May 2017 - Vol. 60 No. 5

Features

Opinion Departments May 1 2017

Cyber Insecurity and Cyber Libertarianism

Here we are, 70 years into the computer age and after three ACM Turing Awards in the area of cryptography, and we still do not seem to know how to build secure information systems. And yet, our community marches forward with no special sense of urgency.

Moshe Y. Vardi

Computing Profession

Opinion May 1 2017

Can Liberty Survive the Digital Age?

Online social media have provided a megaphone for voices that might not have been heard except in limited circles. The amplifying effect, however, gives visibility to deliberate (or ignorant) misinformation, hate speech, incitement to violence, and advocacy of terrorism.

Vinton G. Cerf

Computing Applications

BLOG@CACM May 1 2017

Ending Null Pointer Crashes

Void safety, says Bertrand Meyer, relies on type declarations and static analysis.

Bertrand Meyer

Computing Applications

News May 1 2017

Combating Cancer With Data

Supercomputers will sift massive amounts of data in search of therapies that work.

Esther Shein

Architecture and Hardware

News May 1 2017

Making Chips Smarter

Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are motivating researchers to design and build new chips to support different computing models.

Samuel Greengard

Architecture and Hardware

News May 1 2017

Bionics in Competition

Developers of innovative assistive devices compete as a means of networking with each other.

Keith Kirkpatrick

Architecture and Hardware

News May 1 2017

The Internet of Things

2009 ACM Prize recipient Eric Brewer, 2004 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-recipient Vint Cerf, 2016–2017 Athena Lecturer Jennifer Rexford, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award recipient Martin Casado, ACM Fellows Nick Feamster and Jim Kurose, and ACM member George Roussos discuss the Internet of Things.

CACM Staff

Systems and Networking

Opinion Law and Technology May 1 2017

The Anonymization Debate Should Be About Risk, Not Perfection

Focusing on the process of anonymity rather than pursuing the unattainable goal of guaranteed safety.

Woodrow Hartzog and Ira Rubinstein

Computing Applications

The Anonymization Debate Should Be About Risk, Not Perfection, illustration

Opinion Education May 1 2017

Preparing Tomorrow’s Faculty to Address Challenges in Teaching Computer Science

Using a "boot camp" workshop for new faculty orientation.

Leo Porter, Cynthia Lee, Beth Simon, and Mark Guzdial

Computing Profession

Preparing Tomorrow’s Faculty to Address Challenges in Teaching Computer Science, illustrative photo

Opinion Viewpoint May 1 2017

Toward a Ban on Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Surmounting the Obstacles

A 10-point plan toward fashioning a proposal to ban some — if not all — lethal autonomous weapons.

Wendell Wallach

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Practice May 1 2017

Making Money Using Math

Modern applications are increasingly using probabilistic machine-learned models.

Erik Meijer

Computing Applications

Practice May 1 2017

MongoDB’s Javascript Fuzzer

The fuzzer is for those edge cases that your testing did not catch.

Robert Guo

Computing Applications

Practice May 1 2017

Research For Practice: Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts; Hardware For Deep Learning

Expert-curated guides to the best of CS research.

Peter Bailis, Arvind Narayanan, Andrew Miller, and Song Han

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Contributed articles May 1 2017

Who Owns the Social Web?

User attitudes toward online intellectual property reveal how far social norms have strayed from legal notions of ownership.

Catherine C. Marshall and Frank M. Shipman

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles May 1 2017

Responsible Research and Innovation in the Digital Age

RRI requires doing the best science for the world, not only the best science in the world.

Computing Applications

Responsible Research and Innovation in the Digital Age, illustration

Research and Advances Review articles May 1 2017

Contest Theory

Exploring the basic game theory models of contests found in online services.

Milan Vojnović

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights May 1 2017

Technical Perspective: Functional Compilers

"Exploiting Vector Instructions with Generalized Stream Fusion" points out that stream fusion by itself is not well suited for generating bulk instructions such as vector or SIMD instructions.

Guy Blelloch

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights May 1 2017

Exploiting Vector Instructions with Generalized Stream Fusion

Programmers should not have to sacrifice code clarity or good software engineering practices to obtain performance. This work shows how to attain this goal for high-level Haskell in the domain of sequence-processing functions.

Geoffrey Mainland, Roman Leshchinskiy, and Simon Peyton Jones

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Exploiting Vector Instructions with Generalized Stream Fusion, illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights May 1 2017

Technical Perspective: Building Knowledge Bases from Messy Data

"DeepDive: Declarative Knowledge Base Construction" is a prime example of groundbreaking work in the area of Knowledge Base Construction.

Alon Halevy

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights May 1 2017

DeepDive: Declarative Knowledge Base Construction

We describe DeepDive, a system that combines database and machine learning ideas to help to develop knowledge base construction systems.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion Last byte May 1 2017

Beyond ‘Star Trek’

On a mission to boldly go where no man has gone before, the series and movies somehow missed some promising technologies . . .

David Allen Batchelor

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Departments May 1 2017

Listening to Professional Voices: Draft 2 of the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

For the first time since 1992, the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (the Code) is being updated. We look forward to receiving your comments on these suggested changes and your requests for additional changes as we work on Draft 3 of the Code.

Computing Profession

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