DEPARTMENT:
Editor's letter
Today's Communications of the ACM
It is with great pleasure that I take the helm as the ninth Editor-in-Chief of Communications, the flagship publication and ACM's vessel for the most important and interesting happenings across the field of computing.
Andrew A. Chien
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Cerf's up
A Brittle and Fragile Future
While this is not intended to be a dystopian rant, I feel strongly motivated to draw attention to the fragile and interdependent future we are creating through the use of programmable devices and systems.
Vinton G. Cerf
Page 7
DEPARTMENT:
BLOG@CACM
'Generation CS' Drives Growth in Enrollments
Undergraduates who understand the importance of computer science have been expanding the CS student cohort for more than a decade.
Mark Guzdial
Pages 10-11
COLUMN:
News
Building a Brain May Mean Going Analog
Analog circuits consume less power per operation than CMOS technologies, and so should prove more efficient.
Neil Savage
Pages 13-15
Cracking the Code on DNA Storage
Researchers are tapping DNA to create a new and different type of storage media. The technology could prove revolutionary.
Samuel Greengard
Pages 16-18
Artificial Intelligence Poised to Ride a New Wave
Flush with recent successes, and pushed by even newer technology, AI systems could get much smarter.
Gary Anthes
Pages 19-21
Jean E. Sammet 1928-2017
Jean E. Sammet, an American computer scientist who served as the first female president of ACM, passed away on May 21 at the age of 89.
Lawrence M. Fisher
Page 22
COLUMN:
Privacy and security
Cryptovirology: The Birth, Neglect, and Explosion of Ransomware
Recent attacks exploiting a known vulnerability continue a downward spiral of ransomware-related incidents.
Adam L. Young, Moti Yung
Pages 24-26
COLUMN:
Economic and business dimensions
Unknowns of the Gig-Economy
Seeking multidisciplinary research into the rapidly evolving gig-economy.
Brad Greenwood, Gordon Burtch, Seth Carnahan
Pages 27-29
COLUMN:
The profession of IT
The Beginner's Creed
We all need to learn to be expert beginners.
Peter J. Denning
Pages 30-31
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
The Informal Guide to ACM Fellow Nominations
Recommendations for a successful nomination process.
Marc Snir
Pages 32-34
SECTION:
Practice
Side Effects, Front and Center
One system's side effect is another's meat and potatoes.
Pat Helland
Pages 36-39
The IDAR Graph
An improvement over UML.
Mark A. Overton
Pages 40-45
Research For Practice: Tracing and Debugging Distributed Systems; Programming By Examples
Expert-curated guides to the best of CS research.
Peter Bailis, Peter Alvaro, Sumit Gulwani
Pages 46-49
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Reimagining the Avatar Dream: Modeling Social Identity in Digital Media
Explore the limits of using the computer to imagine yourself as whomever or whatever you want to be.
D. Fox Harrell, Chong-U Lim
Pages 50-61
How Important Is IT?
Information and communication technology patents are more influential on subsequent inventions than are other types of patents.
Pantelis Koutroumpis, Aija Leiponen, Llewellyn D W Thomas
Pages 62-68
SECTION:
Review article
Inference and Auction Design in Online Advertising
Econometrics is a key component to gauging user satisfaction and advertisers' profits.
Denis Nekipelov, Tammy Wang
Pages 70-79
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Ironfleet Simplifies Proving Safety and Liveness Properties
"IronFleet: Proving Safety and Liveness of Practical Distributed Systems," by Chris Hawblitzel, et al., describes mechanically checked proofs for two non-trivial distributed services: A Paxos-based library to support replication …
Fred B. Schneider
Page 82
Ironfleet: Proving Safety and Liveness of Practical Distributed Systems
We demonstrate the methodology on a complex implementation of a Paxos-based replicated state machine library and a lease-based sharded key-value store. With our methodology and lessons learned, we aim to raise the standard for …
Chris Hawblitzel, Jon Howell, Manos Kapritsos, Jacob R. Lorch, Bryan Parno, Michael L. Roberts, Srinath Setty, Brian Zill
Pages 83-92
Technical Perspective: Building a Better Hash Function
In "Fast and Powerful Hashing Using Tabulation," Mikkel Thorup describes a variation of simple but surprisingly effective and powerful hash functions based on using small tables of random hash values.
Michael Mitzenmacher
Page 93
Fast and Powerful Hashing Using Tabulation
We survey recent results on how simple hashing schemes based on tabulation provide unexpectedly strong guarantees.
Mikkel Thorup
Pages 94-101
COLUMN:
Last byte
Ruby Risks
You have three covered boxes of Burmese rubies before you. You know there are a total of 30 identical seven-carat rubies in the three boxes.
Dennis Shasha
Page 104