August 2012 - Vol. 55 No. 8

Features

Opinion Aug 1 2012

The annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) shines the spotlight on the next generation of problem solvers during their university years. Allow me to recap the highlights of the 36th Annual ACM-ICPC World Finals, which took place May 14–18.

Bill Poucher

Computing Applications

Opinion Letters to the Editor Aug 1 2012

Composable Trees For Configurable Behavior

I concur wholeheartedly with the composability benefits outlined in "Why LINQ Matters: Cloud Composability Guaranteed" (Apr. 2012) due to my experience using composability principles to design and implement the message-dissemination mechanism for a mobile ad hoc router in a proprietary network

CACM Staff

Architecture and Hardware

BLOG@CACM Aug 1 2012

Machine Learning and Algorithms; Agile Development

John Langford poses questions about the direction of research for machine learning and algorithms. Ruben Ortega shares lessons about agile development practices like Scrum.

John Langford and Ruben Ortega

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

News Aug 1 2012

Cosmic Simulations

With the help of supercomputers, scientists are now able to create models of large-scale astronomical events.

Jeff Kanipe

Architecture and Hardware

visualization from the Bolshoi simulation

News Aug 1 2012

DARPA Shredder Challenge Solved

The eight-person winning team used original computer algorithms to narrow the search space and then relied on human observation to move the pieces into their final positions.

Tom Geller

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

News Aug 1 2012

Advertising Gets Personal

Online behavioral advertising and sophisticated data aggregation have changed the face of advertising and put privacy in the crosshairs.

Samuel Greengard

Computing Applications

News Aug 1 2012

Broader Horizons

ACM's Committee for Women in Computing (ACM-W) is widening its reach to involve women in industry as well as academia, including community college faculty and students.

Karen A. Frenkel

Computing Applications

Opinion Emerging markets Aug 1 2012

Inside the Hermit Kingdom: IT and Outsourcing in North Korea

North Korea has a sizeable IT sector. Some 10,000 professionals work in the field, and many more have IT degrees. They are already engaged in outsourcing contracts for other countries, and are keen to expand further.

Paul Tjia

Computing Applications

Opinion Education Aug 1 2012

Will Massive Open Online Courses Change How We Teach?

Sharing recent experiences with the massive open artificial intelligence course developed and conducted by Stanford faculty Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

Fred G. Martin

Computing Applications

Opinion Privacy and security Aug 1 2012

The Politics of ‘Real Names’

Power, context, and control in networked publics.

Danah Boyd

Computing Applications

Opinion Kode Vicious Aug 1 2012

A System Is Not a Product

Stopping to smell the code before wasting time reentering configuration data.

George V. Neville-Neil

Computing Applications

Opinion Economic and business dimensions Aug 1 2012

The Internet Is Everywhere, but the Payoff Is Not

Examining the uneven patterns of Internet economics.

Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint Aug 1 2012

Internet Elections: Unsafe in Any Home?

Experiences with electronic voting suggest elections should not be conducted via the Internet.

Kai A. Olsen and Hans Fredrik Nordhaug

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint Aug 1 2012

The Ethics of Software Engineering Should Be an Ethics For the Client

Viewing software engineering as a communicative art in which client engagement is essential.

Neil McBride

Computing Applications

opposing faces with computer code as backdrop

Practice Aug 1 2012

Openflow: A Radical New Idea in Networking

An open standard that enables software-defined networking.

Thomas A. Limoncelli

Architecture and Hardware

OpenFlow: A Radical New Idea in Networking, illustration

Practice Aug 1 2012

Extending the Semantics of Scheduling Priorities

Increasing parallelism demands new paradigms.

Rafael Vanoni Polanczyk

Computing Applications

Extending the Semantics of Scheduling Priorities, illustration

Practice Aug 1 2012

Multitier Programming in Hop

A first step toward programming 21st-century applications.

Manuel Serrano and Gérard Berry

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2012

The Loss of Location Privacy in the Cellular Age

How to have the best of location-based services while avoiding the growing threat to personal privacy.

Stephen B. Wicker

Architecture and Hardware

The Loss of Location Privacy in the Cellular Age, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2012

To Be or Not To Be Cited in Computer Science

Traditional bias toward journals in citation databases diminishes the perceived value of conference papers and their authors.

Bjorn De Sutter and Aäron Van Den Oord

Computing Applications

shelves of old books on computer screen, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2012

Process Mining

Using real event data to X-ray business processes helps ensure conformance between design and reality.

Wil Van Der Aalst

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Review articles Aug 1 2012

Quantum Money

Imagine money you can carry and spend without a trace.

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2012

Technical Perspective: Example-Driven Program Synthesis For End-User Programming

As information technology has come to permeate our society, broader classes of users have developed the need for more sophisticated data manipulation and processing. The following paper focuses on an important emerging area — end user programming.

Martin C. Rinard

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2012

Spreadsheet Data Manipulation Using Examples

Millions of computer end users need to perform tasks over large spreadsheet data, yet lack the programming knowledge to do such tasks automatically. We present a methodology that allows end users to automate such repetitive tasks.

Sumit Gulwani, William R. Harris, and Rishabh Singh

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2012

Technical Perspective: Proving Programs Continuous

Proving a program's correctness is usually an all-or-nothing game.

Andreas Zeller

Systems and Networking

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2012

Continuity and Robustness of Programs

Computer scientists have long believed that software is different from physical systems in one fundamental way: while the latter have continuous dynamics, the former do not. In this paper, we argue that notions of continuity from mathematical analysis are relevant and interesting even for software.

Swarat Chaudhuri, Sumit Gulwani, and Roberto Lublinerman

Systems and Networking

Opinion Last byte Aug 1 2012

Puzzled: Find the Magic Set

Welcome to three new puzzles. Each involves a collection of items, and your job is to find a subset of them that is characterized by a particular property.

Peter Winkler

Computing Applications

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