September 2018 Table of Contents | Communications of the ACM

Home → Magazine Archive → September 2018 (Vol. 61, No. 9)

DEPARTMENT: Editor's letter

Computer Architecture: Disruption from Above

For the research community, opportunities to shape a profoundly different, new age of computer architecture are emerging.

Andrew A. Chien

Page 5

DEPARTMENT: Cerf's up

The Peace of Westphalia

A look at today's headlines suggests the transnational Internet and World Wide Web have become avenues through which the Peace of Westphalia agreement is regularly violated.

Vinton G. Cerf

Page 6

DEPARTMENT: Vardi's insights

Move Fast and Break Things

Whether or not the theory of disruptive innovation has predictive power, it is a powerful story that explains the rise and fall of tech empires. It is deeply embedded in the psyche of Silicon Valley.

Moshe Y. Vardi

Page 7

DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor

Hippie Values Really Did Build the Internet

Moshe Y. Vardi's column "How the Hippies Destroyed the Internet" (July 2018) sent me to my computer in shock where I was relieved to find that nobody has actually yet destroyed the Internet.

CACM Staff

Pages 9-11

DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM

Discovering Bugs, or Ensuring Success?

Finding errors is not the same as making certain a software product works correctly.

Yegor Bugayenko

Pages 12-13

COLUMN: News

AI Holds the Better Hand

Exploiting the techniques of game theory to come up with the superior poker hand.

Don Monroe

Pages 14-16

Robotic Implants

Scientists are developing tiny medical machines that stretch the definition of the term "robot."

Gregory Mone

Pages 17-18

Borders in the Cloud

New data protection laws raise questions about whether certain jurisdictions are trying to thwart the ability of foreign governments to obtain data on their citizens.

Keith Kirkpatrick

Pages 19-21

COLUMN: Computing ethics

Overtrust in the Robotic Age

A contemporary ethical challenge.

Alan R. Wagner, Jason Borenstein, Ayanna Howard

Pages 22-24

COLUMN: Law and technology

When Machine Learning is Facially Invalid

Observations on the use of machine learning and facial inferences to classify people using inexplicable data.

Frank Pasquale

Pages 25-27

COLUMN: The profession of IT

Navigating with Accelerating Technology Change

Mathematical tools such as S-curves locate inflection points in technology-accelerated social spaces; where we move next depends on our navigational skills.

Peter J. Denning

Pages 28-30

COLUMN: Viewpoint

An Academic's Observations from a Sabbatical at Google

How experiences gained in industry can improve academic research and teaching.

Adam Barker

Pages 31-33

Is Software the Result of Top-Down Intelligent Design or Evolution?

Considering the potential danger to individuals of rapid coevolution.

Edward A. Lee

Pages 34-36

SECTION: Practice

GitOps: A Path to More Self-Service IT

IaC + PR = GitOps

Thomas A. Limoncelli

Pages 38-42

Workload Frequency Scaling Law: Derivation and Verification

Workload scalability has a cascade relation via the scale factor.

Noor Mubeen

Pages 43-47

Research for Practice: FPGAs in Datacenters

Expert-curated guides to the best of CS research.

Gustavo Alonso, Peter Bailis

Pages 48-49

SECTION: Contributed articles

A Domain-Specific Architecture for Deep Neural Networks

Tensor processing units improve performance per watt of neural networks in Google datacenters by roughly 50x.

Norman P. Jouppi, Cliff Young, Nishant Patil, David Patterson

Pages 50-59

Can Beyond-CMOS Devices Illuminate Dark Silicon?

The "new Dark Silicon" model benchmarks transistor technologies at the architectural level for multi-core processors.

Robert Perricone, X. Sharon Hu, Joseph Nahas, Michael Niemier

Pages 60-69

Peer Assessment of CS Doctoral Programs Shows Strong Correlation with Faculty Citations

Strong correlation indicates notable research productivity of individual faculty members in turn boosts the standing of their programs.

Slobodan Vucetic, Ashis Kumar Chanda, Shanshan Zhang, Tian Bai, Aniruddha Maiti

Pages 70-76

SECTION: Review articles

An Overview of Deterministic Database Systems

Deterministic database systems show great promise, but their deployment may require changes in the way developers interact with the database.

Daniel J. Abadi, Jose M. Faleiro

Pages 78-88

SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: Is Your WiFi a Sensor?

"Emotion Recognition Using Wireless Signals" shows that not only can the heartrate be counted with accuracy comparable to ECG devices, but the variabilities of the heart signals—in each pulse—can be recognized as well.

Romit Roy Choudhury

Page 90

Emotion Recognition Using Wireless Signals

This paper demonstrates a new technology that can infer a person's emotions from RF signals reflected off his body.

Mingmin Zhao, Fadel Adib, Dina Katabi

Pages 91-100

COLUMN: Last byte

Bounce Blockchain

There is a simple energy-parsimonious solution to ensure the integrity of blockchains that, incidentally, also gives rise to some cool puzzles.

Dennis Shasha

Pages 104-ff

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