Computations for This World and out of This World
In many ways, my career has been chasing chances to do mathematics. When I enrolled at college, I majored in math. Later, I added a second major, chemical physics, which seemed to offer better career...
View ArticleThe Battle to Mitigate E-Waste
E-waste is the term for electronic equipment that no longer works, or that you no longer want. That can include anything from smartphones and laptops to extension cords and remote controls. No matter...
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Improving Testing of Deep-Learning Systems
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are finding applications in many domains. With their continued success, however, come significant challenges and uncertainties. These include:...
View ArticleWhat Do Computing and Economics Have to Say to Each Other?
In July 2020, I wrotea about a computational perspective of economics. I described a 1999 result by Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou, regarding multi-agent systems. They studied systems in which...
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Measuring GitHub Copilot’s Impact on Productivity
Code-completion systems offering suggestions to a developer in their integrated development environment (IDE) have become the most frequently used kind of programmer assistance.1 When generating whole...
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Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
Imagine you are at a crossroads in a complex project and you need quick answers on how to grapple with a problem. It is quite likely that you might turn to an online knowledge community for answers,...
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A Unifying Framework for Incompleteness, Inconsistency, and Uncertainty in...
Databases are often assumed to have definite content. The reality, though, is that the database at hand may be deficient due to missing, invalid, or uncertain information. As a simple illustration,...
View ArticleService Robots Roll Forward
History is filled with examples of robotic devices designed to reduce, eliminate, or improve upon human labor. From washing machines to roaming vacuum cleaners, various machines have transformed the...
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Pondering the Ugly Underbelly, and Whether Images are Real
https://bit.ly/3RFrcUC December 10, 2023 I tell my computer science students that we go through proofs not to show WHAT is true, but WHY it’s true. During an interesting consultation with a graduate...
View ArticleSoftware Managers’ Guide to Operational Excellence
To be a good software leader, you must give your teams as much autonomy as possible. However, you also must be ultimately responsible, especially when things go wrong. One of the most difficult things...
View ArticleInnovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
There is a parallel between rising economic inequality and the current wave of technological disruption in which the world is mired. Economists around the world are debating about the need to rethink...
View ArticleWhat’s That Smell?
The fashion designer Donna Karan once said, “Smell is the primordial sense, more powerful, more primitive, more intimately tied to our memories and emotions than any other. A scent can trigger...
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The Internet of Batteryless Things
Imagine using a health bracelet that tracks your blood pressure and glucose level that you do not have to charge for the next 20 years. Imagine sensors attached to honeybees helping us understand how...
View ArticleU.S. Copyright Office’s Questions about Generative AI
Aware of the consternation generative AI has stirred up in the last year and a half among individual authors, artists, and copyright industry sectors, the U.S. Copyright Office, on its own initiative,...
View ArticleVerifying Correctness
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...
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Internet of Things Security and Privacy Labels Should Empower Consumers
The White House launched a new U.S. Cyber Trust Mark in July 2023, unveiling the design and announcing the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would be soliciting comments on a wide range of...
View ArticleCan Machines Be in Language?
In late 2022, large language models (LLMs) erupted into the public spotlight. Pundits were quick to claim LLMs are the next step in the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and even the...
View ArticleIn Memoriam: Niklaus Wirth
Computing pioneer Niklaus Wirth died on January 1, 2024, just 45 days short of his 90th birthday. Wirth was born in Switzerland in 1934. He received his B.S. from ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of...
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Disinformation 2.0 in the Age of AI: A Cybersecurity Perspective
According to a report from Lloyd’s Register Foundation,a at present, cybercrime is one of the biggest concerns of Internet users worldwide, with disinformationb ranking highest among such risks (57%...
View ArticleCorrigendum for February 2024 Research Article
In the February 2024 Communications article titled, “Energy and Emissions of Machine Learning on Smartphones vs. the Cloud,” the authors found and corrected two arithmetic errors after it was printed....
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Co-Developing Programs and Their Proof of Correctness
Twenty years ago, Sir Tony Hoare proposed a grand challenge to the computing research community: to develop a verifying compiler [which] uses mathematical and logical reasoning to check the...
View ArticleTechnical Perspective: Hiding Secrets in Programs
Can we create computer programs that do not reveal anything about their inner workings? This is the goal of program obfuscation. An obfuscator is a compiler that transforms a program into an...
View ArticleIndistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions
1. Introduction Consider the polynomial f1(x,y)ɛℤ[x,y] that is computed as follows: f 1 ( x , y ) = ( x + y ) 16 − ( x − y ) 16 Alternatively, contemplate the polynomial f2(x,y)ɛℤ[x,y] that is...
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