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The article presents the results of a study which investigated the correlation between the acceptance rate and impact rating of conference papers in the field of computer science. The papers with the highest impact ratings were found to be associated with highly selective conferences, defined as those which rejected between 70 and 85 percent of papers submitted. Such papers, on average, had higher impact ratings than papers which were published in journals without being presented at conferences. A rejection rate of 85 percent or more tended to suppress submission levels and reduce impact factors, while an acceptance rate over 30 percent was associated with less prestigious conferences.

Similarity search is a fundamental algorithmic primitive, widely used in many computer science disciplines. Given a set of points S and a radius parameter r > 0, the r-near neighbor (r-NN) problem asks for a data structure that, given any query point q, returns a point p within distance at most r from q. In this paper, we study the r-NN problem in the light of individual fairness and providing equal opportunities: all points that are within distance r from the query should have the same probability to be returned. The problem is of special interest in high dimensions, where Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), the theoretically leading approach to similarity search, does not provide any fairness guarantee. In this work, we show that LSH-based algorithms can be made fair, without a significant loss in efficiency. We propose several efficient data structures for the exact and approximate variants of the fair NN problem. Our approach works more generally for sampling uniformly from a subcollection of sets of a given collection and can be used in a few other applications. We also carried out an experimental evaluation that highlights the inherent unfairness of existing NN data structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's comments on a proposal by the Publications Board of the Association for Computing Machinery to bring together conference papers and publishing of journal articles on computer science research. According to the author, compared to journal reviewing, conference process has clear advantages that this proposal maintains.

The Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is an invertible text transformation that permutes symbols of a text according to the lexicographical order of its suffixes. BWT is the main component of popular lossless compression programs (such as bzip2) as well as recent powerful compressed indexes (such as the r-index7), central in modern bioinformatics. The compressibility of BWT is quantified by the number r of equal-letter runs in the output. Despite the practical significance of BWT, no nontrivial upper bound on r is known. By contrast, the sizes of nearly all other known compression methods have been shown to be either always within a polylog n factor (where n is the length of the text) from z, the size of Lempel--Ziv (LZ77) parsing of the text, or much larger in the worst case (by an nε factor for ε > 0). In this paper, we show that r = O (z log² n) holds for every text. This result has numerous implications for text indexing and data compression; in particular: (1) it proves that many results related to BWT automatically apply to methods based on LZ77, for example, it is possible to obtain functionality of the suffix tree in O (z polylog n) space; (2) it shows that many text processing tasks can be solved in the optimal time assuming the text is compressible using LZ77 by a sufficiently large polylog n factor; and (3) it implies the first nontrivial relation between the number of runs in the BWT of the text and of its reverse. In addition, we provide an O (z polylog n)-time algorithm converting the LZ77 parsing into the run-length compressed BWT. To achieve this, we develop several new data structures and techniques of independent interest. In particular, we define compressed string synchronizing sets (generalizing the recently introduced powerful technique of string synchronizing sets11) and show how to efficiently construct them. Next, we propose a new variant of wavelet trees for sequences of long strings, establish a nontrivial bound on their size, and describe efficient construction algorithms. Finally, we develop new indexes that can be constructed directly from the LZ77 parsing and efficiently support pattern matching queries on text substrings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the status of research papers published by computer science (CS) conferences, as compared with those published in CS journals. Debate has occurred in relation to the proper way in which to qualify the research presented in a paper. Problems exist in determining the quality of research in various journals due to the wide array of publication opportunities available. A scale that has been created to measure the quality of conference papers in a variety of ways, such as citations and rejection rates, is discussed.

This article reports that research conferences are often the most desirable venues for presenting research results. For academic computer scientists and engineers, preferring conferences over journals is so common that they even lobby administrators to ensure that conference papers can be viewed in the same light as journal papers in other fields. Hence, the health of conferences is vital to the computer science research mission. One conventional indication of health is the number of submissions and the acceptance rate at the conference. Calls for papers often include encouraging words for big idea or new direction papers. The problem is that reviewers see so many regular papers it is just too difficult to switch gears and be more understanding when evaluating bolder papers with holes in arguments or missing measurements. Program committees typically start with a ranked list of papers based on the average of numerical ratings in order to cope with the large number of submissions. Big idea papers are sure to get some poor evaluations, which cause them to drop down the list.

Monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems are notoriously difficult; potential problems are complex, varied, and unpredictable. The monitoring and diagnosis tools commonly used today—logs, counters, and metrics—have two important limitations: what gets recorded is defined a priori, and the information is recorded in a component- or machine-centric way, making it extremely hard to correlate events that cross these boundaries. This paper presents Pivot Tracing, a monitoring framework for distributed systems that addresses both limitations by combining dynamic instrumentation with a novel relational operator: the happened-before join. Pivot Tracing gives users, at runtime, the ability to define arbitrary metrics at one point of the system, while being able to select, filter, and group by events meaningful at other parts of the system, even when crossing component or machine boundaries. Pivot Tracing does not correlate cross-component events using expensive global aggregations, nor does it perform offline analysis. Instead, Pivot Tracing directly correlates events as they happen by piggybacking metadata alongside requests as they execute. This gives Pivot Tracing low runtime overhead—less than 1% for many cross-component monitoring queries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the form and the content of the paper most likely to be accepted for publication in a respected computer science journal in 1997 for the benefit of potential authors requiring advice on publishing of their papers. The 1st annual conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology will take place at Santa Fe, New Mexico in January 1997. Human-Centered Design of Organizational Memory Systems will be held at Pyrenees, France in January 1997. CANPC'97: Workshop on Communication & Architectural Support For Network-Based Parallel Computing will be held at San Antonio, Texas in February 1997.

The article invites papers from research scholars for several conferences related to computer science and technology.

Excerpts from blogs posted on the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Web site are presented, as well as reader comments related to the blogs, on topics such as reading academic research papers, encouraging students to create computer programs, and the significance of Web visibility.

The article discusses the deployment of machine learning technology in production environments. The authors describe the algorithms which constitute and shape machine learning protocols with a focus on papers on subjects including the MauveDB project to integrate machine learning technology into relational databases, scalable response prediction for online advertising, and optimization of neural network queries for object detection in video streams.

The article presents information on a research paper related to computer programming and debugging, which won an award in the 1981 George E. Forsythe Student Paper Competition. The research paper "A Program Testing Assistant," by David Chapman, a graduate student, was selected because of its original and incisive research into program development and debugging. The competition memorializes George E. Forsythe, president of the Association for Computing Machinery from 1964 to 1966, and leader in the development of computer science as a separate discipline. Chapman will receive a cash award of 500 dollars and a certificate. The papers of the first competition were refereed and judged by a committee of graduate students. The tradition has continued, with each competition administered by the graduate students at a major university with the assistance of a faculty advisor. For 1981, it was a committee of graduate students in computer science at Cornell University, New York, with professor David J. Gries serving as faculty advisor.

This article presents information about last date of paper submission to the various conferences related to computer industry. Symposium on Moving Boundary Problems will be organized during September 26-28, 1977, at Riverside Motor Lodge, Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Researchers can submit their papers till June 15, 1977. The symposium is sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Office and Union Carbide Corp. Fifth Annual ACM (Association for computing Machinery) SIGACT- SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages will be organized from January 23-25, 1978, at Tucson, Arizona. It is sponsored by ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN. The last date of paper submission is August 19, 1977. Fourth International Conference on Computer Communication will be organized at Kyoto, Japan, during September 26-29, 1978. It will be sponsored by International Council for Computer Communication. Papers for the conference can be submitted till November 30, 1977. Lawrence Symposium on Systems and Decision Sciences is to be held at Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley, California, during October 3-4, 1977. Researchers can submit their papers till June 15, 1977.

Invites papers to be included in conferences sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery.

Invites abstracts of research papers for various conferences related to computer science.

Invites research papers on Computer Science to be published in various sectors of the industry.

The article discusses the publication process for academic papers in computer science (CS) and provides a proposal for CSPub (clean-slate or computer science publication), an open-access publication system. The author identifies problems which he believes could be addressed by CSPub including low acceptance rates, the resubmission of rejected papers, and short incremental work which is published due to the demands of promotion and tenure systems.

The article presents information on self-plagiarism in computer science. Students submit assignments inherited from their friends, online paper-mills provide term papers on popular topics, and occasionally researchers are found falsifying data or publishing the work of others as their own. Self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse portions of their previous writings in subsequent research papers. Occasionally, the derived paper is simply a retitled and reformatted version of the original one, but more frequently it is assembled from bits and pieces of previous work. Incorporating texts or ideas from previously published work while unaware of the existence of that work. Incorporating texts or ideas from previously published work when writing to a community different from that in which the original work was published. Missing from the ACM and IEEE policy documents is any discussion of what the consequences of ignoring the rules and guidelines might be and whose responsibility it is to prevent plagiarized and self-plagiarized papers from being published. In contrast, most university course syllabi address the definition of plagiarism and who will look for it, as well as its potential consequences.

In this article, various experts on computer science (CS) offer guides relating to the best of CS research. Particular focus is given to how to determine what papers are worth taking the time to read. Additional topics discussed include the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), how datacenters are changing the way Web servers are designed and the notion of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

We have seen remarkable recent progress in computational visual recognition, producing systems that can classify objects into thousands of different categories with increasing accuracy. However, one question that has received relatively less attention is “what labels should recognition systems output?” This paper looks at the problem of predicting category labels that mimic how human observers would name objects. This goal is related to the concept of entry-level categories first introduced by psychologists in the 1970s and 1980s. We extend these seminal ideas to study human naming at large scale and to learn computational models for predicting entry-level categories. Practical applications of this work include improving human-focused computer vision applications such as automatically generating a natural language description for an image or text-based image search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents some abstracts of papers related to computer science which appeared in the publications of the Association for Computing Machinery. The first abstract entitled "A Complexity Theory Based on Boolean Algebra," by S. Skyum and L.G. Valiant, was published in the April 1985 issue of the "Journal of the ACM." According to the paper, a projection of a Boolean function is a function obtained by substituting for each of its variables a variable, the negation of a variable, or a constant. The abstract entitled"Optimal Static Load Balancing in Distributed Computer Systems," by Asser N. Tantawi and Don Towsley, was published in the April 1985 issue of the "Journal of the ACM." According to this paper, a distributed computer system that consists of a set of heterogeneous host computers connected in an arbitrary fashion by a communications network is considered. A general model is developed for such a distributed computer system, in which the host computers and the communications network are represented by product-form queuing networks.

This paper discusses a family of algorithms for computing the volume, moments of inertia, and other integral properties of geometrically complex solids, e.g. typical mechanical parts. The algorithms produce approximate decompositions of solids into cuboid cells whose integral properties are easy to compute. The paper focuses on versions of the algorithms which operate on solids represented by Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG), i.e., as set-theoretical combinations of primitive solid "building blocks." Two known algorithms are summarized and a new algorithm is presented. The efficiencies and accuracies of the three algorithms are analyzed theoretically and compared experimentally. The new algorithm uses recursive subdivision to convert CSG representations of complex solids into approximate cellular decompositions based on variably sized blocks. Experimental data show that the new algorithm is efficient and has predictable accuracy. It also has other potential applications, e.g., in producing approximate octree representations of complex solids and in robot navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the professional activities of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Papers describing original research are sought for the Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, which is scheduled to be held from April 25, 1983 to April 27, 1983 in Boston, Massachusetts. Typical, but not exclusive, topics of interest include: algorithms and data structures; automata and formal languages; computability; complexity theory, etc. A call for participation has been issued for the Tenth Annual Conference of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics, which is scheduled to be held from July 25, 1983 to July 29, 1983 in Detroit, Michigan. Submissions are invited for both technical program paper and panel sessions. Previously unpublished papers in all areas of computer graphics and interactive techniques are sought. Appropriate topics include display techniques; graphics software systems and languages; graphics hardware; robotics; and any applications of graphics. Video or film material that is an integral component of the work must accompany the paper.

