Communications of the ACM

Communications of the ACM is the top print and digital magazine for the computing and information technology sectors. It is widely read by top professionals in the field around the globe and is known as a reliable and authoritative source of information for today’s computing experts.

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Learning Computer Science Behind Bars

6 days ago | cacm.acm.org | Julie Stewart |Robin Hill |Sam Greengard

“I am not smart enough for this.”That thought kept popping into Molly Kelly’s head during her first coding class. She glanced at her three classmates, who looked nervous, too. They weren’t sitting in a high school or college classroom. They were adults learning Web development in a six-month course offered behind the walls of the maximum-security Indiana Women’s Prison, where they were all serving time.
Communications of the ACM

1 week ago | cacm.acm.org | Robin Hill |Sam Greengard

Those of us inclined to lob accusations of hubris at new forms of artificial intelligence, on the grounds that we observed (and possibly fomented) the same kind of affliction in the classical forms, should at least clarify the analogy. What are the similarities that advise caution, and what are the differences that might alleviate it? We address primarily the large language model, and draw attention to its use of text. Consider a traditional linguistics class of some years ago.
Catching the Vibe of Vibe Coding

1 week ago | cacm.acm.org | Sam Greengard |Allyn Jackson

In early 2023, Matt Welsh wrote an opinion piece in Communications of the ACM that described programmers as dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit. Welsh, now director of AI Systems at Palantir Technologies, expressed in his article, “The End of Programming,” that he believes the traditional idea of writing a program is headed for extinction, and most software will be written by artificial intelligence (AI) systems that are trained, rather than programmed.
Communications of the ACM

1 week ago | cacm.acm.org | Sam Greengard |Allyn Jackson |Bennie Mols

Nothing is more fundamentally human than identity. How we think about ourselves shapes our experiences and how we navigate the world. Yet, the idea of identity existing as a unique quality anchored to a specific individual is undergoing change.
Communications of the ACM

1 week ago | cacm.acm.org | Gregory Mone |Allyn Jackson |Bennie Mols |Doug Meil

This year, U.S. rail carrier Amtrak will be installing two novel inspection gateways from Duos Technologies along its busy Northeast Corridor. The barn-like Duos structures straddle railway tracks; as passenger trains speed through at up to 125 miles per hour, 97 cameras and dozens of LED lights arrayed around the sides, top, and bottom of the tracks will capture thousands of high-resolution images of the railcars.
Rethinking Social Media’s Future

1 week ago | cacm.acm.org | Bennie Mols |Allyn Jackson |Doug Meil

It was only 15 to 20 years ago that social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X), YouTube, and Instagram were hailed as drivers of social connections, multipliers of knowledge and experiences, and even as catalysts for better-functioning democracy.
Machine Learning Framework Integrates Geometry into Fast PDE Solving

1 week ago | cacm.acm.org | Allyn Jackson |Bennie Mols |Doug Meil

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are workhorses of science and engineering. They describe a vast range of phenomena, from flow around a ship’s hull, to acoustics in a concert hall, to heat diffusion in a material.
What Ever Happened to…and Other Tech History

2 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Doug Meil |Alex Vakulov

A lot of things have come and gone in the last few decades in computing. This post will cover a short list of topics that I saw in my career that were either notable or that people used to argue about a lot. Or both. Some of this might be a fun trip down memory lane, and some may be PTSD-inducing, but it is important to periodically look back in computing to learn from past experiences, as things that seem inevitable outcomes today weren’t always so clear at the time.
Technical Perspective: Toward a Generalized Accelerator for Genome Sequence Analysis

2 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Yatish Turakhia |Alex Vakulov

Dynamic programming (DP), first introduced by Richard Bellman in the 1950s, is a fundamental algorithmic technique in computer science with broad applicability across numerous domains. In computational genomics, it has proven particularly effective for sequence-comparison tasks, including those involving DNA, RNA, and proteins. Over the past two decades, advancements in sequencing technologies have massively reduced costs and increased throughput, leading to rapid growth in genomic data.
Unlocking Offensive Security to Stay Ahead of Cyber Threats

2 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Alex Vakulov

Offensive security (OffSec) is a proactive cybersecurity approach aimed at identifying and eliminating vulnerabilities in systems and applications before attackers can exploit them. To achieve this, OffSec specialists simulate hacker activities by conducting controlled attacks on a company’s infrastructure to uncover security gaps ranging from configuration flaws and Internet of Things (IoT) vulnerabilities to zero-day threats and human-related weaknesses.