Tracing the history of exposing and elucidating the wide variety of system problems and associated social implications of uses and misuses of computing technology.
In the wake of September 11th, the concept of a national identity (NID) card system has been getting considerable play, largely promoted by persons who might gain financially or politically from its implementation, or by individuals who simply do not understand the complex implications of such a plan. Authentic unique identifiers do have some potentially […]
A fictional scenario of daily life in a world networked with ambient intelligence illustrates the dark side of the technology and the need for appropriate safeguards.
In the years ahead, the declining cost of computation will make digital technologies accessible to nearly everyone in all parts of the world, from inner-city neighborhoods in the U.S. to rural villages in developing nations. That will bring an end to the so-called "digital divide," right? Not necessarily. Even as people everywhere gain access to […]
An innovative roadmap brings together the worlds of business processes and Web services, harnessing their power to construct industrial-strength business applications.
The same technology that makes interactive 3D games so entertaining in the physical action domain is just as effective in education, training, and other more serious applications.
Suppose that you want to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it. This separation is possible: we describe a "fully homomorphic" encryption scheme that keeps data private, but that allows a worker that does not have the secret decryption key to compute any (still encrypted) result of the data, even when the function of the data is very complex.
With software playing an undeniably critical role in our lives, one would expect that the best engineering techniques, such as rigorous specification and systematic inspections, would be applied routinely in its development. But in our experience, the opposite is often the case. Many large and important software development projects are conducted with poor choices of […]
Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