Problems involved in the production of reliable software are now attracting substantial attention. In many applications, reliability is at least as important as more traditional goals such as efficiency and portability. The programming community has started to examine the effects that its tools and techniques have on reliability. Reliability has not been an explicit goal in the design of most programming languages, and it is not surprising that each of today's dominant programming languages contains major sources of unreliability. Data about the effects of languages on the reliability of programs is difficult to obtain and easy to challenge. A new crop of languages promising improvements has appeared, but many issues are still vigorously debated by their designers. Users need guidelines for selecting "safe" subsets that avoid the worst problems of existing languages, for establishing suitable programming conventions, and for choosing between languages where that is an option.

The article discusses the emergence of quantum computer science as a discipline on the practical integration of all aspects of quantum computing. The aspects covered by the discipline include an abstract algorithm in a research paper and physical operations. Designers and developers are instructed to develop programs using a quantum programming language that are close to informal high-level descriptions Other aspects of the quantum programming environment are discussed, including automated offline resource estimates prior to deployment.

The article looks at issues in the history of computing and computer science. The author assesses computer scientist Donald Knuth's criticisms of historiographic trends in the history of computer science, particularly as described by computer scientist Martin Campbell-Kelly in a 2007 paper entitled "The History of the History of Software." Topics include computer scientists versus historians as researchers on the history of computing.

The gap between processor and memory performance has become a focal point for microprocessor research and development over the past three decades. Modern architectures use two orthogonal approaches to help alleviate this issue: (1) Almost every microprocessor includes some form of on-chip storage, usually in the form of caches, to decrease memory latency and make more effective use of limited memory bandwidth. (2) Massively multithreaded architectures, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), attempt to hide the high latency to memory by rapidly switching between many threads directly in hardware. This paper explores the intersection of these two techniques. We study the effect of accelerating highly parallel workloads with significant locality on a massively multithreaded GPU. We observe that the memory access stream seen by on-chip caches is the direct result of decisions made by the hardware thread scheduler. Our work proposes a hardware scheduling technique that reacts to feedback from the memory system to create a more cache-friendly access stream. We evaluate our technique using simulations and show a significant performance improvement over previously proposed scheduling mechanisms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of scheduling as a cache management technique by comparing cache hit rate using our scheduler and an LRU replacement policy against other scheduling techniques using an optimal cache replacement policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author looks at how computer science will transform the humanities. According to the author, algorithmic thinking is transforming both the descriptive sciences and the humanities, bringing them all closer to the mathematical core of computer science. The author discusses the continually increasing reliance on computation, the replacement of paper library collections with online databases and the use of online resources by students writing papers.

Exploiting the multiprocessors that have recently become ubiquitous requires high-performance and reliable concurrent systems code, for concurrent data structures, operating system kernels, synchronization libraries, compilers, and so on. However, concurrent programming, which is always challenging, is made much more so by two problems. First, real multiprocessors typically do not provide the sequentially consistent memory that is assumed by most work on semantics and verification. Instead, they have relaxed memory models, varying in subtle ways between processor families, in which different hardware threads may have only loosely consistent views of a shared memory. Second, the public vendor architectures, supposedly specifying what programmers can rely on, are often in ambiguous informal prose (a particularly poor medium for loose specifications), leading to widespread confusion. In this paper we focus on x86 processors. We review several recent Intel and AMD specifications, showing that all contain serious ambiguities, some are arguably too weak to program above, and some are simply unsound with respect to actual hardware. We present a new x86-TSO programmer's model that, to the best of our knowledge, suffers from none of these problems. It is mathematically precise (rigorously defined in HOL4) but can be presented as an intuitive abstract machine which should be widely accessible to working programmers. We illustrate how this can be used to reason about the correctness of a Linux spinlock implementation and describe a general theory of data-race freedom for x86-TSO. This should put x86 multiprocessor system building on a more solid foundation; it should also provide a basis for future work on verification of such systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frequent items problem is to process a stream of items and find all those which occur more than a given fraction of the time. It is one of the most heavily studied problems in mining data streams, dating back to the 1980s. Many other applications rely directly or indirectly on finding the frequent items, and implementations are in use in large-scale industrial systems. In this paper, we describe the most important algorithms for this problem in a common framework. We place the different solutions in their historical context, and describe the connections between them, with the aim of clarifying some of the confusion that has surrounded their properties. To further illustrate the different properties of the algorithms, we provide baseline implementations. This allows us to give empirical evidence that there is considerable variation in the performance of frequent items algorithms. The best methods can be implemented to find frequent items with high accuracy using only tens of kilobytes of memory, at rates of millions of items per second on cheap modern hardware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the interaction between computer science and game theory. A 1995 paper by E. Kalai highlighted connections between game theory and such areas as graphs, complexity in game playing, and operations research. In 2008 developments proceed along six lines of inquiry, among them compact game representations, algorithms and mechanical design, and logical considerations inherent in games. Future progress could entail ways of thinking that go beyond the role of the Nash equilibrium in game theory.

