggs, Rebecca Braynard

Future Tense: The Near Cloud

Wish I never pulled the plug…

Daniel H. Wilson