This column was supposed to write itself. When Editor-in-Chief Moshe Vardi first asked me to tell readers how a typical issue of Communications comes together, I remember thinking "piece of cake."

Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.

Guest blogger Valerie Barr writes about highlights of the ninth Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, including keynote speeches by Megan Smith and Francine Berman.

The vast Internet delivers only a sliver of the information the average American consumes each day, according to a recent report by the University of California, San Diego ( …

Researchers working in human-computer interaction are developing new interfaces to produce greater efficiencies in personal computing and enhance miniaturization in mobile devices.

Type systems are moving beyond the realm of data structure and into more complex domains like security and networking.

Social networking, sophisticated imaging, and dual-use technologies promise improved disaster management, but they must be adopted by governments and aid agencies if more lives are to be saved in the wake of crises.

Forty-seven men and women are inducted as 2009 ACM Fellows.

Why it is difficult — but essential — to monitor the effectiveness of security technologies.

Isn't computer science enough?

Government-funded initiatives, in cooperation with private-sector partners in key technology areas, are fundamental to cybersecurity technical transformation.

In his July 2009 Communications editor's letter "Open, Closed, or Clopen Access?", editor-in-chief Moshe Vardi addressed the question of open access to this magazine and to …

A prescription for capturing data to diagnose and debug a networking problem.

Michael O. Rabin, co-recipient of the 1976 ACM A.M. Turing Award, discusses his innovative algorithmic work with Dennis Shasha.

Power-manageable hardware can help save energy, but what can software developers do to address the problem?

Contention for caches, memory controllers, and interconnects can be eased by contention-aware scheduling algorithms.

A translator framework enables the use of model checking in complex avionics systems and other industrial settings.

How Coverity built a bug-finding tool, and a business, around the unlimited supply of bugs in software systems.

The National Academy of Sciences recommends what the U.S. government should do to help maintain American IT leadership.

What quantum algorithms outperform classical computation and how do they do it?

In studying the genetic basis of a disease, it is now common to select a set of relevant genes G, and to measure how strongly they are expressed in cell samples from a group …

Data represented geometrically in high-dimensional vector spaces can be found in many applications. The need to manipulate such data in huge corpora and to support various query types gives rise to the question of how to represent …

Microprocessor performance has increased exponentially. These chips with ever increasing complexity are not always fully functional on the first attempt, they need to be debugged …

IFRA overcomes major challenges associated with a very expensive step in post-silicon validation of processors — pinpointing a bug location and the instruction sequence that exposes the bug from a system failure, such as a crash …

Welcome to three new puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is (as yet) unsolved. In each, the issue is how your intuition matches up with the mathematics.

There is growing concern that a technologically educated workforce will not be available to meet the needs of the job market in information technology in the coming years, primarily because students are turning away from academic …

What qualities make a successful IT professional? When companies hire IT professionals, their focus is often on the "hard" skills needed to perform the work, such as years of Java programming experience. However, there is a growing …

Wireless access points are increasingly serving as entry points to the Internet, increasing connectivity options and security concerns. Particularly significant are public access …

Despite the fact that creative problem solving is desirable at all levels, it is constantly in short supply. Part of the problem may be that while some technology trainers advocate the search for creative solutions, the learning …

Improving customer trust in an Internet store is an important goal in B2C electronic commerce because it leads to outcomes important for the success of an Internet store, such as reduced customer risk perceptions in transacting …

In 2001, subscription-based application service providers (ASPs) represented the new paradigm for application deployment. It was anticipated that ASP spending would reach $7.8 billion by 2004. However, this turned out not to …

We define

(COS) as applying the precepts and methodologies prevalent in the open source development community for creating industrial-strength software projects in a corporation for internal use. Our ongoing …

The IT outsourcing industry landscape is dotted with broken contracts - results of unsuccessful client-vendor (C-V) partnerships. Approximately 78% C-V partnerships fail in the long term, inflicting high transition costs on clients …