Welcome to the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library
April 1, 2020 9:37 AM Subscribe
The ACM Digital Library has opened their doors.
Recognizing that many computing researchers, practitioners, and academics are now working remotely, ACM is committed to supporting research, discovery and learning during this time of crisis. For the next three months, through June 30, 2020, we are making all work published by ACM in our Digital Library freely accessible.
(Snark aside, I'd love to see links to interesting papers I'd otherwise never come across!)
posted by phooky at 9:59 AM on April 1, 2020
posted by phooky at 9:59 AM on April 1, 2020
So many other publishers have been "opening" up small portions of their content that's only relevant to coronavirus research. It's great to see ACM do something that actually helps lots of people.
posted by kendrak at 10:03 AM on April 1, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by kendrak at 10:03 AM on April 1, 2020 [4 favorites]
I'm a software developer and vaguely aware that ACM exists, but never cared enough to pay for a journal. Any suggested highlights I should take a look at?
posted by cschneid at 10:08 AM on April 1, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by cschneid at 10:08 AM on April 1, 2020 [1 favorite]
Here's a nice little programming exercise for you.
Re-implement this algorithm in your favorite language: The calculation of Easter... written by a much younger Donald E. Knuth.
posted by springo at 10:32 AM on April 1, 2020 [3 favorites]
Re-implement this algorithm in your favorite language: The calculation of Easter... written by a much younger Donald E. Knuth.
posted by springo at 10:32 AM on April 1, 2020 [3 favorites]
Echoing cschneid here... well aware of the subjectivity that would come with recommendations for a journal
posted by JoeXIII007 at 10:33 AM on April 1, 2020
posted by JoeXIII007 at 10:33 AM on April 1, 2020
About halfway down the page there’s a Most Popular Articles subhead, by either views or citations.
posted by clew at 10:43 AM on April 1, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by clew at 10:43 AM on April 1, 2020 [2 favorites]
Cool! I have a particular love for some of more offbeat papers from the punchcard/DP era, especially the ones predicting how we'd all change our handwriting to all-caps with weird letter forms (O being an upside-down Q, etc) so that OCR would be the fastest and most accurate computer input method. It also coincided with attempts to popularize shortened forms of words (“alphameric”, anyone?) that never caught on. Good times!
narrator voice: OCR was never the fastest and most accurate computer input method.
posted by scruss at 10:45 AM on April 1, 2020 [1 favorite]
narrator voice: OCR was never the fastest and most accurate computer input method.
posted by scruss at 10:45 AM on April 1, 2020 [1 favorite]
> I'm a software developer and vaguely aware that ACM exists, but never cared enough to pay for a journal. Any suggested highlights I should take a look at?
If you're at all interested in information security, a colleague of mine is co-editor-in-chief of Digital Threats: Research and Practice, a new ACM journal that was created in an effort to bridge the gap between, as one might guess, researchers and practitioners. I particularly enjoyed reading Looking Beyond the Horizon: Thoughts on Proactive Detection of Threats and Machine Learning Framework to Analyze IoT Malware Using ELF and Opcode Features since they're closest to my areas of expertise. Topics for future issues (which are hopefully not available for open access, because that would mean COVID-19 is still happening!) will include election security, hardware security, and so-called fake news. (I begged my colleague to use a different, not-hopelessly-poisoned term to describe the proliferation of online disinformation, but the announcement had already been posted.)
posted by tonycpsu at 11:30 AM on April 1, 2020 [4 favorites]
If you're at all interested in information security, a colleague of mine is co-editor-in-chief of Digital Threats: Research and Practice, a new ACM journal that was created in an effort to bridge the gap between, as one might guess, researchers and practitioners. I particularly enjoyed reading Looking Beyond the Horizon: Thoughts on Proactive Detection of Threats and Machine Learning Framework to Analyze IoT Malware Using ELF and Opcode Features since they're closest to my areas of expertise. Topics for future issues (which are hopefully not available for open access, because that would mean COVID-19 is still happening!) will include election security, hardware security, and so-called fake news. (I begged my colleague to use a different, not-hopelessly-poisoned term to describe the proliferation of online disinformation, but the announcement had already been posted.)
posted by tonycpsu at 11:30 AM on April 1, 2020 [4 favorites]
I share the hope that some peeps who know of interesting ACM things will share some interesting things. My ACM was the random journal left around with the other shared-library of random things from people cleaning out their office junk-pile.
