October 2014 - Vol. 57 No. 10

Features

Opinion Oct 1 2014

ACM held a strategic planning retreat last November. The motivation was the realization that the ecosystem that supports scholarly and professional societies is undergoing rapid change, and this change is creating significant challenges.

John White

Computing Applications

Opinion Oct 1 2014

Unconventional Computing

The prospect of increasingly unconventional computing methods that may force us to rethink how we analyze problems for purposes of getting computers to solve them for us.

Vinton G. Cerf

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Letters to the Editor Oct 1 2014

Responsible Programming Not a Technical Issue

Vinton G. Cerf's "Responsible Programming" (July 2014) raised the interesting question of whether it is responsible to produce software without using state-of-the-art defect-detection-and-validation tools. The answer is legal, not technical.

CACM Staff

Computing Profession

BLOG@CACM Oct 1 2014

Finding a Research Job, and Teaching CS in High School

John Langford considers how to stand out when seeking a research position, while Mark Guzdial suggests what teachers need to know to teach computer science at the high school level.

John Langford and Mark Guzdial

Computing Applications

News Oct 1 2014

Still Seeking the Optical Transistor

Optical information handling is a critical staple for communications and the Internet, but using light for computer-scale computation remains a distant dream.

Don Monroe

Computing Applications

test chip with electrical and optical components

News Oct 1 2014

Gradual Evolution

Dynamically typed languages adopt features of static typing to cope with growth.

Neil Savage

Computing Applications

News Oct 1 2014

Museums Go High-Tech with Digital Forensics

Scientists are using cutting-edge scanning and visualization techniques to wow visitors and find new stories in ancient artifacts.

Nidhi Subbaraman

Computing Applications

British Museum staffer views scans of a mummy

Opinion Technology strategy and management Oct 1 2014

The Bitcoin Ecosystem

Speculating on how the Bitcoin economy might evolve.

Michael A. Cusumano

Computing Applications

Opinion Inside risks Oct 1 2014

Risks and Myths of Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage

Considering existing and new types of risks inherent in cloud services.

Peter G. Neumann

Computing Applications

Risks and Myths of Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage, illustrative photo

Opinion Kode vicious Oct 1 2014

Outsourcing Responsibility

What do you do when your debugger fails you?

George V. Neville-Neil

Computing Applications

Opinion The business of software Oct 1 2014

Vendor: Vidi, Vici

Some hidden costs of outsourcing.

Phillip G. Armour

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint Oct 1 2014

Disrupting and Transforming the -University

Higher education institutions must modify their business models in response to technology-driven influences.

Henry Lucas

Computing Applications

Disrupting and Transforming the University, illustrative photo

Opinion Viewpoint Oct 1 2014

A Turing Tale

Assessing the accuracy of popular descriptions of Alan Turing's influences and legacy.

Edgar G. Daylight

Computing Applications

Practice Oct 1 2014

Certificate Transparency

Public, verifiable, append-only logs.

Ben Laurie

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Oct 1 2014

Security Collapse in the HTTPS Market

Assessing legal and technical solutions to secure HTTPS.

Axel Arnbak, Hadi Asghari, Michel Van Eeten, and Nico Van Eijk

Computing Applications

Security Collapse in the HTTPS Market, illustration

Practice Oct 1 2014

Why Is It Taking So Long to Secure Internet Routing?

Routing security incidents can still slip past deployed security defenses.

Sharon Goldberg

Architecture and Hardware

Why Is It Taking So Long to Secure Internet Routing?, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Oct 1 2014

Reading News with Maps By Exploiting Spatial Synonyms

Use this map query interface to search the world, even when not sure what information you seek. (View a related original video at https://vimeo.com/106352925.)

Computing Applications

Reading News with Maps by Exploiting Spatial Synonyms, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Oct 1 2014

Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase

This collaboratively edited knowledgebase provides a common source of data for Wikipedia, and everyone else.

Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch

Architecture and Hardware

Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase, illustration

Research and Advances Review articles Oct 1 2014

Abstractions For Software-Defined Networks

New abstractions are critical for achieving SDN goals.

Martin Casado, Nate Foster, and Arjun Guha

Architecture and Hardware

Abstractions for Software- Defined Networks, illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2014

Technical Perspective: Attacking a Problem from the Middle

"Dissection: A New Paradigm for Solving Bicomposite Search Problems," by Itai Dinur, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir, presents an elegant new algorithm for solving a broad class of combinatorial optimization problems.

Bart Preneel

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Oct 1 2014

Dissection: A New Paradigm For Solving Bicomposite Search Problems

In this paper, we introduce the new notion of bicomposite search problems, and show that they can be solved with improved combinations of time and space complexities by using a new algorithmic paradigm called dissection.

Itai Dinur, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Last byte Oct 1 2014

Future Tense: Garden of Life

From the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, with boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what could be. When machines are in the natural world, what in the world is still unnatural?

Daniel H. Wilson

Architecture and Hardware

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