For almost 50 years we have been riding Moore's Law's exponential curve. Oh, what a ride it has been! No other technology has ever improved at a geometric rate for decades. But exponential trends always slow down, and the end of "Moore's Party" may be near.
November 2011 - Vol. 54 No. 11
Features
Opinion Letters to the editor
The computer science community is deeply concerned over the fate of Masaud Jahromi, chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ahlia University in Bahrain. Jahromi was arrested and taken from his home April 14, 2011.
To ensure the timely publication of articles, Communications created the Virtual Extension to bring readers high-quality articles in an online-only format. The following article is now available in its entirety to ACM members via the Digital Library.
In Support of Open Reviews; Better Teaching Through Large-Scale Data Mining
Bertrand Meyer writes about his long-standing decision not to provide anonymous reviews. Greg Linden considers how educational practices could be improved through the data mining of students' schoolwork.
Opinion CACM online
ACM Offers a New Approach to Self-Archiving
A new service, named the ACM Author-Izer, is a unique tool that enables ACM authors to generate and post links on either their home page or institutional repository that will lead visitors to a free and definitive version of the author's article in the ACM Digital Library.
Scientists say improvements to extreme-weather prediction are possible with new weather models and a reinvention of the modeling technologies used to process them.
Researchers have discovered important security flaws in modern automobile systems. Will car thieves learn to pick locks with their laptops?
Governments, companies, and individuals have suffered an unusual number of highly publicized data breaches this year. Is there a solution?
Opinion Privacy and security
Security Risks in Next-Generation Emergency Services
Sounding the alert on emergency calling system deficiencies.
Opinion Economic and business dimensions
"U.S. broadband is terrible" has become a familiar meme. Given the growing importance of broadband Internet connections, a poor broadband infrastructure would indeed be cause for concern. As it turns out, however, much of this concern is misplaced.
Opinion Legally speaking
Why the Google Book Settlement Failed – and What Comes Next?
Assessing the implications of the Google Book Search settlement.
Opinion Computing ethics
Will Software Engineering Ever Be Engineering?
Considering whether software engineering and engineering can share a profession.
Opinion Education
Teaching-Oriented Faculty at Research Universities
Nine teacher-oriented faculty in computer science departments at research universities in the U.S. or Canada describe how their positions work, how they contribute to education, and how departmental policies can influence their success and satisfaction.
Opinion Viewpoint
Gender Demographics Trends and Changes in U.S. CS Departments
Using the past 10 years of Taulbee Survey data to evaluate female student enrollment across varied academic institutions and departments.
Java Security Architecture Revisited
Difficult technical problems and tough business challenges.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
‘Natural’ Search User Interfaces
Users will speak rather than type, watch video rather than read, and use technology socially rather than alone.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Managing Is Adoption in Ambivalent Groups
Insightful implementers refocus user ambivalence and resistance toward trust and acceptance of new systems.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
The Rise and Fall of High Performance Fortran
HPF pioneered a high-level approach to parallel programming but failed to win over a broad user community.
Research and Advances Review articles
Nanonetworks: A New Frontier in Communications
Technology able to create devices the size of a human cell calls for new protocols.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Making Untrusted Code Useful
The following paper combines two important themes in secure computing: assurance and information flow control. For high assurance, a system's Trusted Computing Base needs to be small and the policy simple. Flow control is one such policy.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Making Information Flow Explicit in HiStar
Features of the new HiStar operating system permit several novel applications, including privacy-preserving, untrusted virus scanners and a dynamic Web server with only a few thousand lines of trusted code.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: A Perfect ‘Match’
In a breakthrough contribution, the authors of the paper that follows have developed an efficient way to find approximate nearest neighbors for the case of database patches within image data.
Research and Advances Research highlights
The Patchmatch Randomized Matching Algorithm For Image Manipulation
This paper presents a new randomized algorithm for quickly finding approximate nearest neighbor matches between image patches. Our algorithm offers substantial performance improvements over the previous state of the art.
Opinion Last byte
Puzzled: Distances Between Points on the Plane
Welcome to three new puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is as yet (famously) unsolved.
Opinion Viewpoints: Virtual extension
Information Seeking: Convergence of Search, Recommendations, and Advertising
How to address user information needs amidst a preponderance of data.
