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Aug 5, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Douglas Schuler |R. Colin Johnson
In March 2024, members of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) voted 12 to 6 to reject the proposal that the Earth had entered a new epoch of geologic time. The Anthropocene proposal posits that human activity—not that of nature—has become the most significant driver of changes in the Earth’s ecosystems. Several reasons for the rejection have been offered.
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Mar 25, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Neil Savage |Shaoshan Liu |Douglas Schuler
The English-speaking world was rocked by the advent of ChatGPT in November 2022. Here, suddenly, was a chatbot that could do a credible imitation of a human being, producing text that seemed like it was written by a real person.
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Mar 25, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Daniel Freund |Shaoshan Liu |Douglas Schuler
Trade-offs between consuming resources now and waiting for a potentially greater reward later are common in both life and algorithm design. Do we accept an exploding job offer now, or hold out hope for a better one? Should we buy the next house we see or keep looking? Making decisions like these in the face of uncertainty has given rise to a wide range of problems in algorithm design.
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Mar 22, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | David Chisnall |Shaoshan Liu |Douglas Schuler |Orit Hazzan
Over the past decade I have been involved in several projects that have designed either instruction set architecture (ISA) extensions or clean-slate ISAs for various kinds of processors (you will even find my name in the acknowledgments for the RISC-V spec, right back to the first public version). When I started, I had very little idea about what makes a good ISA, and, as far as I can tell, this is not formally taught anywhere.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Gregory Mone |Shaoshan Liu |Douglas Schuler |Orit Hazzan
This year, Samsung is planning to open a semiconductor chip manufacturing plant in Taylor, TX, that will cost the company an estimated $17 billion. Intel is building a $20-billion facility in Columbus, OH, and industry leaders GlobalFoundries, TSMC, and Texas Instruments are building their own so-called chip fabs in the U.S. as well.
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Mar 19, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Chris Edwards |Douglas Schuler |Orit Hazzan |Alex Vakulov
We have yet to find a way to drill further deeper than eight miles below the Earth’s surface. To try to uncover the secrets that lurk hundreds of miles further down below the crust, scientists have found useful information in some unexpected places. Measurements taken from hundreds of miles above the Earth have done much to help geophysicists build computer simulations of the thousands of miles of rock beneath our feet.
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Mar 19, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Maggie Johnson |Douglas Schuler |Orit Hazzan |Alex Vakulov
I have spent most of my career working on computer science (CS) education whether teaching undergraduate CS or managing technical education for software engineers at Google. In the early 1990s, when Pascal was the language of choice, I began teaching CS1 and CS2 at Stanford. Over the next few years, I saw the transition from Pascal to C to object-oriented programming.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Douglas Schuler |Orit Hazzan |Alex Vakulov
In 2008, after nearly a decade of researching and writing, Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution, was published. I was singled out as the author of the book, but the 136 “patterns” it contained were contributed by over 75 people. Each “pattern” in the book (and online) is a seed for generating ideas to help tackle the major issues we face today. The pattern language concept organizes patterns that are intended to be used together into a coherent whole.
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Feb 29, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Douglas Schuler |Orit Hazzan |Alex Vakulov
Cryptographer and 2022 ACM Prize winner Yael Tauman Kalai is keenly aware of the trade-offs that often must be made between security and computational efficiency. Kalai, who works as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and as an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has developed groundbreaking methods for succinctly verifying the correctness of a computation. Here, she explains how they work.
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Dec 14, 2023 | 
cacm.acm.org | Stephen Andriole |Douglas Schuler |Orit Hazzan |Alex Vakulov
Executive understanding of technology is incomplete and sometimes even dangerous to the pursuit of corporate strategies. If you doubt this, ask yourself how many executives understand “technology” as well as they understand sales, finance, marketing and human resources. Technology literacy requires executives to understand the range of existing and emerging technologies and how they might impact business processes, models and strategies.
