February 2019 - Vol. 62 No. 2

Features

Opinion Cerf's up Feb 1 2019

Libraries of the future cannot merely be catalogs of digital content. The objects in the digital library will need to interact in some fashion so that truth value of their contents can be adjusted as new knowledge becomes available.

Vinton G. Cerf

Computing Applications

Opinion Letters to the editor Feb 1 2019

Between the Lines in the China Region Special Section

I thought privacy in China deserved better treatment than was expressed in the foreword of the special section on the China Region (Nov. 2018), that "People in China seem less sensitive about privacy."

CACM Staff

Computing Applications

BLOG@CACM Feb 1 2019

Seeking Digital Humanities, IT Tech Support

Herbert Bruderer explains why the opposite of digital is not analog; Robin K. Hill describes how the challenges of user support are aggravated by indeterminate client responsibility.

Herbert Bruderer and Robin K. Hill

Architecture and Hardware

News Feb 1 2019

A Brave New World of Genetic Engineering

Genetic engineering technologies are advancing at a furious rate, changing the world one cell at a time.

Samuel Greengard

Computing Applications

News Feb 1 2019

Technologizing Agriculture

An array of technologies are making farms more efficient, safer, and profitable.

Keith Kirkpatrick

Computing Applications

News Feb 1 2019

Being Recognized Everywhere

How facial and voice recognition are reshaping society.

Logan Kugler

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Opinion Privacy and security Feb 1 2019

2018: A Big Year for Privacy

Retracing the pivotal privacy and security-related events and ensuing issues from the past year.

Carl Landwehr

Computing Profession

Opinion Broadening participation Feb 1 2019

How Computer Science at CMU Is Attracting and Retaining Women

Carnegie Mellon University's successful efforts enrolling, sustaining, and graduating women in computer science challenge the belief in a gender divide in CS education.

Carol Frieze and Jeria L. Quesenberry

Computing Profession

Opinion Kode Vicious Feb 1 2019

Writing a Test Plan

Establish your hypotheses, methodologies, and expected results.

George V. Neville-Neil

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint Feb 1 2019

Tony’s Law

Seeking to promote regulations for reliable software for the long-term prosperity of the software industry.

Dror G. Feitelson

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint Feb 1 2019

Do We Really Need Computational Thinking?

Considering the expression "computational thinking" as an entry point to understand why the fundamental contribution of computing to science is the shift from solving problems to having problems solved.

Enrico Nardelli

Computing Profession

Practice Feb 1 2019

CodeFlow: Improving the Code Review Process at Microsoft

A discussion with Jacek Czerwonka, Michaela Greiler, Christian Bird, Lucas Panjer, and Terry Coatta

CACM Staff

Computing Applications

Practice Feb 1 2019

The Importance of a Great Finish

You have to finish strong, every time.

Kate Matsudaira

Computing Profession

Research and Advances Contributed articles Feb 1 2019

A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture

Innovations like domain-specific hardware, enhanced security, open instruction sets, and agile chip development will lead the way.

John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Contributed articles Feb 1 2019

Even Central Users Do Not Always Drive Information Diffusion

Diffusion speed and scale depend on all kinds of information, not just which users have the most or fewest connections.

Chao Gao, Zhen Su, Jiming Liu, and JÜrgen Kurths

Computing Applications

disconnected floating nodes, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Feb 1 2019

SONYC: A System for Monitoring, Analyzing, and Mitigating Urban Noise Pollution

SONYC integrates sensors, machine listening, data analytics, and citizen science to address noise pollution in New York City.

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Review articles Feb 1 2019

Blockchains From a Distributed Computing Perspective

The roots of blockchain technologies are deeply interwoven in distributed computing.

Maurice Herlihy

Architecture and Hardware

Blockchains from a Distributed Computing Perspective, illustration

Research and Advances Review articles Feb 1 2019

Separation Logic

Separation logic is a key development in formal reasoning about programs, opening up new lines of attack on longstanding problems.

Peter O'Hearn

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Feb 1 2019

Technical Perspective: How Economic Theories Can Help Computers Beat the Heat

The authors of "Distributed Strategies for Computational Sprints" bring the rich theory of allocating scarce resources to the challenge of managing computational sprinting in datacenters.

Thomas F. Wenisch

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Feb 1 2019

Distributed Strategies for Computational Sprints

We describe a computational sprinting architecture in which many, independent chip multiprocessors share a power supply and sprints are constrained by the chips' thermal limits and the rack's power limits.

Songchun Fan, Seyed Majid Zahedi, and Benjamin C. Lee

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Feb 1 2019

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 (specifically ILP) and traditional SQL querying.

Surajit Chaudhuri

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Feb 1 2019

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 over answer sets, allowing the declarative specification and efficient evaluation of a significant class of constrained optimization problems—ILP—within a database.

Matteo Brucato, Azza Abouzied, and Alexandra Meliou

Computing Applications

Opinion Last byte Feb 1 2019

Hawking’s Nightmare

Stephen Hawking warned us not to contact E.T.

David Allen Batchelor

Computing Applications

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