March 2010 - Vol. 53 No. 3

March 2010 issue cover image

Features

Opinion Letters to the Editor

Too Much Debate?

In his editor's letter "More Debate, Please!" (Jan. 2010), Moshe Y. Vardi made a plea for controversial topics on these pages, citing a desire to "let truth emerge from vigorous debate." Though we support the sentiment as well, we question Vardi's judgment in using his editorial position to mount an attack on a 30-year-old article whose authors were neither forewarned nor given the opportunity to respond.
Opinion CACM online

Granting a Second Life

Almost 90% of what we learn comes from reading, estimates say, and the path that online information takes to your brain is less direct than most. The Communications Web site gets most of its readers from someplace else: 56.6% from referring sites, like Slashdot or Reddit, and 14.3% from search engines. Google alone sends 13.6%.
Research and Advances Research highlights

Computing Arbitrary Functions of Encrypted Data

Suppose that you want to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. This separation is possible: we describe a "fully homomorphic" encryption scheme that keeps data private, but that allows a worker that does not have the secret decryption key to compute any (still encrypted) result of the data, even when the function of the data is very complex.
Research and Advances Research highlights

Using the Forest to See the Trees: Exploiting Context For Visual Object Detection and Localization

Recognizing objects in images is an active area of research in computer vision. However, most of the algorithms for detecting objects perform an exhaustive search across all locations and scales in the image comparing local image regions with an object model. That approach ignores the semantic structure of scenes and tries to solve the recognition problem by brute force.
Opinion Last byte

Future Tense: The Primal Cue

Future Tense, one of the revolving features on this page, presents stories and essays from the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, their boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what will and could be. Cybersecurity depends on the human dimension.
Research and Advances Virtual extension

A Framework For Health Care Information Assurance Policy and Compliance

As many as 400 people may have access to one's personal medical information throughout the typical care process. Patients (consumers) feel that it is critical that their medical information is held in confidence, otherwise they may withhold important medical information from health care providers making it difficult to provide quality and effective health care.
Research and Advances Virtual extension

Practitioner-Based Measurement: A Collaborative Approach

The established philosophy within the software development industry is that an organization implementing a program to improve software quality can expect to recoup the cost of the implementation many times over. While organizations recognize that there are potential benefits to measuring their processes and products, however, they typically find it difficult to structure ad-hoc measures into a formal program.

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