Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Breakthrough in Software Obfuscation
In "Hiding Secrets in Software," Garg et al. construct a "one-way compiler" of the type envisioned by Diffie and Hellman.
From Communications of the ACM
Hiding Secrets in Software: A Cryptographic Approach to Program Obfuscation
Can we hide secrets in software? Can we make programs unintelligible while preserving their functionality? Why would we even want to do this? In this article, we...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Software Is Natural
"On the Naturalness of Software" by Hindle et al. takes an entirely new approach to providing tools to help build software.
From Communications of the ACM
On the Naturalness of Software
We begin with the conjecture that most software is natural, with all the attendant constraints and limitations — and thus, like natural language, it is also likely...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Program Synthesis Using Stochastic Techniques
The authors of "Stochastic Program Optimization" have developed a stochastic search technique and applied it to program optimization.
From Communications of the ACM
Stochastic Program Optimization
By encoding constraints of transformation correctness as terms in a cost function, and using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler to explore the space of all possible...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Treating Networks Like Programs
"Software Dataplane Verification" takes existing static checking of networks to a new level by checking the real code in the forwarding path of a Click router using...
From Communications of the ACM
Software Dataplane Verification
We present the result of working iteratively on two tasks: designing a domain-specific verification tool for packet-processing software, while trying to identify...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Not Just a Matrix Laboratory Anymore
Mathematics is not difficult to find in Chebfun, the subject of "Computing Numerically with Functions Instead of Numbers."
From Communications of the ACM
Computing Numerically with Functions Instead of Numbers
We present the Chebfun system for numerical computation with functions, which is based on a key idea: an analogy of floating-point arithmetic for functions rather...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Woodworker's Easy Fix
The authors of "Guided Exploration of Physically Valid Shapes for Furniture Design" have found a way to provide the user with instant feedback on how to fix unstable...
From Communications of the ACM
Guided Exploration of Physically Valid Shapes For Furniture Design
The authors propose an interactive design framework for the efficient and intuitive exploration of geometrically and physically valid shapes.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Simplicity of Cache Efficient Functional Algorithms
In "Cache Efficient Functional Algorithms," Blelloch and Harper suggest we analyze the costs of functional algorithms by assuming objects are allocated sequentially...
From Communications of the ACM
Cache Efficient Functional Algorithms
We present a cost model for analyzing the memory efficiency of algorithms expressed in a simple functional language.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Programming Multicore Computers
"Can Traditional Programming Bridge the Ninja Performance Gap for Parallel Computing Applications" advocates an appealing division of labor between a developer...
From Communications of the ACM
Can Traditional Programming Bridge the Ninja Performance Gap For Parallel Computing Applications?
Current processor trends of integrating more cores with SIMD units have made it more to extract performance from applications. It is believed that traditional...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Equivalence Problem For Finite Automata
As the equivalence problem is essential in many applications, we need algorithms that avoid the worst-case complexity as often as possible. In "Hacking Nondeterminism...
From Communications of the ACM
Hacking Nondeterminism with Induction and Coinduction
We introduce bisimulation up to congruence as a technique for proving language equivalence of nondeterministic finite automata.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Rethinking Caches For Throughput Processors
As GPUs have become mainstream parallel processing engines, many applications targeting GPUs now have data locality more amenable to traditional caching. The...
From Communications of the ACM