Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Progress in Spatial Computing for Flood Prediction
There are few algorithms for multi-flow graphs beyond flow accumulation. The authors of "Flood-Risk Analysis on Terrains" take a big step to fill this knowledge...
From Communications of the ACM
Flood-Risk Analysis on Terrains
In this paper, we study a number of flood-risk related problems, give an overview of efficient algorithms for them, as well as explore the efficacy and efficiency...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Computing the Value of Location Data
"Computing Value of Spatiotemporal Information," by Heba Aly et al., describes a technique for computing the monetary value of a person's location data for a potential...
From Communications of the ACM
Computing Value of Spatiotemporal Information
We investigate the intrinsic value of location data in the context of strong privacy, where location information is only available from end users via purchase. ...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Is There a Geek Gene?
"Evidence that Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal" uses empirical methods to determine if belief in innate differences may explain why CS teachers see a bimodality...
From Communications of the ACM
Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal
There is a common belief that grades in computer science courses are bimodal. We devised a psychology experiment to understand why CS educators hold this belief...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: From Virtual Worlds to Digital Fabrication
The authors of "OpenFab" propose to revisit the processing pipeline that turns a 3D model into machine instructions in light of the solutions developed in computer...
From Communications of the ACM
OpenFab: A Programmable Pipeline for Multimaterial Fabrication
We present OpenFab, a programmable pipeline for synthesis of multimaterial 3D printed objects that is inspired by RenderMan and modern GPU pipelines.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: To Do or Not To Do: Extending SQL with Integer Linear Programming?
"Scalable Computation of High-Order Optimization Queries," by Brucato et al., makes a case for marrying the well-established paradigms of constrained optimization...
From Communications of the ACM
Scalable Computation of High-Order Optimization Queries
We present a complete system that supports package queries, a new query model that extends traditional database queries to handle complex constraints and preferences...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Attacking Cryptographic Key Exchange with Precomputation
"Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice," by David Adrian et al., illustrates the importance of taking preprocessing attacks into account...
From Communications of the ACM
Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice
We investigate the security of Diffie-Hellman key exchange as used in popular Internet protocols and find it to be less secure than widely believed.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Making Sleep Tracking More User Friendly
"LIBS: A Bioelectrical Sensing System from Human Ears for Staging Whole-Night Sleep Study" provides a nice balance in terms of minimizing the burden on users and...
From Communications of the ACM
LIBS: A Bioelectrical Sensing System from Human Ears for Staging Whole-Night Sleep Study
We explore a new form of wearable systems, called LIBS, that can continuously record biosignals such as brain wave, eye movements, and facial muscle contractions...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Backdoor Engineering
"Where Did I Leave My Keys?" by Checkoway et al. reports on the amazing independent reconstruction of a backdoor, discovered in the firmware of a VPN router commonly...
From Communications of the ACM
Where Did I Leave My Keys?: Lessons from the Juniper Dual EC Incident
In this paper, we describe the results of a full independent analysis of the ScreenOS randomness and VPN key establishment protocol subsystems, which we carried...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Rewards of Selfish Mining
"Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable," by Eyal and Sirer, questions the 2009 Bitcoin white paper's implicit assumption of perfect information—that...
From Communications of the ACM
Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable
We propose a practical modification to the Bitcoin protocol that protects Bitcoin in the general case.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Graph-Theoretic Framework Traces Task Planning
In "Time-Inconsistent Planning: A Computational Problem in Behavioral Economics," Kleinberg and Oren describe a graph-theoretic framework for task planning with...
From Communications of the ACM