Communications of the ACM

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM

Departments
News
Viewpoints

5 Cerf’s Up

Libraries Considered Hazardous By Vinton G. Cerf

6 Letters to the Editor

Between the Lines in the China Region Special Section

20 Privacy and Security

2018: A Big Year for Privacy Retracing the pivotal privacy and security-related events and ensuing issues from the past year.

By Carl Landwehr

8 BLOG@CACM

Seeking Digital Humanities,

I T Tech Support

Herbert Bruderer explains why the opposite of digital is not analog; Robin K. Hill describes how the challenges of user support are aggravated by indeterminate client responsibility.

31 Calendar

117 Careers

11

11 A Brave New World of Genetic Engineering

Genetic engineering technologies are advancing at a furious rate, changing the world one cell at a time. By Samuel Greengard

23 Broadening Participation

How Computer Science at CMU Is Attracting and Retaining Women Carnegie Mellon University’s successful efforts enrolling, sustaining, and graduating women in computer science challenge the belief in a gender divide in CS education.

By Carol Frieze and Jeria L. Quesenberry

27 Kode Vicious

Writing a Test Plan

Establish your hypotheses, methodologies, and expected results. By George V. Neville-Neil

Last Byte

14 Technologizing Agriculture

28 Viewpoint

120 Future Tense Hawking’s Nightmare By David Allen Batchelor

An array of technologies are making farms more efficient, safer, and profitable.

Tony’s Law

By Keith Kirkpatrick

17 Being Recognized Everywhere How facial and voice recognition are reshaping society.

Seeking to promote regulations for reliable software for the long-term prosperity of the software industry. By Dror G. Feitelson

32 Viewpoint

By Logan Kugler

Do We Really Need Computational Thinking? Considering the expression “computational thinking” as an entry point to understand why the fundamental contribution of computing to science is the shift from solving problems to having problems solved.

By Enrico Nardelli

About the Cover: John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson’s Turing Lecture (p. 48) traces computing architecture from the 1960s to present day and presents their projections for the field’s next “Golden Age” in the coming decade. Cover illustration by Peter Crowther Associates.