Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

A Battery-Free Internet of Things

The Internet of Things can thrive without hardwired or consumable power sources.

Esther Shein

The Future of Supply Chains

Droids, drones, and driverless technologies are fueling a supply chain revolution.

Paul Marks

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

Reimplementing Software Interfaces Is Fair Use

A multifactored rationale for denying Oracle's claim against Google.

Pamela Samuelson

Lessons From the Loo

Illustrating privacy concepts with potty talk.

Lorrie Faith Cranor

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

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

Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

Acquiring developer-prized practical skills, knowledge, and experiences.

Diomidis Spinellis

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

Application Frameworks

While powerful, frameworks are not for everyone.

Chris Nokleberg, Brad Hawkes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

String Me Along

Seeking the ever-elusive shortest path.

Dennis Shasha