COMMUNICATIONS CACM.ACM.ORG OF THEACM 11/2016 VOL.59 NO.11 SEXAS AN ALGORITHM THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION UNDER THE LENS OF COMPUTATION Association for Computing Machinery 31st IEEE • 2017• INTERNATIONAL May 29-June 2, 2017 Paral lel and Buena Vista Palace Hotel Distributed Orlando, Florida USA Processing SYMPOSIUM www.ipdps.org Orlando is home to a rich offering of indoor and outdoor attractions. Located a mile from Walt Disney World® and 4 miles from Epcot, the Buena Vista Palace Hotel is a 5-minute walk from Downtown Disney with a complimentary shuttle to all Disney Theme Parks and Water Parks. The sprawling Lake Buena Vista resort offers a full menu of amenities and family friendly activities as well as ideal meeting space for IPDPS 2017. ANNOUNCING 24 WORKSHOPS PLANNED FOR IPDPS 2017 IN ORLANDO GENERAL CHAIR IPDPS Workshops are the “bookends” to the three-day technical program of contributed papers, Michela Taufer (University of Delaware, USA) keynote speakers, roundtable workshops, a PhD student forum, and industry participation. They provide the IPDPS community an opportunity to explore special topics and present work that is PROGRAM CHAIR more preliminary or cutting-edge than the more mature research presented in the main symposium. Marc Snir (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA) Each workshop has its own website and submission requirements, and the submission deadline for most workshops is after the main conference author notification date. See the IPDPS Workshops WORKSHOPS CHAIR page for links to Call for Papers for each workshop and due dates. Bora Uçar (CNRS and ENS Lyon, France) IPDPS WORKSHOPS MONDAY 29 MAY 2017 (Check final schedule) WORKSHOPS VICE-CHAIR Erik Saule (University of North Carolina Charlotte, USA) HCW Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop RAW Reconfigurable Architectures Workshop STUDENT PARTICIPATION CHAIR HiComb High Performance Computational Biology Trilce Estrada (University of New Mexico, USA) EduPar NSF/TCPP W. on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education ParLearning Parallel and Distributed Computing for Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics ROUNDTABLE WORKSHOPS PDCO Parallel / Distributed Computing and Optimization These condensed workshops, organized and animated by a GABB Graph Algorithms Building Blocks few people, will be held on Tuesday and Thursday in a AsHES Accelerators and Hybrid Exascale Systems “roundtable” setting designed to promote one-on-one interaction. They will focus on an emerging area of interest to HIPS High Level Programming Models and Supporting Environments IPDPS attendees, especially topics that complement and APDCM Advances in Parallel and Distributed Computational Models “round out” the areas covered by the regular workshops. HPPAC High-Performance, Power-Aware Computing HPBDC High-Performance Big Data Computing PhD FORUM & STUDENT MENTORING This event will include traditional poster presentations by PhD IPDPS WORKSHOPS FRIDAY 2 JUNE 2017 (Check final schedule) students enhanced by a program of mentoring and coaching in scientific writing and presentation skills and a special CHIUW Chapel Implementers and Users Workshop opportunity for students to hear from and interact with senior LSPP Large-Scale Parallel Processing: Practices and Experiences researchers attending the conference. PDSEC Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing JSSPP Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processors INDUSTRY PARTICIPATION DPDNS Dependable Parallel, Distributed and Network-centric Systems IPDPS extends a special invitation for companies to become an IPDPS 2017 Industry Partner and join us in Orlando to IPDRM Emerging Parallel and Distributed Runtime Systems and Middleware share in the benefits of associating with an international iWAPT International Workshop on Automatic Performance Tunings community of top researchers and practitioners in fields ParSocial Parallel and Distributed Processing for Computational Social System related to parallel processing and distributed computing. Visit BigDataEco Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs and Spokes: the IPDPS website to see ways to participate. Accelerating the Big Data Innovation Ecosystem GraML Graph Algorithms and Machine Learning EMBRACE Evolvable Methods for Benchmarking Realism IMPORTANT DATES and Community Engagement Conference Author Notification January 8, 2017 REPPAR Reproducibility in Parallel Computing Workshop Call for Papers Deadlines Most Fall After January 8, 2017 SPONSORED BY: IN COOPERATION WITH: ACM SIGARCH & SIGHPC IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture Technical Committee on Parallel Processing IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Distributed Processing Previous A.M. Turing Award Recipients 1966 A.J. Perlis 1967 Maurice Wilkes 1968 R.W. Hamming 1969 Marvin Minsky 1970 J.H. Wilkinson 1971 John McCarthy 1972 E.W. Dijkstra 1973 Charles Bachman 1974 Donald Knuth 1975 Allen Newell 1975 Herbert Simon 1976 Michael Rabin 1976 Dana Scott 1977 John Backus 1978 Robert Floyd 1979 Kenneth Iverson ACM A.M. TURING AWARD 1980 C.A.R Hoare 1981 Edgar Codd 1982 Stephen Cook NOMINATIONS SOLICITED 1983 Ken Thompson 1983 Dennis Ritchie Nominations are invited for the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award. 1984 Niklaus Wirth 1985 Richard Karp This is ACM’s oldest and most prestigious award and is given 1986 John Hopcroft to recognize contributions of a technical nature which are of 1986 Robert Tarjan 1987 John Cocke lasting and major technical importance to the computing field. 1988 Ivan Sutherland The award is accompanied by a prize of $1,000,000. 1989 William Kahan 1990 Fernando Corbató Financial support for the award is provided by Google Inc. 1991 Robin Milner 1992 Butler Lampson Nomination information and the online submission form 1993 Juris Hartmanis 1993 Richard Stearns are available on: 1994 Edward Feigenbaum http://amturing.acm.org/call_for_nominations.cfm 1994 Raj Reddy 1995 Manuel Blum 1996 Amir Pnueli Additional information on the Turing Laureates 1997 Douglas Engelbart is available on: 1998 James Gray http://amturing.acm.org/byyear.cfm 1999 Frederick Brooks 2000 Andrew Yao 2001 Ole-Johan Dahl The deadline for nominations/endorsements is 2001 Kristen Nygaard November 30, 2016. 2002 Leonard Adleman 2002 Ronald Rivest 2002 Adi Shamir For additional information on ACM’s award program 2003 Alan Kay 2004 Vinton Cerf please visit: www.acm.org/awards/ 2004 Robert Kahn 2005 Peter Naur 2006 Frances E. Allen 2007 Edmund Clarke 2007 E. Allen Emerson 2007 Joseph Sifakis 2008 Barbara Liskov 2009 Charles P. Thacker 2010 Leslie G. Valiant 2011 Judea Pearl 2012 Shafi Goldwasser 2012 Silvio Micali 2013 Leslie Lamport 2014 Michael Stonebraker 2015 Whitfield Diffie 2015 Martin Hellman COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM Departments News Viewpoints 5 Editor’s Letter 20 Privacy and Security Globalization, Computing, Cyber Defense Triad for and Their Political Impact Where Security Matters By Moshe Y. Vardi Dramatically more trustworthy cyber security is a choice. 7 Cerf’s Up By Roger R. Schell Heidelberg Anew By Vinton G. Cerf 24 Legally Speaking Fair Use Prevails in Oracle v. Google 8 Letters to the Editor Two software giants continue Learn to Live with Academic Rankings with legal sparring after an initial judicial decision. 10 BLOG@CACM By Pamela Samuelson Introducing CS to Newcomers, and JES As a Teaching Tool 18 27 Economic and Business Dimensions Valerie Barr gets high schoolers Visualization to thinking about CS, while 12 Learning Securely Understand Ecosystems Mark Guzdial mulls the benefits of Because it is easy to fool, Mapping relationships between Jython Environment for Students. machine learning must be taught stakeholders in an ecosystem how to handle adversarial inputs. to increase understanding and make 23 Calendar By Erica Klarreich better-informed strategic decisions. By Bala R. Iyer and Rahul C. Basole 123 Careers 15 Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin Blockchain technology has 31 Education the potential to revolutionize Growing Computer Science Last Byte applications and redefine Education Into a the digital economy. STEM Education Discipline 136 Future Tense By Sarah Underwood Seeking to make computing The Candidate education as available as Seeking the programmer vote, 18 Farm Automation Gets Smarter mathematics or science education. an AI delivering a slogan like As fewer people work the land, By Mark Guzdial and Briana Morrison “Make Coding Great Again” robots pick up the slack. could easily be seen as a threat. By Tom Geller 34 Viewpoint By Brian Clegg Time to Reinspect the Foundations? Questioning if computer science is outgrowing its traditional foundations. By Jack Copeland, Eli Dresner, Diane Proudfoot, and Oron Shagrir 37 Viewpoint Technology and Academic Lives Considering the need to create new modes of interaction and approaches to assessment given a rapidly evolving academic realm. By Jonathan Grudin Association for Computing Machinery Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession IMAGE COURTESY OF BOSCH DEEPFIELD ROBOTICS COURTESY IMAGE 2 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM | NOVEMBER 2016 | VOL. 59 | NO. 11 11/2016 VOL. 59 NO. 11 Practice Contributed Articles Review Articles 56 Apache Spark: A Unified Engine 84 Sex as an Algorithm: The Theory for Big Data Processing of Evolution Under the Lens This open source computing of Computation framework unifies streaming, batch, Looking at the mysteries of evolution and interactive big data workloads to from a computer science point of unlock new applications. view yields some unexpected insights. By Matei Zaharia, Reynold S. Xin, By Adi Livnat