August 2018 - Vol. 61 No. 8

Opinion Cerf's up Aug 1 2018

Traceability

A primary topic of consideration at a recent workshop on cybersecurity was how to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet while protecting against the harmful behaviors that have emerged in this global medium. That this is a significant challenge cannot be overstated.

Vinton G. Cerf

Encourage ACM to Address U.S. Election Integrity

Opinion Letters to the editor Aug 1 2018

In the spirit of Moshe Y. Vardi's call for ACM to ". . . be more active in addressing social responsibility issues raised by computing technology," we urge the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council to undertake a study of the technological infrastructure for U.S. elections.

CACM Staff

BLOG@CACM Aug 1 2018

Assessing Responsibility for Program Output

We lack an easy way to indicate that algorithms do not make decisions and are not biased; programmers do, and are.

Robin K. Hill

Animals Teach Robots to Find Their Way

News Aug 1 2018

Navigation research demonstrates bio-machine symbiosis.

Chris Edwards

Electronics Are Leaving the Plane

Animals Teach Robots to Find Their Way, illustration

News Aug 1 2018

Stacking chips and connecting them vertically increases both speed and functionality.

Don Monroe

Broadening the Path for Women in STEM

News Aug 1 2018

Organizations work to address 'a notable absence of women in the field.'

Esther Shein

Designing Sustainable Rural Infrastructure Through the Lens of OpenCellular

Broadening the Path for Women in STEM, illustration

Opinion Global computing Aug 1 2018

Understanding the unique local context, as well as technical considerations, are essential components of successful project deployment.

Kashif Ali and Kurtis Heimerl

Providing Equitable Access to Computing Education

Designing Sustainable Rural Infrastructure Through the Lens of OpenCellular, illustrative photo

Opinion Education Aug 1 2018

Seeking the best measures to reach advantaged and less-advantaged students equally.

Mark Guzdial and Amy Bruckman

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud

Providing Equitable Access to Computing Education, illustration

Opinion Kode vicious Aug 1 2018

Cache is king. And if your cache is cut, you are going to feel it.

George V. Neville-Neil

Point: Foundations of E-Democracy

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud, illustration

Opinion Point/counterpoint: democracy and e-democracy Aug 1 2018

Considering the possibility of achieving an e-democracy based on long-established foundations that strengthen both real-world democracies and virtual Internet communities.

Ehud Shapiro

Counterpoint: E-Democracy Won't Save Democracy. Democracy Will Save Democracy

Opinion Point/counterpoint: democracy and e-democracy Aug 1 2018

Increased technology is not the solution to the fundamental issue of declining democratic culture.

Douglas Schuler

Algorithms Behind Modern Storage Systems

Practice Aug 1 2018

Different uses for read-optimized B-trees and write-optimized LSM-trees.

Alex Petrov

Research for Practice: Prediction-Serving Systems

Algorithms Behind Modern Storage Systems

Practice Aug 1 2018

What happens when we wish to actually deploy a machine learning model to production?

Dan Crankshaw, Joseph Gonzalez, and Peter Bailis

Practice Aug 1 2018

Consistently Eventual

For many data items, the work never settles on a value.

Pat Helland

How to Teach Computer Ethics through Science Fiction

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2018

Science fiction in particular offers students a way to cultivate their capacity for moral imagination.

Emanuelle Burton, Judy Goldsmith, and Nicholas Mattei

Amdahl’s Law for Tail Latency

How to Teach Computer Ethics through Science Fiction

Research and Advances Contributed articles Aug 1 2018

Queueing theoretic models can guide design trade-offs in systems targeting tail latency, not just average performance.

Christina Delimitrou and Christos Kozyrakis

Multiparty Privacy in Social Media

Amdahl's Law for Tail Latency, illustration

Research and Advances Review articles Aug 1 2018

Online privacy is not just about what you disclose about yourself, it is also about what others disclose about you.

Jose M. Such and Natalia Criado

Technical Perspective: Graphs, Betweenness Centrality, and the GPU

Multiparty Privacy in Social Media, illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2018

"Accelerating GPU Betweenness Centrality" by McLaughlin and Bader ably addresses the challenges to authors of efficient graph implementations in the important context of a computation called betweenness centrality.

John D. Owens

Accelerating GPU Betweenness Centrality

Research and Advances Research highlights Aug 1 2018

We present a hybrid GPU implementation that provides good performance on graphs of arbitrary structure rather than just scale-free graphs as was done previously.

Adam McLaughlin and David A. Bader

Accelerating GPU Betweenness Centrality, illustration

Opinion Last byte Aug 1 2018

Deadlock

Upgraded with new instructions, my AI aims to debug its original programmer, along with his home planet.

William Sims Bainbridge