The article discusses the conference peer-review process and ways in which it can be improved. Because it has become impossible to distinguish valid research papers from hoaxes at jargon-filled high-technology computer conferences, the author suggests that the quality of computer science conferences is being questioned. He proposes a systematic understanding of quality assurance at computer conferences as a phenomenon that needs analysis and a solution with a look at responsibility and ethics among professionals.

This article focuses on effective aids to assist computing professionals explore computing literature. Several efforts have been made to serve this community, including the Networked Computer Technical Reference Library, which grew out of efforts to collect technical reports from academic and research departments. The purpose of the paper is to provide illustrations of how the computing community can be assisted by richer support for exploratory search, related to the authors' work with the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL).

The article describes the experience of the authors related to the use of protocol analysis. They adopted protocol analysis when studying how software designers employ available documentation for designing systems from existing components. They used tools for extracting and composing components and for document browsing they developed for their earlier work, along with integral logging capabilities that could be used to record developer actions in a nonintrusive manner. They employed Unix processes as components and a group of four subjects, each with several years' experience using Unix but no experience writing shell scripts. They were allocated two tasks. First task was to produce a simple source code control system that would allow users to store and retrieve particular versions of source code. Second task was to produce a utility to count types of files in a specified path. They gave subjects access to all component utilities available on the system utilities. Extra introductory documentation regarding the use of the editor software and the production of shell scripts was provided on paper

The article presents abstracts of research papers related to computer science, which have been published in various publications of the Association for Computing Machinery. The research paper "Complexity of Network Synchronization," examines the problem of simulating a synchronous network by an asynchronous network. A new simulation technique, referred to as a synchronizer, which is a new, simple methodology for designing efficient distributed algorithms in asynchronous networks, has been proposed. The synchronizer exhibits a trade-off between its communication and time complexities, which is proved to be within a constant factor of the lower bound. The article "How to Assign Votes in a Distributed System," discusses distributed processing. In a distributed system, one strategy for achieving mutual exclusion of groups of nodes without communication is to assign to each node a number of votes. Only a group with a majority of votes can execute the critical operations, and mutual exclusion is achieved because at any given time there is at most one such group.

The article presents some abstracts of papers related to computer science which appeared in other publications of the Association for Computing Machinery . The abstract entitled "Generating Binary Trees Using Rotations," by David Zerling, was published in the July 1985 issue of the "Journal of the ACM." In this paper, the authors developed a new algorithm that, for the first time, exploited the rotational geometry of binary trees to enable to lexicographically generate the computer representations of these trees in average time O(1) per tree. The abstract entitled "Uniform Hashing is Optimal," by Andrew C. Yao, was published in the July 1985 issue of the "Journal of the ACM." The abstract entitled "Adding Range Restriction Capability to Dynamic Data Structures," by Dan E. Willard and George S. Lueker, was published in the July 1985 issue of the "Journal of the ACM." According to this paper, a database is said to allow range restrictions if one may request that only records with some specified field in a specified range be considered when answering a given query.

The article presents abstracts of research papers related to information technology. The research paper "Transactions and Consistency in Distributed Database Systems," discusses the concepts of transaction and data consistency for distributed computing systems. The cases of partitioned data, where fragments of a file are stored at multiple nodes, and replicated data, where a file is replicated at several nodes, are discussed. It has been argued that the distribution and replication of data should be transparent to the programs which use the data. That is, the programming interface should provide location transparency, replica transparency, and failure transparency. According to the research paper "On the Correct Translation of Update Operations on Relational Views," most relational database systems provide a facility for supporting user views. Permitting this level of abstraction has the danger, however, that update requests issued by a user within the context of his view may not translate correctly into equivalent updates on the underlying database.

The article reports on some professional activities taking place in the United States related to computer science. As a cooperative venture undertaken by 15 organizations, the "National Educational Computing Conference," held in Kansas City, Missouri, has presented a major work regarding computers in instruction to promote interaction among all levels in computer uses in education. It also intends to develop and coordinate the various professional groups involved with computer uses in instruction and to produce a proceedings documenting the status of computers in education. Papers are invited from individuals representing all academic disciplines and research areas in educational computing. It further reports that papers describing original research in the formal analysis of computing problems are being sought for the "Fourteenth Annual Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Theory of Computing," held during May 5-7, 1982, in San Francisco, California. The Fifteenth Annual Simulation Symposium is to be held during March 17-19, 1982, in Tampa, Florida. The list contains information about some other activities as well.

This column addresses three different topics in short order. The heading "Planning for Future Computers" reports on a study of the growth in desktop computing power and draws conclusions that relate to planning long-term software development. The study focused on desktop and portable computers in the $1000-$5000 price range. Hopefully the results are valid for a much wider price range for some great papers on similar growth on the very high end. Historical data was gathered on the price and performance of small computers since 1983, performed regression analysis of the data to create a model, then used the model to project the trends into the future. Secondly, "Interface Design When You Don't Know How?," discusses the need for interface specialists on a software team, and points out difficulties in trying to use them. Finally, the topic "Design From a Dramatic Perspective" reports on readers' responses to ponderings of the author about Brenda Laurel's book, "Computers As Theater."

On January 1, 1992 an era in the computer field ended with the death of admiral/Dr. Grace Murray Hopper. She saw the beginning of the computer field with her work on MARK I, a physically large electro-mechanical machine, and lived to see and influence people who could carry around small electronic computers with a capability many orders of magnitude greater. Grace Hopper's lifework epitomized the development of the software field from primitive programs to sophisticated compilers and their verification. She was the greatest woman in the computer field, and one of the dozen top people in the field to date. Hopper's first real computing publication was based on her initial work on the Harvard MARK I and was "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator," Annals of the Harvard Computation Laboratory. Her first significant paper dealing with software "The Education of a Computer" was presented in 1952 at one of the very early ACM conferences. It was reprinted in the Annals of the History of Computing.

Many methods for resolving collisions in hashing techniques have been proposed. They are classified into two main categories: open addressing and chaining. In this paper, other methods are presented that are intermediate between the two categories. The basic idea of our methods is the use of one or more predictors reserved per cell instead of a link field as in the chaining method. The predictors are used to maintain loose synonym chains. After describing the methods, the efficiencies are estimated theoretically and verified experimentally. In comparison with the chaining method, we prove that our methods significantly reduce the average number of probes necessary to retrieve a key without expending extra space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the design and implementation of a program testing assistant which aids a programmer in the definition, execution, and modification of test cases during incremental program development. The testing assistant helps in the interactive definition of test cases and executes them automatically when appropriate. It modifies test cases to preserve their usefulness when the program they test undergoes certain types of design Changes. The testing assistant acts as a fully integrated part of the programming environment and cooperates with existing programming tools such as a display editor, compiler, interpreter, and debugger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The volume, moments of inertia, and similar properties of solids are defined by triple (volumetric) integrals over subsets of three-dimensional Euclidean space. The automatic computation of such integral properties for geometrically complex solids is important in CAD/CAM, robotics, and other fields and raises interesting mathematical and computational problems that have received little attention from numerical analysts and computer scientists. This paper summarizes the known methods for calculating integral properties of solids that may be geometrically complex and identifies some significant gaps in our current knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

