Research and Advances – Page 51 – Communications of the ACM

Dec 1 2011

Software misbehaves all too often. This is a truism, but also the driving force behind many computing techniques intended to increase software reliability, safety, and security, ranging from basic testing to full formal verification.

Xavier Leroy

Computing Applications

Dec 1 2011

Safe to the Last Instruction: Automated Verification of a Type-Safe Operating System

High-level computer applications build on services provided by lower-level software layers. Unfortunately, today's low-level software still suffers from a steady stream of bugs, often leaving computers vulnerable to attack until the bugs are patched.

Jean Yang and Chris Hawblitzel

Computing Applications

Dec 1 2011

Wherefore Art Thou R3579X?: Anonymized Social Networks, Hidden Patterns, and Structural Steganography

In a social network, nodes correspond to people or other social entities, and edges correspond to social links between them. We describe a family of attacks such that it is possible to learn whether edges exist or not between specific targeted pairs of nodes.

Lars Backstrom, Cynthia Dwork, and Jon Kleinberg

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Dec 1 2011

Answer Set Programming at a Glance

The motivation and key concepts behind answer set programming — a promising approach to declarative problem solving.

Gerhard Brewka, Thomas Eiter, and Mirosław Truszczyński

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Answer Set Programming at a Glance, illustration

Dec 1 2011

Technical Perspective: Anonymity Is Not Privacy

We live in an era of data abundance. Every aspect of our online and offline behavior is captured and analyzed. The companies holding our data face the responsibility for protecting our privacy, especially as they sell and exchange information about us.

Vitaly Shmatikov

Systems and Networking

Dec 1 2011

Formal Analysis of MPI-Based Parallel Programs

The goal is reliable parallel simulations, helping scientists understand nature, from how foams compress to how ribosomes construct proteins.

Architecture and Hardware

Dec 1 2011

Visual Crowd Surveillance Through a Hydrodynamics Lens

People in high-density crowds appear to move with the flow of the crowd, like particles in a liquid.

Brian E. Moore, Saad Ali, Ramin Mehran, and Mubarak Shah

Computing Applications

Dec 1 2011

License Risks from Ad Hoc Reuse of Code from the Internet

Software developers' reuse of code from the Internet bears legal and economic risks for their employers.

Manuel Sojer and Joachim Henkel

Computing Applications

Nov 1 2011

Managing Is Adoption in Ambivalent Groups

Insightful implementers refocus user ambivalence and resistance toward trust and acceptance of new systems.

DongBack Seo, Albert Boonstra, and Marjolein Offenbeek

Computing Applications

Managing IS Adoption in Ambivalent Groups, illustration

Nov 1 2011

‘Natural’ Search User Interfaces

Users will speak rather than type, watch video rather than read, and use technology socially rather than alone.

Marti A. Hearst

Architecture and Hardware

'Natural' Search User Interfaces, illustration

Nov 1 2011

The Rise and Fall of High Performance Fortran

HPF pioneered a high-level approach to parallel programming but failed to win over a broad user community.

Ken Kennedy, Charles Koelbel, and Hans Zima

Architecture and Hardware

Nov 1 2011

Nanonetworks: A New Frontier in Communications

Technology able to create devices the size of a human cell calls for new protocols.

Ian F. Akyildiz, Josep Miquel Jornet, and Massimiliano Pierobon

Architecture and Hardware

Nov 1 2011

Technical Perspective: A Perfect ‘Match’

In a breakthrough contribution, the authors of the paper that follows have developed an efficient way to find approximate nearest neighbors for the case of database patches within image data.

William T. Freeman

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Nov 1 2011

The Patchmatch Randomized Matching Algorithm For Image Manipulation

This paper presents a new randomized algorithm for quickly finding approximate nearest neighbor matches between image patches. Our algorithm offers substantial performance improvements over the previous state of the art.

Connelly Barnes, Dan B Goldman, Eli Shechtman, and Adam Finkelstein

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Nov 1 2011

Making Information Flow Explicit in HiStar

Features of the new HiStar operating system permit several novel applications, including privacy-preserving, untrusted virus scanners and a dynamic Web server with only a few thousand lines of trusted code.

Nickolai Zeldovich, Silas Boyd-Wickizer, Eddie Kohler, and David Mazières

Computing Applications

Nov 1 2011

Technical Perspective: Making Untrusted Code Useful

The following paper combines two important themes in secure computing: assurance and information flow control. For high assurance, a system's Trusted Computing Base needs to be small and the policy simple. Flow control is one such policy.

Butler Lampson

Computing Applications

Oct 1 2011

From Blitzkrieg to Bitskrieg: The Military Encounter with Computers

Expect more cyberwarfare on the conventional battlefield and less against civilian infrastructure . . . assuming containment is possible.

John Arquilla

Architecture and Hardware

Oct 1 2011

Computational Journalism

How computer scientists can empower journalists, democracy's watchdogs, in the production of news in the public interest.

Sarah Cohen, James T. Hamilton, and Fred Turner

Computing Applications

Oct 1 2011

Biology as Reactivity

Exploring the connection of biology with reactive systems to better understand living systems.

Jasmin Fisher, David Harel, and Thomas A. Henzinger

Computing Applications

Oct 1 2011

Don’t Turn Social Media Into Another ‘Literary Digest’ Poll

The power to predict outcomes based on Twitter data is greatly exaggerated, especially for political elections.

Daniel Gayo-Avello

Computing Applications

Don't Turn Social Media Into Another 'Literary Digest' Poll, illustration

Oct 1 2011

Computing For the Masses

A new paradigm is needed to cope with the application, technology, and discipline challenges to our computing profession in the coming decades.

Zhiwei Xu and Guojie Li

Architecture and Hardware

Oct 1 2011

Technical Perspective: A Better Way to Learn Features

A typical machine learning program uses weighted combinations of features to discriminate between classes or to predict real-valued outcomes. The art of machine learning is in constructing the features, and a radically new method of creating features constitutes a major advance.

Geoffrey E. Hinton

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Oct 1 2011

Technical Perspective: Power Efficiency as the #1 Design Constraint

Moore's Law, and associated observations by Bob Dennard, describe key technical foundations of the semiconductor industry. Taking a step back from these insightful assertions, we can see an even bigger picture emerge related to energy usage and power consumption.

Charles Moore

Architecture and Hardware

Oct 1 2011

Technical Perspective: Visual Reconstruction

Nearly 460,000 Flickr pictures were used to create detailed three-dimensional geometry and colors of famous landmarks and monuments in Rome, Venice, and Dubrovnik. To computer vision researchers, these visual reconstructions are a dream come true.

Carlo Tomasi

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

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