Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Understanding the Impact of Video Quality on User Engagement
As Internet-based videos become mainstream, user expectation for high quality is constantly increasing. In this context, it is crucial for content providers to...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Is Dark Silicon Real?
The microprocessor chip R&D community has been well aware of the so-called "power wall" challenge for over a decade. The following work by Esmaeilzadeh et al. is...
From Communications of the ACM
Power Challenges May End the Multicore Era
Tthe microprocessor industry has shifted to multicore scaling as its principal strategy for continuing performance growth. However, while transistor count increases...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Finding People in Depth
The following article by Shotton et al. describes a landmark computer vision system that takes a single depth image containing a person and automatically estimates...
From Communications of the ACM
Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from Single Depth Images
We propose a new method to quickly and accurately predict human pose — the 3-D positions of body joints — from a single depth image, without depending on information...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Visualization, Understanding, and Design
Photographs capture the moment; paintings convey perception, impression, and feeling; illustrations tell stories. Computer graphics aims to enrich all these artistic...
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: Natural Algorithms in a Networked World
How do birds flock and fish school? How do individuals in a social network reach agreement, even though they are often only influenced by other like-minded individuals...
From Communications of the ACM
Natural Algorithms and Influence Systems
Algorithms lay the grounds for numerical simulations and, crucially, provide a powerful framework for their analysis. The new area of natural algorithms may reprise...
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: Open Platforms For Computational Photography
A fundamental impediment to the widespread development and deployment of in-camera algorithms is the lack of a clean open architecture for controlling camera...
From Communications of the ACM
The Frankencamera: An Experimental Platform For Computational Photography
Progress in computational photography has been hampered by the lack of a portable, programmable camera with sufficient image quality and computing power. To address...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Graph Embeddings and Linear Equations
Algorithmic advances can come from the most unexpected places. The following paper describes an emerging approach to solving linear systems of equations that...
From Communications of the ACM
A Fast Solver For a Class of Linear Systems
The solution of linear systems is a problem of fundamental theoretical importance but also one with a myriad of applications in numerical mathematics, engineering...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A High-Dimensional Surprise
High-dimensional space is a counterintuitive place, where natural geometric intuitions from the familiar three-dimensional world may lead us badly astray.
From Communications of the ACM
Spherical Cubes: Optimal Foams from Computational Hardness Amplification
Foam problems are about how to best partition space into bubbles of minimal surface area. We investigate the case where one unit-volume bubble is required to tile...
From Communications of the ACM