DEPARTMENT: Letter from USACM
There is a common misconception that algorithms automatically result in unbiased decisions.
Simson Garfinkel, Jeanna Matthews, Stuart S. Shapiro, Jonathan M. Smith
Page 5
DEPARTMENT: Cerf's Up
I am fascinated by the metaphor of cyber security as a public health problem.
Vinton G. Cerf
Page 6
DEPARTMENT: Vardi's Insights
Divination is the practice of an occultic ritual as an aid in decision making. Developments in mathematics and in computer science in the 20th century shed new light on the power of divination.
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 7
DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor
I applaud Peter J. Denning's "Remaining Trouble Spots with Computational Thinking" (June 2017), especially for pointing out the subject itself is often characterized by "vague definitions and unsubstantiated claims."
CACM Staff
Pages 8-9
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Robin K. Hill suggests software neglect is a failure of the coder to pay enough attention and take enough trouble to ensure software quality.
Robin K. Hill
Pages 10-11
COLUMN: News
Image recognition technology is advancing rapidly. Researchers are discovering new ways to tackle the task without enormous datasets.
Samuel Greengard
Pages 13-15
Scientists are demonstrating that lasers could be the future of space communication.
Gregory Mone
Pages 16-17
Technology that falsifies navigation data presents significant dangers to public and private organizations.
Logan Kugler
Pages 18-19
ACM recently held a conference in celebration of the first 50 years of the ACM A.M. Turing Award.
Lawrence M. Fisher
Pages 20-23
An engineer best known for his work in database management systems, and in techniques of layered architecture that include Bachman diagrams.
Lawrence M. Fisher
Pages 24-25
COLUMN: Law and technology
Considering law and governance in the digital age.
Joel R. Reidenberg
Pages 26-28
COLUMN: Computing ethics
A procedure for reflection and discourse on the behavior of bots in the context of law, deception, and societal norms.
Carolina Alves de Lima Salge, Nicholas Berente
Pages 29-31
COLUMN: The profession of IT
Lessons from operating systems teach how to do multitasking without thrashing.
Peter J. Denning
Pages 32-34
COLUMN: Viewpoint
Failures to involve end users or to collect comprehensive data representing user needs are described and solutions to avoid such failures are proposed.
Gregorio Convertino, Nancy Frishberg
Pages 35-37
On cryptographic backdoors and prosthetic intelligence.
Andrew Conway, Peter Eckersley
Pages 38-40
SECTION: Practice
You're only as available as the sum of your dependencies.
Ben Treynor, Mike Dahlin, Vivek Rau, Betsy Beyer
Pages 42-47
The approximate approach is often faster and more efficient.
Graham Cormode
Pages 48-55
Plan ahead to make the interview a successful one.
Kate Matsudaira
Pages 56-58
SECTION: Contributed articles
Answering questions correctly from standardized eighth-grade science tests is itself a test of machine intelligence.
Carissa Schoenick, Peter Clark, Oyvind Tafjord, Peter Turney, Oren Etzioni
Pages 60-64
Even when checked by fact checkers, facts are often still open to preexisting bias and doubt.
Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, Asbjørn Følstad
Pages 65-71
SECTION: Review articles
Exploring the many distinctive elements that make securing HPC systems much different than securing traditional systems.
Sean Peisert
Pages 72-80
SECTION: Research highlights
"Exploiting the Analog Properties of Digital Circuits for Malicious Hardware," by Kaiyuan Yang, et al., assumes semiconductor foundries (and others in chip fabrication) can be malicious, modifying designs to produce devices that …
Charles (Chuck) Thacker
Page 82
We show how a fabrication-time attacker can leverage analog circuits to create a hardware attack that is small and stealthy.
Kaiyuan Yang, Matthew Hicks, Qing Dong, Todd Austin, Dennis Sylvester
Pages 83-91
"Scribe," by Walter S. Lasecki, et al., is one of the first in a recent set of crowdsourcing papers that demonstrated how human workers can collaborate with computing systems to accomplish a real-time task that is difficult for …
Ed H. Chi
Page 92
We discuss how our Scribe system combines human labor and machine intelligence in real time to reliably convert speech to text with less than 4s latency.
Walter S. Lasecki, Christopher D. Miller, Iftekhar Naim, Raja Kushalnagar, Adam Sadilek, Daniel Gildea, Jeffrey P. Bigham
Pages 93-100
COLUMN: Last byte
Alexei Efros, recipient of the 2016 ACM prize in computing, works to harness the power of visual complexity.
Leah Hoffmann
Pages 104-ff