Computer science is no longer the hot, high-enrollment field it once was. While many suggestions have been made for increasing enrollments, it is unlikely that computer science will ever be as vibrant as it could be — and should …

The Communications Web site, cacm.acm.org, features 13 bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish excerpts from selected posts, plus readers' comments. Tessa Lau discusses why she doesn't …

The goal of holding readers' attention has made provocation a timeworn editorial strategy. Communications doesn't resort to screaming headlines like most storefront fare, but …

Medical researchers have long dreamed of "magic bullets" that go directly where they are needed. Now micromedicine and nanotechnology are making a range of molecules formerly inaccessible as drugs available to be delivered at …

Entertainment businesses say digital rights management prevents the theft of their products, but access control technologies have been a uniform failure when it comes to preventing piracy. Fortunately, change is on the way.

Researchers are improving unmanned helicopters' capabilities to address regulatory requirements and commercial uses.

CRA's Computing Community Consortium hosted a day-long symposium to discuss the important computing advances of the last several decades and how to sustain that track record of innovation.

Asking the wrong questions when building and deploying systems results in systems that cannot be sufficiently protected against the threats they face.

The convergence of medicine with radio communication and Internet connectivity exposes implantable medical devices (IMDs) not only to safety and effectiveness risks, but also to security and privacy risks. Legislation, regulation …

If we are not careful, our fascination with "computational thinking" may lead us back into the trap we are trying to escape.

Decoding the important differences in terminology, underlying philosophy, and value systems between two similar categories of software.

How to determine when to put the brakes on late-running projects and untested software patches.

New drive technologies and increased capacities create new categories of failure modes that will influence system designs.

The history of NFE processors sheds light on the trade-offs involved in designing network stack software.

The pervasive and long-lasting sockets API has remained largely unchanged since 1982. How have developers worked around its inherent limitations and what is the future of sockets in a changing networked world?

Database research is expanding, with major efforts in system architecture, new languages, cloud services, mobile and virtual worlds, and interplay between structure and text.

The vision is being overwhelmed by the reality of business, politics, logistics, and competing interests worldwide.

Information and communication technology for development can greatly improve quality of life for the world's neediest people.

Many Web sites embed third-party content in frames, relying on the browser's security policy to protect against malicious content. However, frames provide insufficient isolation in browsers that let framed content navigate other …

Modern computer systems are inherently nondeterministic due to a variety of events that occur during an execution, including I/O, interrupts, and DMA fills. The lack of repeatability that arises from this nondeterminism can make …

Last month (May 2009, p. 112) we posed a trio of brain teasers, including one as yet unsolved, concerning relationships among numbers.

Future Tense, one of the revolving features on this page, presents stories and essays from the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, their boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what …