DEPARTMENT:
From the president
Dispelling Common Myths About ACM Awards and Honors
Have you wondered why a person you admire has not received an ACM award? As a former ACM Awards Chair, I'd like to share some insights on what makes nominations effective.
Cherri M. Pancake
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Cerf's up
Undo, Redo, and Regrets
Some actions or decisions are irreversible. We would do ourselves a great favor if we were to design our digital systems to the maximum extent possible to avoid irreversible traps.
Vinton G. Cerf
Page 7
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the editor
A Case Against Mission-Critical Applications of Machine Learning
In their column "Learning Machine Learning" (Dec. 2018), Ted G. Lewis and Peter J. Denning raised a crucial question about machine learning systems.
CACM Staff
Page 9
DEPARTMENT:
BLOG@CACM
Cutting the Wait For CS Advice
Mark Guzdial suggests ways to cut the long lines for college students seeking to meet with their computer science advisors.
Mark Guzdial
Pages 12-13
COLUMN:
News
The Algorithm That Changed Quantum Machine Learning
A college student discovered a classical computing algorithm that experts overlooked. It promises to change both classical and quantum machine learning.
Samuel Greengard
Pages 15-17
I Don't Understand My Car
Self-driving cars will need good communication skills.
Don Monroe
Pages 18-19
What Makes a Robot Likable?
Interactions with robotics teach us more about people.
Gregory Mone
Pages 20-21
COLUMN:
Education
Block-based Programming in Computer Science Education
Considering how block-based programming environments and tools might be used at the introductory level and beyond.
David Weintrop
Pages 22-25
COLUMN:
Economic and business dimensions
A Response to Fake News as a Response to Citizens United
How boundaries on speech could free the market for speech.
Marshall W. Van Alstyne
Pages 26-29
COLUMN:
Kode vicious
MUST and MUST NOT
On writing documentation.
George V. Neville-Neil
Pages 30-31
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
The Success of the Web: A Triumph of the Amateurs
Connecting the unique factors that influenced the origination and subsequent development of the World Wide Web.
Marco Aiello
Pages 32-34
SECTION:
Practice
Industry-Scale Knowledge Graphs: Lessons and Challenges
Five diverse technology companies show how it's done.
Natasha Noy, Yuqing Gao, Anshu Jain, Anant Narayanan, Alan Patterson, Jamie Taylor
Pages 36-43
Research for Practice: The DevOps Phenomenon
An executive crash course.
Anna Wiedemann, Nicole Forsgren, Manuel Wiesche, Heiko Gewald, Helmut Krcmar
Pages 44-49
Overly Attached
Know when to let go of emotional attachment to your work.
Kate Matsudaira
Pages 50-52
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Embedded EthiCS: Integrating Ethics Across CS Education
A Harvard-based pilot program integrates class sessions on ethical reasoning into courses throughout its computer science curriculum.
Barbara J. Grosz, David Gray Grant, Kate Vredenburgh, Jeff Behrends, Lily Hu, Alison Simmons, Jim Waldo
Pages 54-61
Scaling Static Analyses at Facebook
Key lessons for designing static analysis tools deployed to find bugs in hundreds of millions of lines of code.
Dino Distefano, Manuel Fähndrich, Francesco Logozzo, Peter W. O'Hearn
Pages 62-70
SECTION:
Review articles
Activity-Centric Computing Systems
The ability to build a construct that organizes work from different devices and information resources is as complex as it is invaluable.
Jakob E. Bardram, Steven Jeuris, Paolo Tell, Steven Houben, Stephen Voida
Pages 72-81
The History of Digital Spam
Tracing the tangled web of unsolicited and undesired email and possible strategies for its demise.
Emilio Ferrara
Pages 82-91
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: The True Cost of Popularity
The main focus of "Heavy Hitters via Cluster-Preserving Clustering" by Kasper Green Larsen et al. is on building up sufficient information to allow a more effective search process.
Graham Cormode
Page 94
Heavy Hitters via Cluster-Preserving Clustering
We develop a new algorithm for the turnstile heavy hitters problem in general turnstile streams, the EXPANDERSKETCH, which finds the approximate top-k items in a universe of size n using the same asymptotic O(k log n) words of …
Kasper Green Larsen, Jelani Nelson, Huy L. Nguyễn, Mikkel Thorup
Pages 95-100
COLUMN:
Last byte
Fluid Democracy
In trying to "drown" the opposition with daily online elections, I didn't realize they could wash me away.
William Sims Bainbridge
Pages 104-ff