DEPARTMENT:
Editor's letter
Computing Is the Secret Ingredient (well, Not So Secret)
Computer science is both a powerful enabler of rapid advances in all intellectual fields and a disruptor driving furious revolutions in commerce and society worldwide.
Andrew A. Chien
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the editor
Start CS Students Off with Industry Best Practices
Lamenting that CS students are often not exposed to best practices in the classroom, Thomas A. Limoncelli offered advice for serving students better in "Four Ways to Make CS and IT More Immersive" (Oct. 2017). We agree with that …
CACM Staff
Page 6
DEPARTMENT:
Cerf's up
Now For Something Entirely Different
This column is about three books I have just read. Two get at the proliferation of wrong but persuasive assertions about the past, present, or future. The third appeals to logic and humility.
Vinton G. Cerf
Page 7
DEPARTMENT:
BLOG@CACM
Building Tools to Help Students Learn to Program
Philip Guo summarizes his first three years of research into building tools to support those learning computer programming.
Philip Guo
Pages 8-9
COLUMN:
News
Perovskites Boost Solar-Cell Potential
New materials could allow cheaper, more efficient solar cells for both traditional and novel applications.
Don Monroe
Pages 11-13
Gaming Machine Learning
Game simulations are driving improvements in machine learning for autonomous vehicles and other devices.
Samuel Greengard
Pages 14-16
Parallel Computational Thinking
Applications must be programmed to process instructions in parallel to take full advantage of the new multicore processors.
Keith Kirkpatrick
Pages 17-19
COLUMN:
The profession of IT
The Forgotten Engineer
Engineering has been marginalized by the unhealthy belief that engineering is the application of science.
Peter J. Denning
Pages 20-23
COLUMN:
Broadening participation
Community Colleges: A Resource For Increasing Equity and Inclusion in Computer Science Education
Challenging a simplistic pathway metaphor.
Louise Ann Lyon, Jill Denner
Pages 24-26
COLUMN:
Kode vicious
Cold, Hard Cache
On the implementation and maintenance of caches.
George V. Neville-Neil
Pages 27-28
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
The Death of Big Software
We are past the tipping point in the transition away from 20th-century big software architectures.
Stephen J. Andriole
Pages 29-32
Lousy Advice to the Lovelorn
The 37% rule is rarely applicable in real-world situations. It is certainly entirely wrong-headed as advice for getting married.
Ernest Davis
Pages 33-35
SECTION:
Practice
Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree
The concept of cryptocurrencies is built from forgotten ideas in research literature.
Arvind Narayanan, Jeremy Clark
Pages 36-45
XML and JSON Are Like Cardboard
Cardboard surrounds and protects stuff as it crosses boundaries.
Pat Helland
Pages 46-47
Research For Practice: Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
Expert-curated guides to the best of CS research.
John Regehr, Peter Bailis
Pages 48-50
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Cybersecurity, Nuclear Security, Alan Turing, and Illogical Logic
Cyber deterrence, like nuclear deterrence, depends on our adversaries being rational enough to be deterred by our threats but us not by theirs.
Martin E. Hellman
Pages 52-59
Technology-Driven Changes in Work and Employment
Even when surrounded by ubiquitous computing, humans should be encouraged to do what they do better than machines.
Ramiro Montealegre, Wayne F. Cascio
Pages 60-67
SECTION:
Review articles
Energy Efficiency: A New Concern For Application Software Developers
Development of energy-efficient software is hindered by a lack of knowledge and a lack of tools.
Gustavo Pinto, Fernando Castor
Pages 68-75
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Pricing Information (and Its Implications)
"A Theory of Pricing Private Data," by Chao Li, et al., introduces a fascinating and complicated issue that arises on the buy-side of the market when buyers are interested in multiple linear functions of the same dataset.
Aaron Roth
Page 78
A Theory Of Pricing Private Data
We describe the foundations of a market in which those seeking access to data must pay for it and individuals are compensated for the loss of privacy they may suffer.
Chao Li, Daniel Yang Li, Gerome Miklau, Dan Suciu
Pages 79-86
Technical Perspective: A Simple, Elegant Approach to Non-Numeric Parallelization
"Automatically Accelerating Non-Numerical Programs by Architecture-Compiler Co-Design," by Simone Campanoni, et al., proposes a modest hardware extension to support a new parallel execution model for small, non-numeric loops. …
James Larus
Page 87
Automatically Accelerating Non-Numerical Programs By Architecture-Compiler Co-Design
HELIX-RC is a compiler/microprocessor co-design that opens loops to parallelization by decoupling communication from thread execution in conventional multicore architectures.
Simone Campanoni, Kevin Brownell, Svilen Kanev, Timothy M. Jones, Gu-Yeon Wei, David Brooks
Pages 88-97
COLUMN:
Last byte
Grooming the Leaders of Tomorrow
Former Stanford University president John Hennessy is the academic architect behind the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program.
Leah Hoffmann
Pages 112-ff