DEPARTMENT:
Departments
Program Verification: Vision and Reality
In 1969, Tony Hoare wrote in "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming" about mathematical certainty, great reliance, and confidence. In retrospect, the hope for "mathematical certainty" was idealized, and not fully realistic …
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Career paths in computing: Computing enabled me to …
Obtain a Ph.D. and a Career in Data
Innovative new approaches to learning are enabling people to gain skills that are vital in today's workplace.
Victoria Holt
Page 7
DEPARTMENT:
Editor's letter
Two Sides of the Software Engineering Coin
Two columns from the January 2021 Communications: Michael A. Cusumano's "Technology Strategy and Management" and Thomas Haigh's "Historical Reflections," offer a stark contrast with respect to the engineering profession.
CACM Staff
Pages 8-9
DEPARTMENT:
[email protected]
Securing Seabed Cybersecurity, Emphasizing Intelligence Augmentation
John Arquilla considers the outlook for undersea cyberwar, while Judi Fusco, Pati Ruiz, and Jeremy Roschelle discuss how building equitable applications in education requires an emphasis on augmenting intelligence.
John Arquilla, Judi Fusco, Pati Ruiz, Jeremy Roschelle
Pages 10-12
COLUMN:
News
Formal Software Verification Measures Up
Verified coding techniques use mathematical proofs to ensure code is error-free and hacker-resistant. Can the approach revolutionize software?
Samuel Greengard
Pages 13-15
A Battery-Free Internet of Things
The Internet of Things can thrive without hardwired or consumable power sources.
Esther Shein
Pages 16-18
The Future of Supply Chains
Droids, drones, and driverless technologies are fueling a supply chain revolution.
Paul Marks
Pages 19-21
Charles M. Geschke (1939-2021)
Charles M. Geschke helped create the modern world of computing, where beautiful typography and expressive, artistic graphics are as integral to most users' experience as numbers and text.
Simson Garfinkel, Eugene H. Spafford
Page 22
COLUMN:
Legally speaking
Reimplementing Software Interfaces Is Fair Use
A multifactored rationale for denying Oracle's claim against Google.
Pamela Samuelson
Pages 24-26
COLUMN:
Privacy
Lessons From the Loo
Illustrating privacy concepts with potty talk.
Lorrie Faith Cranor
Pages 27-29
COLUMN:
Computing ethics
Responsible Computing During COVID-19 and Beyond
Navigating the ethical and societal impacts of technologies.
Solon Barocas, Asia J. Biega, Margarita Boyarskaya, Kate Crawford, Hal Daumé III, Miroslav Dudík, Benjamin Fish, Mary L. Gray, Brent Hecht, Alexandra Olteanu, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Luke Stark, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna Wallach, Marion Zepf
Pages 30-32
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
The Limits of Differential Privacy (and Its Misuse in Data Release and Machine Learning)
Differential privacy is not a silver bullet for all privacy problems.
Josep Domingo-Ferrer, David Sánchez, Alberto Blanco-Justicia
Pages 33-35
Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects
Acquiring developer-prized practical skills, knowledge, and experiences.
Diomidis Spinellis
Pages 36-38
The 2021 Software Developer Shortage Is Coming
Companies must address the difficulty of hiring and retaining high-skilled employees from an increasingly smaller labor supply.
Travis Breaux, Jennifer Moritz
Pages 39-41
SECTION:
Practice
Application Frameworks
While powerful, frameworks are not for everyone.
Chris Nokleberg, Brad Hawkes
Pages 42-49
Always-on Time-Series Database: Keeping Up Where There's No Way to Catch Up
A discussion with Theo Schlossnagle, Justin Sheehy, and Chris McCubbin.
Theo Schlossnagle, Justin Sheehy, Chris McCubbin
Pages 50-56
SECTION:
Turing lecture
Deep Learning for AI
How can neural networks learn the rich internal representations required for difficult tasks such as recognizing objects or understanding language?
Yoshua Bengio, Yann Lecun, Geoffrey Hinton
Pages 58-65
SECTION:
Contributed articles
The Harm in Conflating Aging With Accessibility
Including older adults as full stakeholders in digital society.
Bran Knowles, Vicki L. Hanson, Yvonne Rogers, Anne Marie Piper, Jenny Waycott, Nigel Davies, Aloha Hufana Ambe, Robin N. Brewer, Debaleena Chattopadhyay, Marianne Dee, David Frohlich, Marisela Gutierrez-Lopez, Ben Jelen, Amanda Lazar, Radoslaw Nielek, Belén Barros Pena, Abi Roper, Mark Schlager, Britta Schulte, Irene Ye Yuan
Pages 66-71
Flexible Work and Personal Digital Infrastructures
PDIs are emerging as alternative sociotechnical infrastructures to enhance flexible work arrangments.
Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, Gemma Newlands, Brian Butler, Saiph Savage, Christoph Lutz, Michael Dunn, Steve Sawyer
Pages 72-79
SECTION:
Review articles
Spatial Concepts in the Conversation With a Computer
Conversing about places with a computer poses a range of challenges to current AI.
Stephan Winter, Timothy Baldwin, Martin Tomko, Jochen Renz, Werner Kuhn, Maria Vasardani
Pages 82-88
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: An Elegant Model for Deriving Equations
"Deriving Equations from Sensor Data Using Dimensional Function Synthesis," by Vasileios Tsoutsouras, et al., addresses the key problem of discovering relationships that hold between physical quantities from data using dimensional …
Sriram Sankaranarayanan
Page 90
Deriving Equations from Sensor Data Using Dimensional Function Synthesis
We present a new method, which we call dimensional function synthesis, for deriving functions that model the relationship between multiple signals in a physical system.
Vasileios Tsoutsouras, Sam Willis, Phillip Stanley-Marbell
Pages 91-99
Technical Perspective: Tracking Pandemic-Driven Internet Traffic
"A Year in Lockdown," by Anja Feldmann, et al., offers a detailed look at how Internet traffic changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jennifer Rexford
Page 100
A Year in Lockdown: How the Waves of COVID-19 Impact Internet Traffic
We review the impact of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic on Internet traffic in order to analyze its performance.
Anja Feldmann, Oliver Gasser, Franziska Lichtblau, Enric Pujol, Ingmar Poese, Christoph Dietzel, Daniel Wagner, Matthias Wichtlhuber, Juan Tapiador, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Oliver Hohlfeld, Georgios Smaragdakis
Pages 101-108
COLUMN:
Last byte
String Me Along
Seeking the ever-elusive shortest path.
Dennis Shasha
Page 112