October 2009 - Vol. 52 No. 10

Features

Opinion President's letter Oct 1 2009

Increasing ACM's relevance and influence as a membership organization in the global computing community has been a top priority from the outset of my presidency.

Wendy Hall

Computing Applications

Opinion Letters to the editor Oct 1 2009

Time and Computing

Edward E. Lee's "Computing Needs Time" (May 2009) might be the most important, stimulating, and timely article I have read in …

CACM Staff

Computing Applications

News In the Virtual Extension Oct 1 2009

In the Virtual Extension

Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.

CACM Staff

Computing Applications

BLOG@CACM blog@CACM Oct 1 2009

The Netflix Prize, Computer Science Outreach, and Japanese Mobile Phones

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish excerpts…

Greg Linden, Michael Conover, and Judy Robertson

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion CACM online Oct 1 2009

Following the Leaders

The articles, sections, and services available on Communications' Web site all vie for visitor attention. According to…

CACM Staff

Computing Applications

News Oct 1 2009

Managing Data

Dealing with terabytes of data is not the monumental task it once was. The difficult part is presenting enormous amounts of information in ways that are most useful to a…

David Lindley

Computing Applications

News Oct 1 2009

Debating Net Neutrality

Advocates seek to protect users from potential business practices, but defenders of the status quo say that concerns are overblown.

Alan Joch

Computing Applications

News Oct 1 2009

Shaping the Future

To create shape-shifting robotic ensembles, researchers need to teach micro-machines to work together.

Tom Geller

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Viewpoints Oct 1 2009

Contagious Craziness, Spreading Sanity

Some examples of the upward or downward spiral of behaviors in the workplace.

Phillip G. Armour

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Oct 1 2009

Computing in the Depression Era

Since its beginning, the computer industry has been through several major recessions, each occurring approximately five years …

Martin Campbell-Kelly

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Oct 1 2009

Reflections on Conficker

Conficker's alarming growth rate in early 2009 along with the apparent mystery surrounding its ultimate purpose had raised concern among…

Phillip Porras

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Oct 1 2009

Dealing with the Venture Capital Crisis

The venture capital industry, like financial services in general, has fallen on hard times. Part of the problem is that large payoffs have…

Michael Cusumano

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Oct 1 2009

Kode Reviews 101

A review of code review do's and don'ts.

George V. Neville-Neil

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Oct 1 2009

Retrospective: An Axiomatic Basis For Computer Programming

C.A.R. Hoare revisits his past Communications article on the axiomatic approach to programming and uses it as a touchstone for the future.

C. A. R. Hoare

Computing Applications

Practice Oct 1 2009

Probing Biomolecular Machines with Graphics Processors

GPU acceleration and other computer performance increases will offer critical benefits to biomedical science.

James C. Phillips and John E. Stone

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Oct 1 2009

Unifying Biological Image Formats with HDF5

The biosciences need an image format capable of high performance and long-term maintenance. Is HDF5 the answer?

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion Oct 1 2009

A Conversation with David E. Shaw

Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan sits down with the noted hedge fund founder, computational biochemist, and (above all) computer scientist.

CACM Staff

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Contributed articles Oct 1 2009

A View of the Parallel Computing Landscape

Writing programs that scale with increasing numbers of cores should be as easy as writing programs for sequential computers. Here as a concrete example of a coordinated…

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Contributed articles Oct 1 2009

Automated Support For Managing Feature Requests in Open Forums

The result is stable, focused, dynamic discussion threads that avoid redundant ideas and engage thousands of stakeholders.

Jane Cleland-Huang, Horatiu Dumitru, Chuan Duan, and Carlos Castro-Herrera

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Review articles Oct 1 2009

Smoothed Analysis: An Attempt to Explain the Behavior of Algorithms in Practice

This Gödel Prize-winning work traces the steps toward modeling real data.

Daniel A. Spielman and Shang-Hua Teng

Systems and Networking

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2009

Technical Perspective: Relational Query Optimization: Data Management Meets Statistical Estimation

Relational systems have made it possible to query large collections of data in a declarative style through languages such as SQL. There is a key component that is needed…

Surajit Chaudhuri

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2009

Distinct-Value Synopses For Multiset Operations

The task of estimating the number of distinct values (DVs) in a large dataset arises in a wide variety of settings in computer science and elsewhere. We provide DV…

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2009

Technical Perspective: Data Stream Processing – When You Only Get One Look

The database and systems communities have made great progress in developing database systems that allow us to store and query huge amounts of data. Real-time analysis is…

Johannes Gehrke

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2009

Finding the Frequent Items in Streams of Data

Many data generation processes can be modeled as data streams. While this data may be archived and indexed within a data warehouse, it is also important to process the…

Graham Cormode and Marios Hadjieleftheriou

Computing Applications

Opinion Last byte Oct 1 2009

Q&A: The Networker

Jon Kleinberg talks about algorithms, information flow, and the connections between Web search and social networks.

Leah Hoffmann

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning