Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
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
Time-Inconsistent Planning: A Computational Problem in Behavioral Economics
We propose a graph-theoretic model of tasks and goals, in which dependencies among actions are represented by a directed graph, and a time-inconsistent agent constructs...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Designing Algorithms and the Fairness Criteria They Should Satisfy
"Which Is the Fairest (Rent Division) of Them All?" focuses on the problem of rent division, and stands out in the variety of techniques applied to arrive at a...
From Communications of the ACM
Which Is the Fairest (Rent Division) of Them All?
What is a fair way to assign rooms to several housemates, and divide the rent between them? We develop a general algorithmic framework that enables the computation...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Can High Performance Be Portable?
"Halide: Decoupling Algorithms from Schedules for High-Performance Image Processing" by Ragan-Kelley et al. on the image processing language Halide explores a substantially...
From Communications of the ACM