January 2008 - Vol. 51 No. 1

January 2008 issue cover image

Features

Opinion Editorial pointers

Editorial Pointers

The first issue was 20 pages. Its technical content fell into three departments: Standards; Computer Techniques; and Unusual Applications. It told of new methods for square-root computations and of a programmed binary counter for the IBM Type 650 calculator. It was January 1958. Sputnik had been launched by the Soviet Union three months prior; the […]
Opinion Forum

Forum

Edsger Dijkstra wrote a Letter to the Editor of Communications in 1968, criticizing the excessive use of the go to statement in programming languages. Instead, he encouraged his fellow computer scientists to consider structured programming. The letter, originally entitled "A Case Against the Goto Statement," was published in the March 1968 issue under the headline […]
Opinion President's letter

Fifty Years and Still Growing

This anniversary issue represents how Communications has covered the depth and breadth of the computing field over the decades, as well as its growth, and the industry’s shifts in technological focus. The name "Association for Computing Machinery" once explained the primary interest of our members. Of course, over the last 50 years, both ACM and […]
Opinion From the editor's desk

Introduction

Communications of the ACM has been most fortunate to have had seven authoritative stewards lead its editorial direction over most of these last 50 years. The editors-in-chief (EICs) who have served this publication, and the computer science community, with their foresight and dedication to the cause are some of the prime reasons why CACM continues […]
Opinion From the editor's desk

A Time to Retrospect and Prospect

As noted in these introductory pages, Alan Perlis was the founding Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of Communications, with the first issue debuting in January 1958. He resigned upon being elected ACM President in June 1962. During his tenure, CACM content was organized into departments, such as "Scientific Applications," "Standards," "Programming Languages," among others. I was the editor of a section on "Business Applications."
Opinion From the editor's desk

The Battle of the Covers

The battle of the covers. That was the beginning. I had just taken over as Editor-in-Chief of CACM in 1969. Don Madden was then ACM's Executive Director. With undoubtedly some justification, he was concerned that the covers of CACM were too drab and were not attractive to an increasingly broad base of membership. He wanted to brighten them up.
Opinion From the editor's desk

The Battle Behind the Scenes

Like Stuart Lynn, I had been a department editor for CACM before becoming its EIC. In fact, the "Computer Systems" department was initiated by Kelly Gotlieb during his editorship. He sent me a letter enclosing a submitted paper that he thought should be published in CACM; however, it fit no existing department. It would appear in the September 1965 issue: Reilly and Federighi's "On Reversible Subroutines and Computers that Run Backwards." A subsequent contribution, of considerably more lasting significance, was published in that same issue: E.W. Dijkstra's "Solution of a Problem in Concurrent Program Control." Indeed, the paper initiated a whole new subdiscipline in the computer operating systems area. Eventually, "Computer Systems" became the department for software/hardware systems papers such as those that now appear in Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS).
Opinion From the editor's desk

Déja Vu All Over Again

After a 10-year struggle within ACM to define a Journal for All Members (JAM), a "new" Communications was launched in the cold of February 1983. CACM was to leave behind its pure research past and transform into a professionally useful, interesting, monthly magazine for all members. The CACM that evolved in the decade following 1983 is substantially the form you find today. I was the EIC who managed the transition.
Opinion From the editor's desk

From Academia to the Editorship

Communications has always had a special meaning to me since the beginning of my career, both professionally and personally. My fascination with computers started in the late 1950s when I was pursuing my doctoral degree at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The Illiac-I was among the early computers built in the U.S. and I had the privilege to use it extensively in my dissertation.
Opinion From the editor's desk

CACM: Past, Present, and Future

The French adage "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," or, the more things change, the more they stay the same, still rings true today. Reading over the essays of my predecessors, one recognizes the thread that runs through all of them, which is the constant need of CACM to reinvent itself. In fact, I discovered an April 24, 1964 report from a Commission of Thoughtful Persons to the ACM Council that stated "It was felt that Communications was becoming too much of a journal and that a re-evaluation is in order." I suspect this ongoing need to rethink CACM, a flagship publication for professionals working in a fast-moving and ever-changing field, will stay with us for the foreseeable future.
Opinion Voices

Introduction

Many of the leading voices in computing have graced the pages of Communications over the past 50 years. Their research, opinions, and professional journeys have influenced countless future leaders, and will continue to do so. In this section, we’ve invited some of the most prominent among them to look into the future of the field […]
Opinion Voices

Ode to Code

Much have I travell’d in the realms of code, And many goodly programs have I seen. I’ve voyaged far to conferences umpteen, Attending to the wisdom there bestowed. Yet as I’ve moved along the winding road Of my career (a journey not serene), Only one source of knowledge has there been Of worth enough to […]
Research and Advances

The Centrality and Prestige of CACM

Journal rankings identify the most respected publications in a field, and can influence which sources to read to remain current, as well as which journals to target when publishing. Ranking studies also help track the progress of the field, identifying core journals and research topics, and tracking changes in these topics and perceptions over time. Past journal ranking studies have consistently found Communications of the ACM (CACM) to be very highly respected within the IS discipline. However, the exact nature of its relationships to other IS journals has not been thoroughly examined. In this article, we report a social network analysis (SNA) of 120 journals for the purpose of exploring in detail CACM's position within the IS journal network.
Research and Advances Breakthrough research: a preview of things to come

Technical Perspective: The Data Center is the Computer

Internet services are already significant forces in searching, retail purchases, music downloads, and auctions. One vision of 21st century IT is that most users will be accessing such services over a descendant of the cell phone rather than running shrink-wrapped software on a descendant of the PC.
Research and Advances Breakthrough research: a preview of things to come

MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large datasets that is amenable to a broad variety of real-world tasks. Users specify the computation in terms of a map and a reduce function, and the underlying runtime system automatically parallelizes the computation across large-scale clusters of machines, handles machine failures, and schedules inter-machine communication to make efficient use of the network and disks. Programmers find the system easy to use: more than ten thousand distinct MapReduce programs have been implemented internally at Google over the past four years, and an average of one hundred thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day, processing a total of more than twenty petabytes of data per day.
Research and Advances Breakthrough research: a preview of things to come

Technical Perspective: Finding a Good Neighbor, Near and Fast

You haven't read it yet, but you can already tell this article is going to be one long jumble of words, numbers, and punctuation marks. Indeed, but look at it differently, as a text classifier would, and you will see a single point in high dimension, with word frequencies acting as coordinates. Or take the background on your flat panel display: a million colorful pixels teaming up to make quite a striking picture. Yes, but also one single point in 106-dimensional space--that is, if you think of each pixel's RGB intensity as a separate coordinate. In fact, you don't need to look hard to find complex, heterogeneous data encoded as clouds of points in high dimension. They routinely surface in applications as diverse as medical imaging, bioinformatics, astrophysics, and finance.
Research and Advances Breakthrough research: a preview of things to come

Near-Optimal Hashing Algorithms for Approximate Nearest Neighbor in High Dimensions

In this article, we give an overview of efficient algorithms for the approximate and exact nearest neighbor problem. The goal is to preprocess a dataset of objects (e.g., images) so that later, given a new query object, one can quickly return the dataset object that is most similar to the query. The problem is of significant interest in a wide variety of areas.
Opinion Inside risks

The Psychology of Risks

Personal risk taking is a major public-health problem in our society. It includes criminal behavior, drug addiction, compulsive gambling, accident-prone behavior, suicide attempts, and disease-promoting activities. The costs in human life, suffering, financial burden, and lost work are enormous. Some of the insights from the psychology of personal risks seem applicable to computer-related risks, and […]

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