September 2016 - Vol. 59 No. 9

Features

Opinion Sep 1 2016

Academic rankings, in general, provide highly misleading ways to inform academic decision making by individuals. Using such rankings for academic decision making is letting third-party business interests influence our academic values.

Moshe Y. Vardi

Computing Applications

Opinion Sep 1 2016

Keeping the Internet Open

To those who have spoken for and who espouse an open and welcoming Internet now falls the task of keeping it that way. To do so will require more than words and argument.

Vinton G. Cerf

Computing Profession

Opinion Letters to the Editor Sep 1 2016

Election Auditing and Verifiability

Re "The Risks of Self-Auditing Systems" (June 2016): While Internet voting (like any remote-voting method) is indeed vulnerable to vote buying and selling, end-to-end verifiable voting is not.

CACM Staff

News Sep 1 2016

Reconciling Quantum Physics with Math

Mathematicians explore the root of many problems in developing a proof for the Kadison-Singer problem.

Chris Edwards

Architecture and Hardware

Nikhil Srivastava, Adam Marcus, and Daniel Spielman

News Sep 1 2016

GPUs Reshape Computing

Graphical processing units have emerged as a major powerhouse in the computing world, unleashing huge advancements in deep learning and AI.

Samuel Greengard

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

News Sep 1 2016

The Edge of the Uncanny

Scientists are learning more about what makes robots and chatbots engaging.

Gregory Mone

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion Law and Technology Sep 1 2016

No Easy Answers in the Fight Over iPhone Decryption

A look at the legal background and future possibilities for an issue that is likely to reoccur.

Felix Wu

Security and Privacy

empty chairs for U.S. House Committee hearing

Opinion The profession of IT Sep 1 2016

Software Quality

Software users are looking more and more for software that delights.

Peter J. Denning

Computing Applications

Opinion Broadening participation Sep 1 2016

‘For All’ in ‘Computer Science For All’

Seeking to expand inclusiveness in computer science education.

Richard E. Ladner and Maya Israel

Computing Profession

'For All' in 'Computer Science For All,' illustrative photo

Opinion Viewpoint Sep 1 2016

Designing AI Systems that Obey Our Laws and Values

Calling for research on automatic oversight for artificial intelligence systems.

Amitai Etzioni and Oren Etzioni

Computing Applications

Designing AI Systems that Obey Our Laws and Values, illustrative photo

Opinion Viewpoint Sep 1 2016

Helping Conference Attendees Better Understand Research Presentations

Sharing lessons learned from a lecture program for making technical material more accessible to conference attendees.

Computing Profession

Helping Conference Attendees Better Understand Research Presentations, illustrative photo

Opinion Viewpoint Sep 1 2016

A New Look at the Semantic Web

Seeking to make Web data "smarter" by utilizing a new kind of semantics.

Abraham Bernstein, James Hendler, and Natalya Noy

Computing Applications

A New Look at the Semantic Web, illustrative photo

Practice Sep 1 2016

Introducing Research For Practice

Expert-curated guides to the best of CS research.

Peter Bailis, Simon Peter, and Justine Sherry

Computing Applications

Practice Sep 1 2016

Bad Software Architecture Is a People Problem

When people don't work well together they make bad decisions.

Kate Matsudaira

Computing Applications

Bad Software Architecture Is a People Problem, illustration

Practice Sep 1 2016

10 Optimizations on Linear Search

The operations side of the story.

Thomas A. Limoncelli

Computing Applications

10 Optimizations on Linear Search, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Sep 1 2016

Why Data Citation Is a Computational Problem

Using database views to define citable units is the key to specifying and generating citations to data.

Peter Buneman, Susan Davidson, and James Frew

Computing Applications

Why Data Citation Is a Computational Problem, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Sep 1 2016

Dynamic Presentation Consistency Issues in Smartphone Mapping Apps

Smartphone mapping apps routinely fail to follow centuries-old mapmaking dynamic consistency principles and practices.

Hanan Samet, Sarana Nutanong, and Brendan C. Fruin

Architecture and Hardware

Dynamic Presentation Consistency Issues in Smartphone Mapping Apps, illustration

Research and Advances Review articles Sep 1 2016

Learning Executable Semantic Parsers For Natural Language Understanding

Semantic parsing is a rich fusion of the logical and the statistical worlds.

Percy Liang

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Learning Executable Semantic Parsers for Natural Language Understanding, illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2016

Technical Perspective: The Dawn of Computational Light Transport

What would the world look like if we had a chance to observe it with a trillion frame-per-second video camera? "Imaging the Propagation of Light through Scenes at Picosecond Resolution" by Velten et al. represents an audacious attempt to answer this for the very first time.

Kyros Kutulakos

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2016

Imaging the Propagation of Light Through Scenes at Picosecond Resolution

We present a novel imaging technique, which we call femtophotography, to capture and visualize the propagation of light through table-top scenes with an effective exposure time of 1.85 ps per frame.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Imaging the Propagation of Light through Scenes at Picosecond Resolution, illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2016

Technical Perspective: Jupiter Rising

As "Jupiter Rising" makes clear, many of the Internet mechanisms for maintaining large-scale networks are suboptimal when the datacenter is largely homogeneous, exhibits strong regularity within its structure, and when its bandwidth needs exceed the capabilities of those of any available equipment vendor.

Andrew W. Moore

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2016

Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google's Datacenter Network

We present our approach for overcoming the cost, operational complexity, and limited scale endemic to datacenter networks a decade ago.

Computing Applications

Opinion Last byte Sep 1 2016

Q&A: Hello, Underworld

Stefan Savage's innovative research has focused on strengthening the security, privacy, and reliability of networks.

Leah Hoffmann

ACM-Infosys Foundation Award recipient Stefan Savage

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