August 1990 - Vol. 33 No. 8
Features
Computer perspectives: the bandwidth famine
A number of years ago I visited a young and successful computer company and was given a tour of the facilities by one of the directors. We passed offices in which people…
Legally speaking: should program algorithms be patented
In the Legally Speaking column last May [6], we reported on a survey conducted at last year's ACM-sponsored Conference on Computer-Human Interaction in Austin, Tex. Among…
Cyc: toward programs with common sense
Cyc is a bold attempt to assemble a massive knowledge base (on the order of 108 axioms) spanning human consensus knowledge. This article examines the need for such an…
Knowledge and natural language processing
KBNL is a knowledge-based natural language processing system that is novel in several ways, including the clean separation it enforces between linguistic knowledge and…
Natural language understanding and speech recognition
Natural language understanding must be an integral part of any automatic speech recognition system that attempts to deal with interactive problem solving. The methods for…
Cache considerations for multiprocessor programmers
Although caches in most computers are invisible to programmers, they significantly affect program performance. This is particularly true for cache-coherent, shared-memory…
A bridging model for parallel computation
The success of the von Neumann model of sequential computation is attributable to the fact that it is an efficient bridge between software and hardware: high-level…
The willingness of one scientist to share data with another scientist continues to be influenced by a number of enconomic, social, psychological and political factors.
Physical design equivalencies in database conversion
As relational technology becomes increasingly accepted in commercial data processing, conversion of some of the huge number of existing navigational databases to…
A very fast substring search algorithm
This article describes a substring search algorithm that is faster than the Boyer-Moore algorithm. This algorithm does not depend on scanning the pattern string in any…
Inside risks: insecurity about security?
Background A few highly visible cases of computer system exploitations have raised general awareness of existing vulnerabilities and the considerable risks they entail.