June 2017 - Vol. 60 No. 6

Open Access to Academic Research

Opinion Cerf's up Jun 1 2017

One challenge associated with data and publication preservation is the creation of business models that can sustain long-duration archives. Considerable infrastructure must be maintained to ensure access to digital content over long periods of time and that has an underlying cost.

Vinton G. Cerf

Technologies Do Have Ethics

Opinion Letters to the editor Jun 1 2017

The Cerf's Up column "Social and Ethical Behavior in the Internet of Things" (Feb. 2017) by Francine Berman and Vinton G. Cerf was a welcome reminder of the importance of ethical issues involving sociotechnical systems in general and the Internet of Things in particular.

CACM Staff

Balancing Teaching CS Efficiently with Motivating Students

BLOG@CACM Jun 1 2017

Mark Guzdial suggests a new balance is needed in computer science education between discovery learning and direct instruction.

Mark Guzdial

Deep Learning Takes on Translation

News Jun 1 2017

Improvements in hardware, the availability of massive amounts of data, and algorithmic upgrades are among the factors supporting better machine translation.

Don Monroe

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Deep Learning Takes on Translation, illustration

News Jun 1 2017

Optimization Search Finds a Heart of Glass

Analog computing could provide greater efficiency, improved digital algorithms.

Chris Edwards

News Jun 1 2017

Potential and Peril

The outlook for artificial intelligence-based autonomous weapons.

Sarah Underwood

Campaign to Stop Killer Robots participants, London 2013

News Jun 1 2017

Weaving the Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee created a paradigm shift that changed the world with his invention of the World Wide Web, Hypertext Transport Protocol, and Hypertext Markup Language.

Neil Savage

2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee

News Jun 1 2017

Big Data

2014 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Michael Stonebraker, 2013 ACM Prize recipient David Blei, 2007 ACM Prize recipient Daphne Koller, and ACM Fellow Vipin Kumar discuss trends in big data.

CACM Staff

Trustworthiness and Truthfulness Are Essential

David Blei, Daphne Koller, Vipin Kumar, and Michael Stonebraker

Opinion Inside risks Jun 1 2017

Their absence can introduce huge risks . . .

Peter G. Neumann

Security and Privacy

Trustworthiness and Truthfulness Are Essential, illustration

Opinion Broadening participation Jun 1 2017

The Influence and Promise of Alliances

Evaluating the influence of broadening participation efforts on students, faculty, organizations, and the computing education infrastructure.

Leslie Goodyear, Gary Silverstein, and Linda P. Thurston

Forced Exception Handling

The Influence and Promise of Alliances, illustration

Opinion Kode Vicious Jun 1 2017

You can never discount the human element in programming.

George V. Neville-Neil

Remaining Trouble Spots with Computational Thinking

Opinion Viewpoint Jun 1 2017

Addressing unresolved questions concerning computational thinking.

Peter J. Denning

Remaining Trouble Spots with Computational Thinking, illustration

Practice Jun 1 2017

The Debugging Mind-Set

Understanding the psychology of learning strategies leads to effective problem-solving skills.

Devon H. O'Dell

The Debugging Mind-Set, illustrative photo

Practice Jun 1 2017

Too Big Not to Fail

Embrace failure so it does not embrace you.

Pat Helland, Simon Weaver, and Ed Harris

Conversations with Technology Leaders: Erik Meijer

Practice Jun 1 2017

Great engineers are able to maximize their mental power.

Kate Matsudaira and Erik Meijer

The Scion Internet Architecture

Research and Advances Contributed articles Jun 1 2017

Adhering to the end-to-end principle even more than the current Internet yields highly available point-to-point communication.

The Dynamics of Work-Family Conflict

The SCION Internet Architecture, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Jun 1 2017

Conflict is averted by separating work and family time and responsibility, as reflected in millions of tweets.

Yili Liu and Lina Zhou

Learnable Programming: Blocks and Beyond

The Dynamics of Work-Family Conflict, illustrative photo

Research and Advances Review articles Jun 1 2017

New blocks frameworks open doors to greater experimentation for novices and professionals alike.

Technical Perspective: What Led Computer Vision to Deep Learning?

Learnable Programming: Blocks and Beyond, illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights Jun 1 2017

We are in the middle of the third wave of interest in artificial neural networks as the leading paradigm for machine learning. "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks" is the paper most responsible for this third wave.

Jitendra Malik

ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Research and Advances Research highlights Jun 1 2017

In the 1980s backpropagation did not live up to the very high expectations of its advocates. Twenty years later, we know what went wrong: for deep neural networks to shine, they need far more labeled data and hugely more computation.

Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey E. Hinton

Technical Perspective: Low-Depth Arithmetic Circuits

ILSVRC-2010 test images and training images

Research and Advances Research highlights Jun 1 2017

The past few years have seen a revolution in our understanding of arithmetic circuits. "Unexpected Power of Low-Depth Arithmetic Circuits" by Gupta et al. on the "chasm at depth 3" is one of the culminations of this new understanding.

Avi Wigderson

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Jun 1 2017

Unexpected Power of Low-Depth Arithmetic Circuits

Several earlier results have shown that it is possible to rearrange basic computational elements in surprising ways to give more efficient algorithms. The main result of this article is along a similar vein.

Ankit Gupta, Pritish Kamath, Neeraj Kayal, and Ramprasad Saptharishi

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Unexpected Power of Low-Depth Arithmetic Circuits, illustration

Opinion Last byte Jun 1 2017

This Is For Everyone

Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the formative years of the world wide web, and the challenges it now faces.

Leah Hoffmann