Technical Perspective: Algorithm Selection as a Learning Problem
"Data-Driven Algorithm Design," by Rishi Gupta and Tim Roughgarden, addresses the issue that the best algorithm to use for many problems depends on what the input "looks like."
Theory
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A decades-old conjecture about computational complexity is confirmed in just a few pages.
Revealing the Critical Role of Human Performance in Software
It's time to appreciate the human side of Internet-facing software systems.
The use of post-incident artifacts in high-performing organizations.
Diverse examples depict how indistinguishability plays a central role in computer science.
The notion of scalable operating systems led Mendel Rosenblum to virtual machines, which have revolutionized datacenters and enabled modern cloud computing.
seL4 in Australia: From Research to Real-World Trustworthy Systems
An overview of developments, and of ongoing research, related to the correctness proof of the seL4 microkernel.
Technical Perspective: An Answer to Fair Division’s Most Enigmatic Question
The envy-free cake-cutting problem stood its ground for two decades, until it was cracked by Aziz and Mackenzie. Their solution is presented in "A Bounded and Envy-Free Cake Cutting Algorithm."
A Bounded and Envy-Free Cake Cutting Algorithm
We report on our algorithm that resolved the well-studied cake cutting problem in which the goal is to find an envy-free allocation of a divisible resource based on queries from agents.
Above the Line, Below the Line
The resilience of Internet-facing systems relies on what is above the line of representation.
Technical Perspective: A Perspective on Pivot Tracing
Instead of handing trace records off to a collector for long-term storage and future processing, the system described in "Pivot Tracing: Dynamic Causal Monitoring for Distributed Systems," by Jonathan Mace, et al., installs continuous queries, on demand, inside the distributed system itself.
Pivot Tracing: Dynamic Causal Monitoring for Distributed Systems
This paper presents Pivot Tracing, a monitoring framework for distributed systems, which addresses the limitations of today's monitoring and diagnosis tools by combining dynamic instrumentation with a novel relational operator: the happened-before join.
Why it is good to have a systematic approach to software verification.
Talented Programmers Don’t Tolerate Chaos
Talented programmers will strive to structure chaos and write perfect code.
‘Everything Fails All the Time’
Werner Vogels, an expert on ultra-scalable systems, talks about listening to customers, reconceptualizing the stack, and building a product-centered culture.
Retailers of all stripes are using technology to follow consumers through their brick-and-mortar stores in order to develop detailed profiles of their shopping habits and preferences.
Numbers Are for Computers, Strings Are for Humans
How and where software should translate data into a human-readable form.
Fuzzing: Hack, Art, and Science
Reviewing software testing techniques for finding security vulnerabilities.
Not So Good After All? Don’t Let ‘Altruism’ Kill Your Company
Altruism is often heralded as a panacea for management challenges, but it could actually be a death sentence for your team and projects. Here's why.
Exploring the Theory of Computing
2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Avi Wigderson discusses his work in an interview originally published in January 2020.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
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