July 2020 - Vol. 63 No. 7

Features

Opinion Departments Jul 1 2020

Our digital infrastructure, which has become a key component of the economic system in developed countries, is one of the few components that did not buckle under the stress of COVID-19.

Moshe Y. Vardi

Computing Applications

Careers Departments Jul 1 2020

Challenge Yourself by Reaching for the Highest Bar

"Challenge yourself and reach for the highest bar. If you succeed, keep pushing the boundaries," my friend advised when I started my career at IBM Research. These words have been a guiding force in my career ever since.

Yosuke Ozawa

Computing Profession

winding road, Career Paths in Computing illustration

Opinion Letters to the editor Jul 1 2020

Computing’s Role in Climate Warming

As a computer scientist, I was embarrassed to read the Viewpoint "Conferences in an Era of Expensive Carbon" (March 2020) from four fellow computer scientists.

CACM Staff

Computing Profession

BLOG@CACM Jul 1 2020

Transitioning to Distance Learning and Virtual Conferencing

John Arquilla considers responses to the Coronavirus pandemic, while Mark Guzdial ponders the impacts of competitive enrollment.

John Arquilla and Mark Guzdial

Computing Applications

News Jul 1 2020

The Quantum Threat

Cryptographers are developing algorithms to ensure security in a world of quantum computing.

Gregory Mone

Computing Applications

News Jul 1 2020

Your Wish Is My CMD

Artificial intelligence could automate software coding.

Neil Savage

Architecture and Hardware

News Jul 1 2020

Reducing and Eliminating E-Waste

We need to mitigate the environmental impact of disposing of electronics at their end of useful life.

Keith Kirkpatrick

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Legally speaking Jul 1 2020

AI Authorship?

Considering the role of humans in copyright protection of outputs produced by artificial intelligence.

Pamela Samuelson

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Economic and business dimensions Jul 1 2020

Proposal: A Market for Truth to Address False Ads on Social Media

Guaranteeing truth in advertising.

Marshall W. Van Alstyne

Computing Applications

measuring device with display, illustration

Opinion Computing ethics Jul 1 2020

For Impactful Community Engagement: Check Your Role

Toward a more equitable distribution of the benefits of technological change.

Computing Applications

colored heads on colored backgrounds, illustration

Opinion Viewpoint Jul 1 2020

Consumers vs. Citizens in Democracy’s Public Sphere

Attempting to balance the challenging trade-offs between individual rights and our obligations to one another.

Allison Stanger

Computing Applications

fingerprint with a red tag, illustration

Opinion Viewpoint Jul 1 2020

Call For a Wake Standard for Artificial Intelligence

Suggesting a Voice Name System (VNS) to talk to any object in the world.

Brian Subirana

Computing Applications

polygonal face and colored shapes, illustration

Practice Jul 1 2020

The Best Place to Build a Subway

Building projects despite (and because of) existing complex systems.

Pat Helland

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Jul 1 2020

Demystifying Stablecoins

Cryptography meets monetary policy.

Jeremy Clark, Didem Demirag, and Seyedehmahsa Moosavi

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Jul 1 2020

Domain-Specific Hardware Accelerators

DSAs gain efficiency from specialization and performance from parallelism.

William J. Dally, Yatish Turakhia, and Song Han

Architecture and Hardware

colored chip on circuit board, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Jul 1 2020

The Data Science Life Cycle: A Disciplined Approach to Advancing Data Science as a Science

A cycle that traces ways to define the landscape of data science.

Victoria Stodden

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Jul 1 2020

A Domain-Specific Supercomputer for Training Deep Neural Networks

Google's TPU supercomputers train deep neural networks 50x faster than general-purpose supercomputers running a high-performance computing benchmark.

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Review articles Jul 1 2020

Some Simple Economics of the Blockchain

Blockchain technology can shape innovation and competition in digital platforms, but under what conditions?

Christian Catalini and Joshua S. Gans

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Jul 1 2020

Technical Perspective: Why ‘Correct’ Computers Can Leak Your Information

"Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution," by Paul Kocher, et al., reviews how speculative execution and caches can be exploited, presents specific exploits using speculative branches that are direct and indirect, and discusses software and hardware options for mitigating Spectre.

Mark D. Hill

Security and Privacy

Research and Advances Research highlights Jul 1 2020

Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution

This paper describes practical attacks that combine methodology from side-channel attacks, fault attacks, and return-oriented programming that can read arbitrary memory from the victim's process.

Security and Privacy

Research and Advances Research highlights Jul 1 2020

Technical Perspective: ASIC Clouds: Specializing the Datacenter

Can we build purpose-built, warehouse-scale datacenters customized for large-scale arrays of ASIC accelerators or, to use a term coined in the paper by Michael Bedford Taylor, et al., ASIC clouds?

Parthasarathy Ranganathan

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Jul 1 2020

ASIC Clouds: Specializing the Datacenter for Planet-Scale Applications

This paper distills lessons from Bitcoin ASIC Clouds and applies them to other large scale workloads, showing superior TCO (total cost of ownership) versus CPU and GPU.

Computing Applications

Opinion Last byte Jul 1 2020

Strategic Paddling

Choosing how to best navigate turbulent current events.

Dennis Shasha

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