DEPARTMENT:
Editor's letter
Owning Computing's Environmental Impact
It is time for the computing community to face up to computing's growing environmental impact—and take responsibility for it.
Andrew A. Chien
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Cerf's up
Ownership vs. Stewardship
The Internet and the World Wide Web are dependent on the stewardship of a key set of non-profit institutions.
Vinton G. Cerf
Page 6
DEPARTMENT:
Departments
Lost in Math?
While some people find mathematics befuddling, others find it elegant and beautiful. But the seductive power of mathematical beauty has come under criticism lately.
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 7
DEPARTMENT:
[email protected]
Smoothing the Path to Computing; Pondering Uses for Big Data
Members of the Computing Research Association suggest ways to broaden participation in computer science, while Saurabh Bagchi looks at use cases for big data.
Mary Hall, Richard Ladner, Diane Levitt, Manuel A. Pérez Quiñones, Saurabh Bagchi
Pages 8-9
COLUMN:
News
Building a Better Battery
How researchers are improving energy storage devices for power generated from renewable sources like solar and wind.
Logan Kugler
Pages 11-13
Exoskeletons Today
Wearable mobile machines integrate people and machines to assist the movement-impaired, and amplify the capabilities of industrial and defense workers while protecting them from injury.
Esther Shein
Pages 14-16
Electronics Need Rare Earths
Demand is expected to spike over the next few years, leading to higher prices and international trade issues.
Keith Kirkpatrick
Pages 17-18
COLUMN:
Legally speaking
Questioning a New Intellectual Property Right for Press Publishers
Considering the implications of the "link tax" provision of the proposed EU Directive for the Digital Single Market for traditional press publishers.
Pamela Samuelson
Pages 20-23
COLUMN:
Economic and business dimensions
Potential 'Dark Sides' of Leisure Technology Use in Youth
Time for balanced reflections on technology.
Ofir Turel
Pages 24-27
COLUMN:
The profession of IT
An Interview with William Hugh Murray
A discussion of the rapidly evolving realm of practical cyber security.
Peter J. Denning
Pages 28-30
COLUMN:
Education
It's About Power
A call to rethink ethics and equity in computing education.
Sepehr Vakil, Jennifer Higgs
Pages 31-33
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
From Computational Thinking to Computational Action
Envisioning computing education that both teaches and empowers.
Mike Tissenbaum, Josh Sheldon, Hal Abelson
Pages 34-36
SECTION:
Practice
A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Blockchain Universe
Blockchain remains a mystery, despite its growing acceptance.
Jim Waldo
Pages 38-42
Design Patterns for Managing Up
Four challenging work situations and how to handle them.
Kate Matsudaira
Pages 43-45
Understanding Database Reconstruction Attacks on Public Data
These attacks on statistical databases are no longer a theoretical danger.
Simson Garfinkel, John M. Abowd, Christian Martindale
Pages 46-53
SECTION:
Contributed articles
The Seven Tools of Causal Inference, with Reflections on Machine Learning
The kind of causal inference seen in natural human thought can be "algorithmitized" to help produce human-level machine intelligence.
Judea Pearl
Pages 54-60
Metamorphic Testing of Driverless Cars
Metamorphic testing can test untestable software, detecting fatal errors in autonomous vehicles' onboard computer systems.
Zhi Quan Zhou, Liqun Sun
Pages 61-67
Blogging Birds: Telling Informative Stories About the Lives of Birds from Telemetric Data
The system transforms raw telemetric data into engaging and informative blog texts readily understood by all.
Advaith Siddharthan, Kapila Ponnamperuma, Chris Mellish, Chen Zeng, Daniel Heptinstall, Annie Robinson, Stuart Benn, René Van Der Wal
Pages 68-77
The Compositional Architecture of the Internet
A new model for describing the Internet reflects today's reality and the future's needs.
Pamela Zave, Jennifer Rexford
Pages 78-87
SECTION:
Review articles
Beyond Worst-Case Analysis
The need for deeply understanding when algorithms work (or not) has never been greater.
Tim Roughgarden
Pages 88-96
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Borrowing Big Code to Automate Programming Activities
"Predicting Program Properties from 'Big Code'" presents new techniques for leveraging big code to automate two programming activities: selecting understandable names for JavaScript identifiers and generating type annotations …
Martin C. Rinard
Page 98
Predicting Program Properties from 'Big Code'
We present a new approach for predicting program properties from large codebases (aka "Big Code").
Veselin Raychev, Martin Vechev, Andreas Krause
Pages 99-107
Technical Perspective: Isolating a Matching When Your Coins Go Missing
Whether there exists a deterministic parallel algorithm for bipartite matching remains an outstanding question at the frontiers of our understanding of the role of randomness in computation. The question has been (nearly) recently …
Nisheeth K. Vishnoi
Page 108
A Deterministic Parallel Algorithm for Bipartite Perfect Matching
In this article, we give an almost complete derandomization of the Isolation Lemma for perfect matchings in bipartite graphs.
Stephen Fenner, Rohit Gurjar, Thomas Thierauf
Pages 109-115
COLUMN:
Last byte
Guiding Computers, Robots to See and Think
Fei-Fei Li, co-director of Stanford University's Human-Centered AI Institute, wants to create algorithms that can learn the way human babies do.
Leah Hoffmann
Pages 120-ff