DEPARTMENT:
Cerf's up
Libraries Considered Hazardous
Libraries of the future cannot merely be catalogs of digital content. The objects in the digital library will need to interact in some fashion so that truth value of their contents can be adjusted as new knowledge becomes available …
Vinton G. Cerf
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the editor
Between the Lines in the China Region Special Section
I thought privacy in China deserved better treatment than was expressed in the foreword of the special section on the China Region (Nov. 2018), that "People in China seem less sensitive about privacy."
CACM Staff
Pages 6-7
DEPARTMENT:
BLOG@CACM
Seeking Digital Humanities, IT Tech Support
Herbert Bruderer explains why the opposite of digital is not analog; Robin K. Hill describes how the challenges of user support are aggravated by indeterminate client responsibility.
Herbert Bruderer, Robin K. Hill
Pages 8-9
COLUMN:
News
A Brave New World of Genetic Engineering
Genetic engineering technologies are advancing at a furious rate, changing the world one cell at a time.
Samuel Greengard
Pages 11-13
Technologizing Agriculture
An array of technologies are making farms more efficient, safer, and profitable.
Keith Kirkpatrick
Pages 14-16
Being Recognized Everywhere
How facial and voice recognition are reshaping society.
Logan Kugler
Pages 17-19
COLUMN:
Privacy and security
2018: A Big Year for Privacy
Retracing the pivotal privacy and security-related events and ensuing issues from the past year.
Carl Landwehr
Pages 20-22
COLUMN:
Broadening participation
How Computer Science at CMU Is Attracting and Retaining Women
Carnegie Mellon University's successful efforts enrolling, sustaining, and graduating women in computer science challenge the belief in a gender divide in CS education.
Carol Frieze, Jeria L. Quesenberry
Pages 23-26
COLUMN:
Kode Vicious
Writing a Test Plan
Establish your hypotheses, methodologies, and expected results.
George V. Neville-Neil
Page 27
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
Tony's Law
Seeking to promote regulations for reliable software for the long-term prosperity of the software industry.
Dror G. Feitelson
Pages 28-31
Do We Really Need Computational Thinking?
Considering the expression "computational thinking" as an entry point to understand why the fundamental contribution of computing to science is the shift from solving problems to having problems solved.
Enrico Nardelli
Pages 32-35
SECTION:
Practice
CodeFlow: Improving the Code Review Process at Microsoft
A discussion with Jacek Czerwonka, Michaela Greiler, Christian Bird, Lucas Panjer, and Terry Coatta
CACM Staff
Pages 36-44
The Importance of a Great Finish
You have to finish strong, every time.
Kate Matsudaira
Pages 45-47
SECTION:
Contributed articles
A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture
Innovations like domain-specific hardware, enhanced security, open instruction sets, and agile chip development will lead the way.
John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson
Pages 48-60
Even Central Users Do Not Always Drive Information Diffusion
Diffusion speed and scale depend on all kinds of information, not just which users have the most or fewest connections.
Chao Gao, Zhen Su, Jiming Liu, JÜrgen Kurths
Pages 61-67
SONYC: A System for Monitoring, Analyzing, and Mitigating Urban Noise Pollution
SONYC integrates sensors, machine listening, data analytics, and citizen science to address noise pollution in New York City.
Juan P. Bello, Claudio Silva, Oded Nov, R. Luke Dubois, Anish Arora, Justin Salamon, Charles Mydlarz, Harish Doraiswamy
Pages 68-77
SECTION:
Review articles
Blockchains From a Distributed Computing Perspective
The roots of blockchain technologies are deeply interwoven in distributed computing.
Maurice Herlihy
Pages 78-85
Separation Logic
Separation logic is a key development in formal reasoning about programs, opening up new lines of attack on longstanding problems.
Peter O'Hearn
Pages 86-95
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: How Economic Theories Can Help Computers Beat the Heat
The authors of "Distributed Strategies for Computational Sprints" bring the rich theory of allocating scarce resources to the challenge of managing computational sprinting in datacenters.
Thomas F. Wenisch
Page 97
Distributed Strategies for Computational Sprints
We describe a computational sprinting architecture in which many, independent chip multiprocessors share a power supply and sprints are constrained by the chips' thermal limits and the rack's power limits.
Songchun Fan, Seyed Majid Zahedi, Benjamin C. Lee
Pages 98-106
Technical Perspective: To Do or Not To Do: Extending SQL with Integer Linear Programming?
"Scalable Computation of High-Order Optimization Queries," by Brucato et al., makes a case for marrying the well-established paradigms of constrained optimization (specifically ILP) and traditional SQL querying.
Surajit Chaudhuri
Page 107
Scalable Computation of High-Order Optimization Queries
We present a complete system that supports package queries, a new query model that extends traditional database queries to handle complex constraints and preferences over answer sets, allowing the declarative specification and …
Matteo Brucato, Azza Abouzied, Alexandra Meliou
Pages 108-116
COLUMN:
Last byte
Hawking's Nightmare
Stephen Hawking warned us not to contact E.T.
David Allen Batchelor
Pages 120-ff