Opinion Letter from USACM
Toward Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability
There is a common misconception that algorithms automatically result in unbiased decisions.
September 2017 - Vol. 60 No. 9
Features
Opinion Cerf's Up
Take Two Aspirin and Call Me in the Morning
I am fascinated by the metaphor of cyber security as a public health problem.
Opinion Vardi's Insights
Divination By Program Committee
Divination is the practice of an occultic ritual as an aid in decision making. Developments in mathematics and in computer science in the 20th century shed new light on the power of divination.
Opinion Letters to the editor
Computational Thinking Is Not Necessarily Computational
I applaud Peter J. Denning's "Remaining Trouble Spots with Computational Thinking" (June 2017), especially for pointing out the subject itself is often characterized by "vague definitions and unsubstantiated claims."
Assuring Software Quality By Preventing Neglect
Robin K. Hill suggests software neglect is a failure of the coder to pay enough attention and take enough trouble to ensure software quality.
Image recognition technology is advancing rapidly. Researchers are discovering new ways to tackle the task without enormous datasets.
Scientists are demonstrating that lasers could be the future of space communication.
Why GPS Spoofing Is a Threat to Companies, Countries
Technology that falsifies navigation data presents significant dangers to public and private organizations.
Turing Laureates Celebrate Award’s 50th Anniversary
ACM recently held a conference in celebration of the first 50 years of the ACM A.M. Turing Award.
An engineer best known for his work in database management systems, and in techniques of layered architecture that include Bachman diagrams.
Opinion Computing ethics
Is That Social Bot Behaving Unethically?
A procedure for reflection and discourse on the behavior of bots in the context of law, deception, and societal norms.
Opinion The profession of IT
Multitasking Without Thrashing
Lessons from operating systems teach how to do multitasking without thrashing.
Opinion Viewpoint
Why Agile Teams Fail Without UX Research
Failures to involve end users or to collect comprehensive data representing user needs are described and solutions to avoid such failures are proposed.
Opinion Viewpoint
When Does Law Enforcement’s Demand to Read Your Data Become a Demand to Read Your Mind?
On cryptographic backdoors and prosthetic intelligence.
The Calculus of Service Availability
You're only as available as the sum of your dependencies.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Moving Beyond the Turing Test with the Allen AI Science Challenge
Answering questions correctly from standardized eighth-grade science tests is itself a test of machine intelligence.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Trust and Distrust in Online Fact-Checking Services
Even when checked by fact checkers, facts are often still open to preexisting bias and doubt.
Research and Advances Review articles
Security in High-Performance Computing Environments
Exploring the many distinctive elements that make securing HPC systems much different than securing traditional systems.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: A Gloomy Look at the Integrity of Hardware
"Exploiting the Analog Properties of Digital Circuits for Malicious Hardware," by Kaiyuan Yang, et al., assumes semiconductor foundries (and others in chip fabrication) can be malicious, modifying designs to produce devices that can later be used for malice.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Exploiting the Analog Properties of Digital Circuits For Malicious Hardware
We show how a fabrication-time attacker can leverage analog circuits to create a hardware attack that is small and stealthy.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Humans and Computers Working Together on Hard Tasks
"Scribe," by Walter S. Lasecki, et al., is one of the first in a recent set of crowdsourcing papers that demonstrated how human workers can collaborate with computing systems to accomplish a real-time task that is difficult for either one to do by itself.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Scribe: Deep Integration of Human and Machine Intelligence to Caption Speech in Real Time
We discuss how our Scribe system combines human labor and machine intelligence in real time to reliably convert speech to text with less than 4s latency.
Opinion Last byte
Alexei Efros, recipient of the 2016 ACM prize in computing, works to harness the power of visual complexity.
