January 2012 - Vol. 55 No. 1

Features

Opinion Jan 1 2012

Artificial Intelligence: Past and Future

The most dramatic chess match of the 20th century was the May 1997 rematch between the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue and world champion Garry Kasparov, which Deep Blue won. While this victory was considered by many a triumph for artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, who coined the very name of the field, was rather dismissive of this accomplishment.

Moshe Y. Vardi

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion Letters to the editor Jan 1 2012

Software Engineering Is Engineering

I was confounded by the conclusion of Michael Davis's Viewpoint "Will Software Engineering Ever Be Engineering?" (Nov. 2011), mainly because anything I can do in code I can also do in digital hardware, analog hardware, fluidics, even gears and motors.

CACM Staff

News Jan 1 2012

ACM President’s Letter

Early in 2011, IEEE Computer Society President Sorel Reisman and I began discussing how IEEE-CS and ACM could work together more cooperatively. We solicited suggestions from our members and received some ideas that are worth pursuing for the benefit of the community, which I discuss here.

Alain Chesnais

Computing Applications

News Jan 1 2012

ACM’s Annual Report

FY11 was a defining year for ACM as the largest educational and scientific computing society in the world. Many of the initiatives we have set forth over the last few years have taken root and we now see tangible evidence of their success.

Alain Chesnais

Computing Applications

BLOG@CACM Jan 1 2012

Understanding CS1 Students; Defective Software

Mark Guzdial writes about why teachers must grasp introductory CS students' theories about computing. Bertrand Meyer argues for the necessity of analyzing large-scale software disasters and publishing a detailed technical study.

Mark Guzdial and Bertrand Meyer

Computing Applications

Opinion CACM online Jan 1 2012

eBooks Will Abound in the ACM Digital Library

ACM is preparing to offer a new and exciting member benefit for 2012; eBooks accessible via the ACM Digital Library! Expanding the eBooks Collections in the ACM Learning Center, ACM will make available full-text versions of eBook titles published by Morgan Kaufmann and Syngress.

Scott Delman

Computing Applications

News Jan 1 2012

Better Medicine Through Machine Learning

Computers that tease out patterns from clinical data could improve patient diagnosis and care.

Neil Savage

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

comparison of rib-suppressed temporal-subtraction images

News Jan 1 2012

Revamping Storage Performance

Great strides are being made in finding fast alternatives to the slow disks that dominate storage systems, but fast media are not nearly enough.

Gary Anthes

Architecture and Hardware

News Jan 1 2012

Law and Disorder

International law has always been a murky and Byzantine area. However, the Internet and digital technology have raised the stakes, the risks, and the challenges.

Samuel Greengard

Computing Applications

South Korean official at cyberattacks briefing

News Jan 1 2012

Celebration Time

The centennial celebrations of Alan Turing's birth might help turn a quiet British genius into an iconic global hero.

Sarah Underwood

Computing Applications

News Jan 1 2012

Analyzing Apple Products

Researchers untangle the complex web of Apple's global supply chain — and offer lessons for managers and policymakers trying to chart the future course of U.S. industry.

Alex Wright

Computing Applications

News Jan 1 2012

John McCarthy, 1927 – 2011

Winner of the 1971 A.M. Turing Award, John McCarthy was a founder of artificial intelligence and inventor of the Lisp programming language.

Paul Hyman

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion Law and technology Jan 1 2012

The Yin and Yang of Copyright and Technology

Examining the recurring conflicts between copyright and technology from piano rolls to domain-name filtering.

Randal C. Picker

Computing Applications

Opinion The business of software Jan 1 2012

The Difference Engine

Observations on cognitive diversity and team performance.

Phillip G. Armour

Computing Applications

Opinion Historical reflections Jan 1 2012

The IBM PC: From Beige Box to Industry Standard

Looking back at three decades of PC platform evolution.

Thomas Haigh

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Viewpoint Jan 1 2012

Interfaces For the Ordinary User: Can We Hide Too Much?

Increasing the visibility and access to underlying file structure on consumer devices can vastly improve the user experience.

Kai A. Olsen and Alessio Malizia

Computing Applications

Interfaces for the Ordinary User, illustration

News Interview Jan 1 2012

An Interview with Stephen A. Cook

Stephen A. Cook, winner of the 1982 A.M. Turing Award, reflects on his career.

Philip L. Frana

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Practice Jan 1 2012

Creating Languages in Racket

Sometimes you just have to make a better mousetrap.

Matthew Flatt

Computing Applications

Creating Languages in Racket, illustration

Practice Jan 1 2012

Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet

Networks without effective AQM may again be vulnerable to congestion collapse.

Jim Gettys and Kathleen Nichols

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Jan 1 2012

I/O Virtualization

Decoupling a logical device from its physical implementation offers many compelling advantages.

Carl Waldspurger and Mendel Rosenblum

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Jan 1 2012

The State of Phishing Attacks

Looking past the systems people use, they target the people using the systems.

Jason Hong

Architecture and Hardware

The State of Phishing Attacks, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Jan 1 2012

Flexible Experimentation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Virtual testbeds model them by seamlessly integrating physical, simulated, and emulated sensor nodes and radios in real time.

Architecture and Hardware

Flexible Experimentation in Wireless Sensor Networks, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Jan 1 2012

Long-Term Confidentiality of PKI

How to guarantee files encrypted and transmitted today stay confidential for years to come.

Chi-Sung Laih, Shang-Ming Jen, and Chia-Yu Lu

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Review articles Jan 1 2012

(Computer) Vision Without Sight

Computer vision holds the key for the blind or visually impaired to explore the visual world.

Roberto Manduchi and James Coughlan

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Jan 1 2012

Technical Perspective: Where Do People Draw Lines?

Computer graphics once focused exclusively on realism. The field eventually broadened to include other pictorial styles. The breadth of situations in which line drawings are used makes it important to develop algorithms to generate them either automatically or in a user-assisted manner.

Frédo Durand

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Jan 1 2012

Where Do People Draw Lines?

This paper presents the results of a study in which artists made line drawings intended to convey specific 3D shapes.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Jan 1 2012

Technical Perspective: Content-Centric Networking

Much has changed in the 50 years since the invention of packet switching and the early network designs and deployments that would evolve into today's Internet. The designs that began with Cerf and Kahn's 1974 landmark paper have proven durable — a tribute to their prescience and wisdom.

Jim Kurose

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Jan 1 2012

Networking Named Content

Current network use is dominated by content distribution and retrieval yet current networking protocols are designed for conversations between hosts. We present Content-Centric Networking which uses content chunks as a primitive — decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving chunks of content by name.

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Last byte Jan 1 2012

Future Tense: The Near Cloud

Wish I never pulled the plug…

Daniel H. Wilson

Architecture and Hardware

Recent Issues

Explore the Issue Archive