Practice
36 Abstraction in Hardware
System Design
Applying lessons from software
languages to hardware languages
using Bluespec SystemVerilog.
By Rishiyur S. Nikhil
45 The World According to LINQ
Big data is about more than size, and
LINQ is more than up to the task.
By Erik Meijer
52 Verification of Safety-Critical Software
Avionics software safety
certification is achieved through
objective-based standards.
By B. Scott Andersen
and George Romanski
Articles’ development led by
queue.acm.org
illustratioN by dave bolliNger
about the cover:
this month’s cover story,
beginning on page 72,
explores the connection
of biology with reaction
systems. the key to
these efforts will unlock
a far greater understanding
of living systems. cover
image by J.f. podevin.
for more on his work, see
http://www.podevin.com.
Contributed Articles
58 From Blitzkrieg to Bitskrieg:
The Military Encounter
with Computers
Expect more cyberwarfare on the
conventional battlefield and less
against civilian infrastructure…
assuming containment is possible.
By John Arquilla
66 Computational Journalism
How computer scientists can
empower journalists, democracy’s
watchdogs, in the production
of news in the public interest.
By Sarah Cohen, James T. Hamilton,
and Fred Turner
Don’t Turn Social Media Into
Another Literary Digest Poll
The power to predict outcomes
based on Twitter data is
greatly exaggerated, especially
for political elections.
By Daniel Gayo-Avello
Computing for the Masses
A new paradigm is needed to cope
with the application, technology,
and discipline challenges to
our computing profession in
the coming decades.
By Zhiwei Xu and Guojie Li
Review Articles
72 Biology as Reactivity
Exploring the connection of biology
with reactive systems to better
understand living systems.
By Jasmin Fisher, David Harel,
and Thomas A. Henzinger
10/2011
VoL.; 54;No.; 10
Research Highlights
84 Technical Perspective
Power Efficiency as
the #1 Design Constraint
By Charles Moore
85 Understanding Sources
of Inefficiency in
General-Purpose Chips
By Rehan Hameed, Wajahat Qadeer,
Megan Wachs, Omid Azizi,
Alex Solomatnikov, Benjamin C. Lee,
Stephen Richardson,
Christos Kozyrakis and Mark Horowitz
94 Technical Perspective
A Better Way to Learn Features
By Geoffrey E. Hinton
95 Unsupervised Learning of
Hierarchical Representations
with Convolutional Deep
Belief Networks
By Honglak Lee, Roger Grosse,
Rajesh Ranganath, and Andrew Y. Ng
104 Technical Perspective
Visual Reconstruction
By Carlo Tomasi
105 Building Rome in a Day
By Sameer Agarwala, Yasutaka
Furukawaa, Noah Snavely,
Ian Simon, Brian Curless,
Steven M. Seitz, and Richard Szeliski
Association for Computing Machinery
Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession
