September 2009 - Vol. 52 No. 9

Features

Opinion Editor's letter Sep 1 2009

For many of us, the past year has been one of the most unsettling in our lifetime. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we watched communism collapse of its own dead…

Moshe Y. Vardi

Computing Applications

Opinion Letters to the editor Sep 1 2009

Computer Science Does Matter

It was disappointing that two competent computer scientists — Matthias Felleisen and Shiram Krishnamurthi — took such a narrow view in their Viewpoint…

CACM Staff

News In the Virtual Extension Sep 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

BLOG@CACM Sep 1 2009

Saying Good-Bye to DBMSs, Designing Effective Interfaces

Michael Stonebraker discusses the problems with relational database management systems and possible solutions, and Jason Hong writes about interfaces and usable privacy…

Michael Stonebraker and Jason Hong

Computing Applications

Opinion CACM online Sep 1 2009

What You Read on Your Summer Vacation

Here are the most popular articles and sections from the Communications site this past summer as indicated by our latest site statistics.

David Roman

Architecture and Hardware

News Sep 1 2009

Entering a Parallel Universe

The promise of parallel computing has run afoul of the harsh reality of Amdahl's Law, which puts a ceiling on the benefit of converting sequential code to parallel…

Gregory Goth

Architecture and Hardware

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Universal Parallel Computing Research Center

News Sep 1 2009

Medical Nanobots

Researchers working in medical nanorobotics are creating technologies that could lead to novel health-care applications, such as new ways of accessing areas of the human…

Kirk L. Kroeker

Architecture and Hardware

News Sep 1 2009

Facing an Age-Old Problem

Researchers are addressing the computing challenges of older individuals, whose needs are different — and too often disregarded.

Samuel Greengard

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

News Sep 1 2009

Computer Science Meets Environmental Science

Scientists share knowledge and seek collaborators at computational sustainability conference.

Karen A. Frenkel

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2009

Keeping Track of Telecommunications Surveillance

The creation of a statistical index of U.S. telecommunications surveillance activities and their results will benefit both civil liberties and law enforcement.

Paul M. Schwartz

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2009

Computing: The Fourth Great Domain of Science

Computing is as fundamental as the physical, life, and social sciences.

Peter J. Denning and Paul S. Rosenbloom

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

image of physical, life, social, and computing sciences

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2009

How ICT Advances Might Help Developing Nations

Some predictions for technology developments, deployments, and the associated societal implications.

Mark Cleverley

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2009

The Long Road to Computer Science Education Reform

Viewing the factors impeding improvements to CS education from kindergarten through grade 12 from a policy perspective.

Cameron Wilson and Peter Harsha

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2009

Face the Inevitable, Embrace Parallelism

Hardware, software, and applications must all evolve in anticipation of the proliferation of parallelism.

Anwar Ghuloum

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2009

An Interview with Maurice Wilkes

Maurice Wilkes, the designer and builder of the EDSAC, passed away on Nov. 29 at age 97. He reflects on his career in this 2009 interview.

David P. Anderson and Maurice Wilkes

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Practice Sep 1 2009

Reveling in Constraints

The Google Web Toolkit is an end-run around Web development obstacles.

Bruce Johnson

Computing Applications

Practice Sep 1 2009

Monitoring and Control of Large Systems With MonALISA

MonALISA developers describe how it works, the key design principles behind it, and the biggest technical challenges in building it.

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Sep 1 2009

Making Sense of Revision-Control Systems

All revision-control systems come with complicated sets of trade-offs. How do you find the best match between tool and team?

Bryan O'Sullivan

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Contributed articles Sep 1 2009

Sound Index: Charts For the People, By the People

Mining the wisdom of the online crowds generates music business intelligence, identifying what's hot and what's not.

Varun Bhagwan, Tyrone Grandison, and Daniel Gruhl

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Contributed articles Sep 1 2009

What Intellectual Property Law Should Learn from Software

Software's close encounters with the law provide some lessons for our future.

James Boyle

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Review article Sep 1 2009

The Status of the P Versus NP Problem

It's one of the fundamental mathematical problems of our time, and its importance grows with the rise of powerful computers.

Lance Fortnow

Systems and Networking

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2009

Technical Perspective: Abstraction For Parallelism

Looking for some new insight into an old problem? The familiar problem of writing parallel applications and a …

Katherine Yelick

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2009

Optimistic Parallelism Requires Abstractions

Writing software for multicore processors is greatly simplified if we could automatically parallelize sequential programs. Although auto-parallelization has been studied…

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2009

Technical Perspective: They Do Click, Don’t They?

You never click on advertisements received in spam or in phishing messages, do you? Nobody does. So, if that is true,…

Marc Dacier

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2009

Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion

We all receive spam advertisements, but few of us have encountered a person who admits to following through on an offer and making a purchase. And yet, the relentlessness…

Computing Applications

Opinion Last byte Sep 1 2009

Puzzled: Solutions and Sources

Last month (August 2009, p. 104) we posted a trio of brainteasers, including one as yet unsolved, concerning probability and intuition.

Peter Winkler

Opinion Last byte Sep 1 2009

Future Tense: Confusions of the Hive Mind

Be cautious about the artificial intelligence approach to computer science. It is impossible to differentiate the actual …

Jaron Lanier

Architecture and Hardware