ACM Communications

  1. Researchers' Big Data Crisis; Understanding Design and Functionality -

    Michael Stonebraker issues a call to arms about research groups' data-management problems. Jason Hong discusses the nature of functionality with respect to design.

  2. Incentive Auctions -

    Reallocating valuable wireless spectrum can generate billions of dollars in revenue to the U.S. federal government while also benefiting consumers.

  3. Revisiting ACM Europe -

    ACM Europe was launched in October 2009 in Paris. Since then, the ACM Europe Council has grown to 21 members with a good mix of nationality (although mostly European, of course), gender, and research interests.

  4. The Social Life of Robots -

    Researchers are trying to build robots capable of working together with minimal human supervision. But will they ever learn to get along?

  5. ACM Fellows Inducted -

    Forty-six men and women are recognized as 2011 ACM Fellows.

  6. The War Against Botnets -

    Increasingly sophisticated botnets have emerged during the last several years. However, security researchers, businesses, and governments are attacking botnets from a number of different angles — and sometimes winning.

  7. The Science of Better Science -

    Researchers are exploring networked computational analysis, formal classification, and topic modeling to better identify relevant scientists, ideas, and trends.

  8. Emotion and Security -

    Examining the role of human emotional response in making complex security-related decisions.

  9. Text-Mining the Voice of the People -

    Statistical techniques help public leaders turn text in unstructured citizen feedback into responsive e-democracy.

  10. Software as a Service for Data Scientists -

    Globus Online manages fire-and-forget file transfers for big-data, high-performance scientific collaborations.

  11. Programming by Optimization -

    Avoid premature commitment, seek design alternatives, and automatically generate performance-optimized software.

  12. Credit Non-Anonymous Reviewers with a Name -

    I agree with Bertrand Meyer's blog "Fixing the Process of Computer Science Refereeing" (Nov. 2011) and "Why I Sign My Reviews" in favor of open reviewing but suggest we go further with the quality of refereeing by rewarding reviewers and encouraging their contribution.

  13. Peer Instruction -

    How the computing education community can learn from physics education.

  14. Yet Another Technology Cusp -

    Considering the unexpected risks associated with seemingly minor technological changes.

  15. Puzzled: Where Sets Meet (Venn Diagrams) -

    Welcome to three new puzzles. The theme is Venn diagrams, those ubiquitous but useful pictures, usually consisting of two or three intersecting circles that illustrate how sets meet.

  16. What Have We Learned About Software Engineering? -

    Upon closer examination, everything old appears to be new again in the realm of software engineering.

  17. Wanton Acts of Debuggery -

    Keep your debug messages clear, useful, and not annoying.

  18. Progress and Challenges in Intelligent Vehicle Area Networks -

    Vehicle area networks form the backbone of future intelligent transportation systems.

  19. Technical Perspective: Modeling High-Dimensional Data -

    Data in high dimension is difficult to visualize and understand. This has always been the case and is even more apparent now with the availability of large high-dimensional datasets and the need to make sense of them.

  20. Software Synthesis Procedures -

    Automated synthesis of program fragments from specifications can make programs easier to write and easier to reason about. To integrate synthesis into programming languages, software synthesis algorithms should behave in a predictable way.

  21. Disentangling Gaussians -

    The Gaussian mixture model is one of the oldest and most widely used statistical models. Our work focuses on the case where the mixture consists of a small but unknown number of Gaussian "components" that may overlap

  22. Technical Perspective: Compiling What to How -

    The following paper by Viktor Kuncak et al. integrates declarative programming into a general-purpose language, allowing one to escape the host language when a subproblem can be solved declaratively.

  23. You Don't Know Jack About Shared Variables or Memory Models -

    Data races are evil.

  24. BufferBloat: What's Wrong With the Internet? -

    A discussion with Vint Cerf, Van Jacobson, Nick Weaver, and Jim Gettys.

  25. Advances and Challenges in Log Analysis -

    Logs contain a wealth of information to help manage systems.