Who Begat Computing?
The Turing Centenary is now behind us and we can afford some reflection on what has transpired. There is a risk, however, that in our focus on highlighting Turing's seminal contributions we may have gone from celebration to …
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
From the president
What's a Robot?
In most formulations, robots have the ability to manipulate and affect the real world. I would like to posit, however, that the notion of robot could usefully be expanded to include programs that perform functions, ingest …
Vinton G. Cerf
Page 7
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the Editor
Computer Science Is Not a Science
To the question Vinton G. Cerf addressed in his President's Letter "Where Is the Science in Computer Science?" (Oct. 2012), my first answer would be that there isn't any. A true science like physics or chemistry studies some …
CACM Staff
Pages 8-9
ACM's Annual Report For FY12
FY12 was an outstanding year for ACM. Membership reached an all-time high for the 10th consecutive year. We witnessed our global hubs in Europe, India, and China take root and flourish.
Alain Chesnais
Pages 11-15
DEPARTMENT:
[email protected]
Lost in Translation
Daniel Reed on straddling the intellectual divide between technology experts and policymakers.
Daniel Reed
Pages 16-17
COLUMN:
News
Stopping the Leaks
Side channels give out information that can be used to crack secrets, but researchers are identifying the holes and trying to close them.
Neil Savage
Pages 19-21
Beyond Hadoop
The leading open source system for processing big data continues to evolve, but new approaches with added features are on the rise.
Gregory Mone
Pages 22-24
Just the Facts
In repackaging other companies' news, some news aggregators are diverting readers and ad dollars, and, critics argue, undercutting the incentive to spend money on original reporting. It is an economic and ethical problem without …
Marina Krakovsky
Pages 25-27
COLUMN:
Technology strategy and management
The Apple-Samsung Lawsuits
In search of a middle ground in the intellectual property wars.
Michael A. Cusumano
Pages 28-31
COLUMN:
The business of software
How We Build Things: . . . and Why Things Are 90% Complete
It seems to be a law of software development that things always take longer than we expect. When a project manager talks to a designer, programmer, or tester and tries to get a sense of how "complete" the assigned task is …
Phillip G. Armour
Pages 32-33
COLUMN:
Law and technology
Beyond Location: Data Security in the 21st Century
Viewing evolving data security issues as engineering problems to be solved.
Deven Desai
Pages 34-36
COLUMN:
Historical reflections
Five Lessons from Really Good History
Lessons learned from four award-winning books on the history of information technology.
Thomas Haigh
Pages 37-40
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
What College Could Be Like
Imagining an optimized education model.
Salman Khan
Pages 41-43
Conference-Journal Hybrids
Considering how to combine the best elements of conferences and journals.
Jonathan Grudin, Gloria Mark, John Riedl
Pages 44-49
SECTION:
Practice
Condos and Clouds
Constraints in an environment empower the services.
Pat Helland
Pages 50-59
Browser Security: Appearances Can Be Deceiving
A discussion with Jeremiah Grossman, Ben Livshits, Rebecca Bace, and George Neville-Neil
CACM Staff
Pages 60-67
The Web Won't Be Safe or Secure Until We Break It
Unless you have taken very particular precautions, assume every website you visit knows exactly who you are.
Jeremiah Grossman
Pages 68-72
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Human Mobility Characterization from Cellular Network Data
Anonymous location data from cellular phone networks sheds light on how people move around on a large scale.
Richard Becker, Ramón Cáceres, Karrie Hanson, Sibren Isaacman, Ji Meng Loh, Margaret Martonosi, James Rowland, Simon rbanek, Alexander Varshavsky, Chris Volinsky
Pages 74-82
Abstractions For Genomics
Large genomic databases with interactive access require new, layered abstractions, including separating "evidence" from "inference."
Vineet Bafna, Alin Deutsch, Andrew Heiberg, Christos Kozanitis, Lucila Ohno-Machado, George Varghese
Pages 83-93
SECTION:
Review articles
Computer Security and the Modern Home
A framework for evaluating security risks associated with technologies used at home.
Tamara Denning, Tadayoshi Kohno, Henry M. Levy
Pages 94-103
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Visualization, Understanding, and Design
Photographs capture the moment; paintings convey perception, impression, and feeling; illustrations tell stories. Computer graphics aims to enrich all these artistic practices through technology. The following paper is a watershed …
Doug DeCarlo, Matthew Stone
Page 105
Illustrating How Mechanical Assemblies Work
How-things-work visualizations use a variety of visual techniques to depict the operation of complex mechanical assemblies. We present an automated approach for generating such visualizations.
Niloy J. Mitra, Yong-Liang Yang, Dong-Ming Yan, Wilmot Li, Maneesh Agrawala
Pages 106-114
Technical Perspective: Finding People in Depth
The following article by Shotton et al. describes a landmark computer vision system that takes a single depth image containing a person and automatically estimates the pose of the person's body in 3D.
James M. Rehg
Page 115
Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from Single Depth Images
We propose a new method to quickly and accurately predict human pose — the 3-D positions of body joints — from a single depth image, without depending on information from preceding frames.
Jamie Shotton, Toby Sharp, Alex Kipman, Andrew Fitzgibbon, Mark Finocchio, Andrew Blake, Mat Cook, Richard Moore
Pages 116-124
COLUMN:
Last byte
Future Tense: Share My Enlightenment
From the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, with boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what could be. I self-publish, and you get to sail my aether wave for free.
Rudy Rucker
Pages 136-ff