Advertisement

Helping Younger People Protect Themselves from Security Attacks

One potentially disturbing trend that came out in a recent eCrime meeting is that younger people 18-24 years old seem to be more susceptible to phishing attacks, roughly by a factor of three. It's likely that this translates into other kinds of security attacks as well. At this point, our understanding of young people and security is still murky, and it will require more work to understand the problem so that we can devise appropriate solutions.

High-Performance Computing: Where

By definition, the raison d’être for high-performance computing is high performance, but floating point operations per second (FLOPS) need not be the only measure. Human productivity, total cost and time to solution are equally, if not more important.

When Petascale Is Just Too Slow

Evolution or revolution, it’s the persistent question. Can we build reliable esascale systems from extrapolations of current technology or will new approaches be required? There is no definitive answer, as almost any approach might be made to work at some level with enough heroic effort. The bigger question is what design would enable the most breakthrough scientific research in a reliable and cost effective way?

What To Do With Those Idle Cores?

So many processors on our desktops.  Four cores, eight cores, soon we will see hundreds of cores.  Almost all of them are going to be idle most of the time.  If it is nearly free to use  those idle cores, what work could we find for them that might be worthwhile?

Privacy As… Sharing More Information?

When I first started working in the area of personal privacy I had what I would call a conventional view on privacy, which is how to minimize the flow of information going out about them. I reasoned that people were private individuals, wanted protection from interruptions, and wanted a lot of control and feedback about what was shared.

Connecting the Two Ends: Mobile Clouds

  In 1959, the colorful and brilliant physicist, Richard Feynman, gave a seminal lecture to the American Physical Society entitled, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in which he considered the implications of matter manipulation at the atomic scale – a vision of then future nanotechnology. In computing, we also have plenty of room at the bottom, paradoxically enabled by plenty of room at the top. I speak, of course, of the transformative power of our now ubiquitous mobile devices and rich sensor/actuator networks (smart dust) coupled with the capabilities of immense cloud data centers. These two extremes of the modern computing scale are reshaping our society in deep and profound ways.

Shape the Future of Computing

ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.

Get Involved

Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.

By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.

Learn More