February 2021 - Vol. 64 No. 2

Features

Opinion Editor's letter Feb 1 2021

Climate change has come to the fore as a business concern, and this compels the business leaders of computing technology companies to be on the side of progress toward true zero carbon.

Andrew A. Chien

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Cerf's up Feb 1 2021

Half-Baked High-Resolution Referencing

I wonder whether time resolution, in addition to space resolution, might be a functionality to instantiate. Assuming that this would be an interesting capability, it remains to figure out how to implement it.

Vinton G. Cerf

Computing Applications

Opinion Letters to the editor Feb 1 2021

Salary Disputes

In Moshe Vardi's "Where Have All the Domestic Graduate Students Gone?," the short but woefully incomplete answer is that the wage premium for a Ph.D. in CS is simply too small to justify foregoing five years of industry-level salary.

CACM Staff

Computing Profession

BLOG@CACM Feb 1 2021

Issues Arise When Time Goes Digital

Robin K. Hill considers why time can be "a pesky problem for computing."

Robin K. Hill

Computing Profession

News Feb 1 2021

Moore’s Law: What Comes Next?

Moore's Law challenges point to changes in software.

Chris Edwards

Architecture and Hardware

News Feb 1 2021

The State of Virtual Reality Hardware

Advances in VR hardware could finally take the technology mainstream.

Logan Kugler

Architecture and Hardware

News Feb 1 2021

Technological Responses to COVID-19

Companies are finding new ways to enforce social distancing, clean public spaces, and provide substitutes for human workers.

Keith Kirkpatrick

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Pratt Miller's LAAD disinfecting robot at Gerald R Ford International Airport

Opinion Economic and business dimensions Feb 1 2021

When Permissioned Blockchains Deliver More Decentralization Than Permissionless

Considerations for the governance of distributed systems.

Yannis Bakos, Hanna Halaburda, and Christoph Mueller-Bloch

Computing Applications

Opinion Education Feb 1 2021

CAPE: A Framework for Assessing Equity throughout the Computer Science Education Ecosystem

Examining both the leading indicators of equity in CS and the lagging indicators of student outcomes.

Carol L. Fletcher and Jayce R. Warner

Computing Profession

Opinion Kode Vicious Feb 1 2021

Kabin Fever

KV's guidelines for KFH (koding from home).

George V. Neville-Neil

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint Feb 1 2021

Cybersecurity: Is It Worse than We Think?

Evaluating actual implementations and practices versus stated goals.

Chris Maurer, Kevin Kim, Dan Kim, and Leon A. Kappelman

Computing Applications

computers at edge of crator, illustration

Opinion Viewpoint Feb 1 2021

Polanyi’s Revenge and AI’s New Romance with Tacit Knowledge

Artificial intelligence systems need the wisdom to know when to take advice from us and when to learn from data.

Subbarao Kambhampati

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint Feb 1 2021

Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science

Donald Knuth on the best way to recognize the history of computer science.

Donald E. Knuth and Len Shustek

Computing Applications

Donald Knuth reading 'The Art of Computer Programming'

Practice Feb 1 2021

Differential Privacy: The Pursuit of Protections by Default

A discussion with Miguel Guevara, Damien Desfontaines, Jim Waldo, and Terry Coatta

CACM Staff

Computing Applications

Practice Feb 1 2021

The Time I Stole $10,000 from Bell Labs

Why DevOps encourages us to celebrate outages.

Thomas A. Limoncelli

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Feb 1 2021

AZERTY amélioré: Computational Design on a National Scale

A new French keyboard standard is the first designed with the help of computational methods.

Computing Applications

hands typing on AZERTY keyboard on blue, white, and red background, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Feb 1 2021

GDPR Anti-Patterns

How design and operation of modern cloud-scale systems conflict with GDPR.

Supreeth Shastri, Melissa Wasserman, and Vijay Chidambaram

Computing Applications

map of Europe, EU stars, and a lock, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles Feb 1 2021

Keeping Science on Keel When Software Moves

An approach to reproducibility problems related to porting software across machines and compilers.

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Review articles Feb 1 2021

A Review of the Semantic Web Field

Tracing the triumphs and challenges of two decades of Semantic Web research and applications.

Pascal Hitzler

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Research and Advances Review articles Feb 1 2021

DP-Cryptography: Marrying Differential Privacy and Cryptography in Emerging Applications

Synthesizing the emerging directions of research at the intersection of differential privacy and cryptography.

Sameer Wagh, Xi He, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, and Prateek Mittal

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Feb 1 2021

Technical Perspective: Programming Microfluidics to Execute Biological Protocols

The approach taken in "BioScript," by Jason Ott, et al., is an example of how programming languages can help develop executable protocols that are conforming, understandable, safe, and retargetable.

Nada Amin

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Feb 1 2021

BioScript: Programming Safe Chemistry on Laboratories-on-a-Chip

This paper introduces BioScript, a domain-specific language for programmable biochemistry that executes on emerging microfluidic platforms.

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Feb 1 2021

Technical Perspective: Solving the Signal Reconstruction Problem at Scale

"Scalable Signal Reconstruction for a Broad Range of Applications," by Abolfazl Asudeh, et al. shows that algorithmic insights about SRP, combined with database techniques, can be used to scalably solve the signal reconstruction problem.

Zachary G. Ives

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Feb 1 2021

Scalable Signal Reconstruction for a Broad Range of Applications

Most of the common approaches for solving signal reconstruction problem do not scale to large problem sizes. We propose a novel and scalable algorithm for solving this critical problem.

Architecture and Hardware

arrows pointing up with speed lines, illustration

Opinion Last byte Feb 1 2021

Bringing Stability to Wireless Connections

2020 Marconi Prize recipient Andrea Goldsmith on MIMO technologies, millimeter-wave communications, and her goals as the new dean of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Leah Hoffmann

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

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