Table of Contents

The Sand-Heap Paradox of Privacy and Influence

In 2018, Arnold Kling wrote a famous blog article, "How the Internet turned bad." It is time for us, as a community, to ask now: "How do we turn the Internet good?"

Moshe Y. Vardi

How Music and Programming Led Me to Build Digital Microworlds

The ability to discover and experience world building is a relatively unique privilege afforded to computer programmers.

Andrew Sorensen

Turing Reaction

The June 2021 Communications of the ACM celebrates Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho as winners of ACM's 2020 Turing Award. For many Iranian members of the computing community, Ullman is the face of discrimination in academia.

CACM Staff

Finding the Art in Systems Conversions, Naming

Doug Meil considers a third distinct type of development, while Mario Antoine Aoun ponders alternate names for ACM.

Doug Meil, Mario Antoine Aoun

A Model Restoration

The architect of the Sagrada Familia appears to have done parametric modeling in his head; software is helping to complete the structure a century later.

Marina Krakovsky

Photonic Processors Light the Way

Highly efficient light-based processors can overcome the bottlenecks of today's electronics.

Samuel Greengard

Non-Fungible Tokens and the Future of Art

A new blockchain-based technology is changing how the art world works, and changing how we think about asset ownership in the process.

Logan Kugler

Protecting the Global Internet from Technology Cold Wars

Considering the perceived dangers of the global information flow.

Anupam Chander

Security Done Right Can Make Smart Cities Wise

Seeking security improvements for smart cities.

Marjory S. Blumenthal

Women's Lives in Code

Exploring Ellen Ullman's 'Close to the Machine' and AMC's 'Halt and Catch Fire.'

Thomas Haigh

Back of the Envelope

Back-of-the-envelope calculations are a powerful professional practice.

Peter J. Denning

Testing Educational Digital Games

Diversifying usability studies utilizing rapid application development.

Lamont A. Flowers

Whose Smartphone Is It?

Should two private companies have complete control over the world's cellphones?

James R. Larus

AI Ethics: A Call to Faculty

Integrating ethics into artificial intelligence education and development.

Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

The Complex Path to Quantum Resistance

Is your organization prepared?

Atefeh Mashatan, Douglas Heintzman

Quantum-Safe Trust for Vehicles: The Race Is Already On

A discussion of concerns on quantum vulnerability for the automobile industry.

Michael Gardiner, Alexander Truskovsky, George Neville-Neil, Atefeh Mashatan

The Future Is Big Graphs: A Community View on Graph Processing Systems

Ensuring the success of big graph processing for the next decade and beyond.

Sherif Sakr, Angela Bonifati, Hannes Voigt, Alexandru Iosup, Khaled Ammar, Renzo Angles, Walid Aref, Marcelo Arenas, Maciej Besta, Peter A. Boncz, Khuzaima Daudjee, Emanuele Della Valle, Stefania Dumbrava, Olaf Hartig, Bernhard Haslhofer, Tim Hegeman, Jan Hidders, Katja Hose, Adriana Iamnitchi, Vasiliki Kalavri, Hugo Kapp, Wim Martens, M. Tamer Özsu, Eric Peukert, Stefan Plantikow, Mohamed Ragab, Matei R. Ripeanu, Semih Salihoglu, Christian Schulz, Petra Selmer, Juan F. Sequeda, Joshua Shinavier

Managing IT Professional Turnover

Organizational distrust, not compensation, is more likely to send IT pros packing.

Kelly Idell, David Gefen, Arik Ragowsky

Formalizing and Guaranteeing Human-Robot Interaction

As robots begin to interact closely with humans, we need to build systems worthy of trust regarding the safety and quality of the interaction.

Hadas Kress-Gazit, Kerstin Eder, Guy Hoffman, Henny Admoni, Brenna Argall, Rüdiger Ehlers, Christoffer Heckman, Nils Jansen, Ross Knepper, Jan Křetínský, Shelly Levy-Tzedek, Jamy Li, Todd Murphey, Laurel Riek, Dorsa Sadigh

An Internet of Things Service Roadmap

A blueprint for leveraging the tremendous opportunities the IoT has to offer.

Athman Bouguettaya, Quan Z. Sheng, Boualem Benatallah, Azadeh Ghari Neiat, Sajib Mistry, Aditya Ghose, Surya Nepal, Lina Yao

Technical Perspective: The Importance of WINOGRANDE

"WINOGRANDE" explores new methods of dataset development and adversarial filtering, expressly designed to prevent AI systems from making claims of smashing through benchmarks without making real progress.

Leora Morgenstern

WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale

We introduce WinoGrande, a large-scale dataset of 44k problems, inspired by the original Winograd Schema Challenge, but adjusted to improve both the scale and the hardness of the dataset.

Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi

Technical Perspective: Does Your Experiment Smell?

"PlanAlyzer," by Emma Tosch et al., details PlanAlyzer software, the first tool to statically check the validity of online experiments.

Stefano Balietti

PlanAlyzer: Assessing Threats to the Validity of Online Experiments

We present the first approach for checking the internal validity of online experiments statically, that is, from code alone.

Emma Tosch, Eytan Bakshy, Emery D. Berger, David D. Jensen, J. Eliot B. Moss

Playing With, and Against, Computers

2019 ACM Computing Prize recipient David Silver on developing the AlphaGo algorithm, his fascination with Go, and on teaching computers to play.

Leah Hoffmann