System R, an experimental database system, was constructed to demonstrate that the usability advantages of the relational data model can be realized in a system with the complete function and high performance required for everyday production use. This paper describes the three principal phases of the System R project and discusses some of the lessons learned from System R about the design of relational systems and database systems in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on some forthcoming events related to computer science. The International Symposium on Distributed Databases will be held from March 12 to 14, 1980 in Versailles, France. The 13th Annual Simulation Symposium will be held from March 19 to 21, 1980 in Tampa, Florida. The Sixth International ALLC Symposium on Computers in Literary and Linguistic Research will be held from March 28 to April 3, 1980 at the University of Cambridge in England. The 4th International IFAC Conference on Instrumentation and Automation in the Paper, Rubber, Plastics, and Polymerization Industries will be held from June 3 to 6, 1980 in Belgium. The Seventh Conference on Electronic Computation will be held from August 6 to 8, 1979 in Saint Louis, Missouri. The IFAC Symposium on Computer Applications in Large Scale Power Systems will be held from August 16 to 18, 1979 in Bangalore, India. The Silver Anniversary International Meeting of the Society for General Systems Research will be held from August 20 to 24, 1979 in London, England.

As computer technology matures, our growing ability to create large systems is leading to basic changes in the nature of programming. Current programming language concepts will not be adequate for building and maintaining systems of the complexity called for by the tasks we attempt. Just as high level languages enabled the programmer to escape from the intricacies of a machine's order code, higher level programming systems can provide the means to understand and manipulate complex systems and components. In order to develop such systems, we need to shift our attention away from the detailed specification of algorithms, towards the description of the properties of the packages and objects with which we build. This paper analyzes some of the shortcomings of programming languages as they now exist, and lays out some possible directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hierarchical programming is being increasingly recognized as helpful in the construction of large programs. Users of hierarchical techniques claim or predict substantial increases in productivity and in the reliability of the programs produced. In this paper we describe a formal method for hierarchical program specification, implementation, and proof. We apply this method to a significant list processing problem and also discuss a number of extensions to current programming languages that ease hierarchical program design and proof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A data abstraction can be naturally specified using algebraic axioms. The virtue of these axioms is that they permit a representation-independent formal specification of a data type. An example is given which shows how to employ algebraic axioms at successive levels of implementation. The major thrust of the paper is twofold. First, it is shown how the use of algebraic axiomatizations can simplify the process of proving the correctness of an implementation of an abstract data type. Second, semi-automatic tools are described which can be used both to automate such proofs of correctness and to derive an immediate implementation from the axioms. This implementation allows for limited testing of programs at design time, before a conventional implementation is accomplished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent curricular development in computer science together with student interest in pursuing topics in computer science beyond the usual programming courses have encouraged small liberal arts colleges to expand their offerings. This paper summarizes the results of a survey taken to determine the type of computer science programs being offered in these colleges. The results indicate that over half of these colleges either have no computer science program or offer only programming courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on news briefs related to the March 1977 issue of the journal "Communications of the ACM." The committee invites students whose Bachelor degrees will not have been received before April 1, 1977 to submit papers. High school students are also eligible to participate in the competition. The Awards Committee reminds members of the Association that it welcomes awards candidates suggested by ACM members. The 1977 edition of the Administrative Directory of Chairmen of University and College Computer Science Departments and Directors of Computer Centers has been published by ACM. The Awards Committee reminds members of the Association that it welcomes awards candidates suggested by ACM members. The 1977 edition of the Administrative Directory of Chairmen of University and College Computer Science Departments and Directors of Computer Centers has been published by ACM.