August 2012 Table of Contents | Communications of the ACM

Home → Magazine Archive → August 2012 (Vol. 55, No. 8)

The annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) shines the spotlight on the next generation of problem solvers during their university years. Allow me to recap the highlights of the 36th Annual ACM-ICPC World …

Bill Poucher

Page 5

DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor

Composable Trees For Configurable Behavior

I concur wholeheartedly with the composability benefits outlined in "Why LINQ Matters: Cloud Composability Guaranteed" (Apr. 2012) due to my experience using composability principles to design and implement the message-dissemination …

CACM Staff

Page 7

DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM

Machine Learning and Algorithms; Agile Development

John Langford poses questions about the direction of research for machine learning and algorithms. Ruben Ortega shares lessons about agile development practices like Scrum.

John Langford, Ruben Ortega

Pages 10-11

COLUMN: News

Cosmic Simulations

With the help of supercomputers, scientists are now able to create models of large-scale astronomical events.

Jeff Kanipe

Pages 13-15

DARPA Shredder Challenge Solved

The eight-person winning team used original computer algorithms to narrow the search space and then relied on human observation to move the pieces into their final positions.

Tom Geller

Pages 16-17

Advertising Gets Personal

Online behavioral advertising and sophisticated data aggregation have changed the face of advertising and put privacy in the crosshairs.

Samuel Greengard

Pages 18-20

Broader Horizons

ACM's Committee for Women in Computing (ACM-W) is widening its reach to involve women in industry as well as academia, including community college faculty and students.

Karen A. Frenkel

Page 21

COLUMN: Emerging markets

Inside the Hermit Kingdom: IT and Outsourcing in North Korea

North Korea has a sizeable IT sector. Some 10,000 professionals work in the field, and many more have IT degrees. They are already engaged in outsourcing contracts for other countries, and are keen to expand further.

Paul Tjia

Pages 22-25

COLUMN: Education

Will Massive Open Online Courses Change How We Teach?

Sharing recent experiences with the massive open artificial intelligence course developed and conducted by Stanford faculty Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

Fred G. Martin

Pages 26-28

COLUMN: Privacy and security

The Politics of 'Real Names'

Power, context, and control in networked publics.

Danah Boyd

Pages 29-31

COLUMN: Kode Vicious

A System Is Not a Product

Stopping to smell the code before wasting time reentering configuration data.

George V. Neville-Neil

Pages 32-33

COLUMN: Economic and business dimensions

The Internet Is Everywhere, but the Payoff Is Not

Examining the uneven patterns of Internet economics.

Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, Shane Greenstein

Pages 34-35

COLUMN: Viewpoint

Internet Elections: Unsafe in Any Home?

Experiences with electronic voting suggest elections should not be conducted via the Internet.

Kai A. Olsen, Hans Fredrik Nordhaug

Pages 36-38

The Ethics of Software Engineering Should Be an Ethics For the Client

Viewing software engineering as a communicative art in which client engagement is essential.

Neil McBride

Pages 39-41

SECTION: Practice

Openflow: A Radical New Idea in Networking

An open standard that enables software-defined networking.

Thomas A. Limoncelli

Pages 42-47

Extending the Semantics of Scheduling Priorities

Increasing parallelism demands new paradigms.

Rafael Vanoni Polanczyk

Pages 48-52

Multitier Programming in Hop

A first step toward programming 21st-century applications.

Manuel Serrano, Gérard Berry

Pages 53-59

SECTION: Contributed articles

The Loss of Location Privacy in the Cellular Age

How to have the best of location-based services while avoiding the growing threat to personal privacy.

Stephen B. Wicker

Pages 60-68

To Be or Not To Be Cited in Computer Science

Traditional bias toward journals in citation databases diminishes the perceived value of conference papers and their authors.

Bjorn De Sutter, Aäron Van Den Oord

Pages 69-75

Process Mining

Using real event data to X-ray business processes helps ensure conformance between design and reality.

Wil Van Der Aalst

Pages 76-83

SECTION: Review articles

Quantum Money

Imagine money you can carry and spend without a trace.

Scott Aaronson, Edward Farhi, David Gosset, Avinatan Hassidim, Jonathan Kelner, Andrew Lutomirski

Pages 84-92

SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: Example-Driven Program Synthesis For End-User Programming

As information technology has come to permeate our society, broader classes of users have developed the need for more sophisticated data manipulation and processing. The following paper focuses on an important emerging area …

Martin C. Rinard

Page 96

Spreadsheet Data Manipulation Using Examples

Millions of computer end users need to perform tasks over large spreadsheet data, yet lack the programming knowledge to do such tasks automatically. We present a methodology that allows end users to automate such repetitive tasks …

Sumit Gulwani, William R. Harris, Rishabh Singh

Pages 97-105

Technical Perspective: Proving Programs Continuous

Proving a program's correctness is usually an all-or-nothing game.

Andreas Zeller

Page 106

Continuity and Robustness of Programs

Computer scientists have long believed that software is different from physical systems in one fundamental way: while the latter have continuous dynamics, the former do not. In this paper, we argue that notions of continuity …

Swarat Chaudhuri, Sumit Gulwani, Roberto Lublinerman

Pages 107-115

COLUMN: Last byte

Puzzled: Find the Magic Set

Welcome to three new puzzles. Each involves a collection of items, and your job is to find a subset of them that is characterized by a particular property.

Peter Winkler

Page 120

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