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 generating such visualizations.
Research and Advances
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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 practices through technology. The following paper is a watershed in depiction, creating imagery that gets ideas across.
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 the pose of the person's body in 3D.
Improved performance and a proven deployment strategy make SPDY a potential successor to HTTP.
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 authors aim at elevating data structure programming to the relational realm.
Theory of Algorithmic Self-Assembly
The challenge of programming molecules to manipulate themselves.
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.
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 in the life sciences the role differential equations have long played in the physical sciences.
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? How can one engineer a swarm of robots to behave like bird flocks?
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 performance across the United States.
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 this problem, we have designed and implemented the Frankencamera.
The Challenges Ahead For Bio-Inspired ‘Soft’ Robotics
Soft materials may enable the automation of tasks beyond the capacities of current robotic technology.
Functional Encryption: A New Vision For Public-Key Cryptography
Decryption keys allow users to learn a specific function of the encrypted data and nothing else.
Open-source chemistry software and molecular databases broaden the research horizons of drug discovery.
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 is somewhat more complicated.
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 features and writing the corresponding real-time processing and viewing algorithms.
A Few Useful Things to Know About Machine Learning
Tapping into the "folk knowledge" needed to advance machine learning applications.
Internet voting is unachievable for the foreseeable future and therefore not inevitable. View a video of Barbara Simons entitled "Internet Voting: An Idea Whose Time Has Not Come."
Experiments in Social Computation
Human subjects perform a computationally wide range of tasks from only local, networked interactions.
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, and science.
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 relies heavily on techniques from graph theory.
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.
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 d-dimensional space in a periodic fashion according to the standard, cubical lattice.
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 InvolvedCommunications 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.
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