Hazards of the Information Superhighway

The presentation of Internet search results not only must be prioritized by some measure of quality but also the ranking criteria must be clear and well understood. Transparency is our friend in this endeavor.

Vinton G. Cerf

The Winner-Takes-All Tech Corporation

What may have been a radical position less than a year ago has become a conventional wisdom now. There are several initiatives to regulate "Big Tech;" the question now is how rather than if.

Moshe Y. Vardi

You Can Publish It!: (You Have To)

The Viewpoint Column "Online Voting: We Can Do It! (We Have To)" in the September 2019 issue is naïve and unscientific. It does not cite any of the scientific literature the author is claiming to refute.

CACM Staff

The Benefits of Indolence

Yegor Bugayenko explains his realization that software developers should go neither above nor beyond.

Yegor Bugayenko

Information Is Physics

Individual bits of information can have direct physical consequences.

Don Monroe

When Drones Fly

Drone technology is poised to enter the mainstream of business and society, but engineering robust controls remains a challenge.

Samuel Greengard

Real-World Applications for Drones

Unmanned vehicles have a number of compelling real-world use cases.

Logan Kugler

Europe's Controversial Digital Copyright Directive Finalized

Considering the new liability risks for ISPs, search engines, and news aggregators under recent EU-wide mandatory rules.

Pamela Samuelson

Computational Thinking Should Just be Good Thinking

Seeking to change computing teaching to improve computer science.

Mark Guzdial, Alan Kay, Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway

An Interview with Leonard Kleinrock

The UCLA professor and networking pioneer reflects on his career in industry and academia.

George Varghese

Algorithms, Platforms, and Ethnic Bias

How computing platforms and algorithms can potentially either reinforce or identify and address ethnic biases.

Selena Silva, Martin Kenney

Welcome to the India Region Special Section

The India region plays an important role in the global computing landscape with its highly trained manpower, software companies, and top universities whose students serve local and global needs. The India Region special section …

P J Narayanan, Pankaj Jalote, Anand Deshpande

Extreme Classification

What if you had the superpower to accurately answer, in a few milliseconds, a multiple-choice question with a billion choices? The objective in extreme classification is to develop algorithms with such capabilities.

Manik Varma

Designing ICT Interventions for Women in Pakistan

In order to ensure entire populations benefit from the deployment and adoption of ICTs an understanding of the specific needs and challenges faced by women is imperative.

Maryam Mustafa, Amna Batool, Agha Ali Raza

Turbocharging Database Query Processing and Testing

Query processing and optimization are implemented in all contemporary database systems. Indian universities have played a visible role in addressing important, unsolved issues.

Jayant R. Haritsa, S. Sudarshan

Digital Transformation in the Indian Government

The Digital India program is centered on the vision of offering digital infrastructure as a core utility to every citizen, providing services and enabling the digital empowerment of citizens.

Neeta Verma, Savita Dawar

CSpathshala: Bringing Computational Thinking to Schools

Some 300,000 students from 750 schools in 11 states throughout India are learning computing through "unplugged" activities as part of CSpathshala, ACM India's education initiative.

Vipul Shah

Creative Disruption in Fintech from Sri Lanka

The farsighted entry into financial technology, and experience in mobilizing local talent, contributed to the early success of MillenniumIT.

Ajit Samaranayake, Sampath Tilakumara, Thayaparan Sripavan, Rasika Withanawasam

Technology Interventions for Road Safety and Beyond

Inadequate road infrastructure, increasing vehicle population, and poor driver training make a chaotic and often deadly mix in India. Artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technologies may improve the situation.

C. V. Jawahar, Venkata N. Padmanabhan

Skill Evaluation

Aspiring Minds has developed a scalable platform to test the job skills of millions of graduates entering the labor market in India every year.

Shashank Srikant, Rohit Takhar, Vishal Venugopal, Varun Aggarwal

Computing Research at Tata Consultancy Services

Research and innovation have played a unique role in Tata Consultancy Services' journey from a computing division to its current place in global technology consulting.

Gautam Shroff, K. Ananth Krishnan

The Growth and Evolution of India's Software Industry

The Indian software industry has matured from providing cost-effective back office support to driving the digital transformation of global companies.

Pankaj Jalote, Pari Natarajan

Indic Language Computing

Speech and natural language processing of Indic languages is hugely important and relevant in India, where approximately 420-440 languages are in active use.

Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Hema Murthy, Surangika Ranathunga, Ranjiva Munasinghe

India Stack - Digital Infrastructure as Public Good

Digital inclusion in India has taken off in a significant way in the last few years. The country is young, ambitious, and connected.

Vivek Raghavan, Sanjay Jain, Pramod Varma

Privacy Concerns with Aadhaar

The debate engendered by the Aadhaar project has propelled India from being a predominantly pre-privacy society to one in which privacy protection in digital databases has emerged as a major national concern.

Subhashis Banerjee, Subodh Sharma

The Rise of the Indian Start-Up Ecosystem

The rise of the Indian start-up ecosystem can be characterized by three major changes over the last decade that offer interesting insights for the start-up ecosystem in India and across the world.

Charles Assisi, Avinash Raghava, NS Ramnath

Highlights of Software R&D in India

India's achievement as a software superpower rests on decades of work spanning software processes, rigorous engineering, value-adding technologies, and other factors.

Supratik Chakraborty, Vasudeva Varma

Research in Theoretical Computer Science

Indian undergraduate programs in computing date back to the early 1980s — a time that also saw the first generation of graduate students from India taking up theoretical computer science.

Meena Mahajan, Madhavan Mukund, Nitin Saxena

The Positive and Negative Effects of Social Media in India

Online social media services have had a profound impact in India, increasing digital literacy, disseminating more local language content, and more. The services have had negative effects as well.

Niloy Ganguly, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

The Internet of the Orals

Researchers and practitioners have used interactive voice response technology to create voice-based services that have found application in India's marginalized communities.

Aditya Vashistha, Umar Saif, Agha Ali Raza

The Effects of Mixing Machine Learning and Human Judgment

Collaboration between humans and machines does not necessarily lead to better outcomes.

Michelle Vaccaro, Jim Waldo

Write Amplification vs. Read Perspiration

The trade-offs between write and read.

Pat Helland

The Five-Minute Rule 30 Years Later and Its Impact on the Storage Hierarchy

Tracing the evolution of the five-minute rule to help identify imminent changes in the design of data management engines.

Raja Appuswamy, Goetz Graefe, Renata Borovica-Gajic, Anastasia Ailamaki

An Elementary Introduction to Kalman Filtering

Demystifying the uses of a powerful tool for uncertain information.

Yan Pei, Swarnendu Biswas, Donald S. Fussell, Keshav Pingali

Technical Perspective: A Whitebox Solution for Blackbox-Like Behaviors

DeepXplore brings a software testing perspective to deep neural networks and, in doing so, creates the opportunity for enormous amounts of follow-on work in several ways.

David G. Andersen

DeepXplore: Automated Whitebox Testing of Deep Learning Systems

We design, implement, and evaluate DeepXplore, the first white-box framework for systematically testing real-world deep learning systems.

Kexin Pei, Yinzhi Cao, Junfeng Yang, Suman Jana

Cantando con la Corrente (Singing with Current)

An augmented singer gets some unexpected feedback from his audience.