Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Illustrating How Mechanical Assemblies Work
How-things-work visualizations use a variety of visual techniques to depict the operation of complex mechanical assemblies. We present an automated approach for...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: High-Level Data Structures
This lifting of data structure thinking to the relational level has long inspired computer scientists. In "An Introduction to Data Representation Synthesis," the...
From Communications of the ACM
An Introduction to Data Representation Synthesis
We consider the problem of specifying combinations of data structures with complex sharing in a manner that is declarative and results in provably correct code.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Realities of Home Broadband
Buying residential broadband services seems relatively simple: pick among a small number of plans, and then compare similar plans by price. Unfortunately, reality...
From Communications of the ACM
Measuring Home Broadband Performance
We present the results from the first study of Internet access link performance measured directly from home routers. Our findings provide a snapshot of access network...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: SQL on an Encrypted Database
There is some risk in trusting the cloud providers with sensitive data. Why not encrypt the data stored in cloud services?
From Communications of the ACM
CryptDB: Processing Queries on an Encrypted Database
An ideal solution to satisfying the dual goals of protecting data confidentiality and running computations is to enable a server to compute over encrypted data,...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Innovative Interaction: From Concept to the Wild
The history of the relationship between writing systems and technology is as long as it is varied. Likewise, the challenge of entering text using portable gadgets...
From Communications of the ACM
The Word-Gesture Keyboard: Reimagining Keyboard Interaction
As computing technologies expanded beyond the confines of the desktop, the need for effective text entry methods alternative to the ubiquitous desktop keyboards...
From Communications of the ACM
Searching the Village: Models and Methods For Social Search
With Aardvark, a social search engine, users ask a question, either by IM, e-mail, Web input, text message, or voice. Aardvark then routes the question to the person...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Who Knows?: Searching For Expertise on the Social Web
It is difficult to remember what people had to do to find the answer to a question before the Web. One option might be to call a friend who might know the answer...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Benefits of Capability-Based Protection
Affordable personal computing hardware and the usable GUI-based PC operating systems made the vision of "a computer on every desktop and in every home" a reality...
From Communications of the ACM
A Taste of Capsicum: Practical Capabilities For Unix
Capsicum is a lightweight operating system capability and sandbox framework planned for inclusion in FreeBSD 9. Capsicum extends, rather than replaces, UNIX APIs...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Content-Centric Networking
Much has changed in the 50 years since the invention of packet switching and the early network designs and deployments that...
From Communications of the ACM
Networking Named Content
Current network use is dominated by content distribution and retrieval yet current networking protocols are designed for conversations between hosts. We present...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Power Efficiency as the #1 Design Constraint
Moore's Law, and associated observations by Bob Dennard, describe key technical...
From Communications of the ACM
Understanding Sources of Ineffciency in General-Purpose Chips
To better understand what improvement in processor efficiency is possible, we quantify the performance and energy overheads of a 720p HD H.264 encoder running on...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Visual Reconstruction
Nearly 460,000 Flickr pictures were used to create detailed three-dimensional geometry and colors of famous landmarks and...
From Communications of the ACM
Building Rome in a Day
We present a system that can reconstruct 3D geometry from large, unorganized collections of photographs. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is possible...
From Communications of the ACM