Ob: I wrote my first Prolog interpreter based on an article in an ACM publication 30 years ago. I haven't found it yet, there are a ton of 'Prolog' things in the search results.... :)
Like many, I hope some peeps have some favorite ACM things to point out while they're here.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:28 PM on April 1, 2020
Ob: I wrote my first Prolog interpreter based on an article in an ACM publication 30 years ago. I haven't found it yet, there are a ton of 'Prolog' things in the search results.... :)
Like many, I hope some peeps have some favorite ACM things to point out while they're here.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:28 PM on April 1, 2020
A lot of these papers are beyond a dilettante like me, but I've noticed I do better with truly foundational ones because they assume less knowledge. Can anyone recommend a list of papers like that?
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:20 PM on April 1, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:20 PM on April 1, 2020 [2 favorites]
Communications of the ACM is the standard "comes with membership" magazine and not bad for browsing. It's like a somewhat more technical Scientific American, aimed at computer professionals.
posted by mark k at 5:29 PM on April 1, 2020
posted by mark k at 5:29 PM on April 1, 2020
No journal rec's, but I love searching fun nouns in ACM: friendship, puppies, rainbows, french fries, hopscotch. Your results tend to be a fascinating mix: they're all relevant to the term you searched, but in multiple, distinct contexts.
posted by unknowncommand at 7:54 PM on April 1, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by unknowncommand at 7:54 PM on April 1, 2020 [1 favorite]
Not a professional scholar, but when I do read papers I barely look at the journal it was published in. Maybe briefly to ensure it's ACM/IEEE but after that, no clue. I guess I probably read more USENIX papers than either of those. Mostly what I do is sub to a few Youtube channels:
- Papers We Love is a nice format for industry professionals presenting academic works they've found useful.
- Google Tech Talks used to be a nice survey of academics presenting their work to industry (probably to get a job?). Content seems to have waned, so either the party responsible for Youtube uploads got promoted and took the password with them, or Google's retaining this on their intranet for the competitive advantage.
- So I guess I do know about ACM SIGGRAPH, and it's probably their most popular SIG among professionals. I assume it helps that even a layman can at least enjoy the results even if the math or notation is too complicated to grasp. Ke-Sen Huang's page is usually a fun page to review. But also note that virtually every preso there has a link to the author's prepub version, which means there isn't a huge change provided by opening up the digital library version of that page.
posted by pwnguin at 8:20 PM on April 1, 2020
- Papers We Love is a nice format for industry professionals presenting academic works they've found useful.
- Google Tech Talks used to be a nice survey of academics presenting their work to industry (probably to get a job?). Content seems to have waned, so either the party responsible for Youtube uploads got promoted and took the password with them, or Google's retaining this on their intranet for the competitive advantage.
- So I guess I do know about ACM SIGGRAPH, and it's probably their most popular SIG among professionals. I assume it helps that even a layman can at least enjoy the results even if the math or notation is too complicated to grasp. Ke-Sen Huang's page is usually a fun page to review. But also note that virtually every preso there has a link to the author's prepub version, which means there isn't a huge change provided by opening up the digital library version of that page.
posted by pwnguin at 8:20 PM on April 1, 2020
Joe, a paper which was truly influential to me at the time when the group of which I was a part was one of many working on distributed systems. Written by 3 of the gods: end to end arguments in systems design. Essentially, be careful to place error detection/correction in the correct parts of your system. Click the PDF link for a clearer copy.
posted by epo at 1:23 AM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by epo at 1:23 AM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]
If only I had a list of all the links to ACM issues I have failed to read in the past 10 years. I would be kept occupied for months. Alas, it is not so easy even with a relatively long browser history for reference.
posted by wierdo at 7:51 AM on April 2, 2020
posted by wierdo at 7:51 AM on April 2, 2020
"ACM Digital Library" weirdly itched my brain despite not being in the computing field. Then I remembered -- more than a dozen years ago now, trying and failing to register an account so I could read about more behind-the-scenes CGI wizardry from Van Helsing (one of high school me's favorite guilty pleasure blockbusters) after I read about the makers doing a presentation at SIGGRAPH. Now's my big chance!
After plumbing the archives a bit, I finally found it -- not just one article, but a whole series. Creature matchmove! Skinning werewolves! Beheading vampire brides! A 50-page white paper entitled "Jiggly bits (and motion retargeting)"! It was the perfect fusion of nostalgia, titillating horror schlock, and in-depth computer graphics nerdery... or would be, if every one of them hadn't been subtitled "Copyright restrictions prevent ACM from providing the full text for this work." Whomp whomp.
(Bonus disappointment: that "copyright restrictions" boilerplate appears 380 times in the Library's 584,140 records, meaning the only content I actually wanted managed to fall into the minuscule 0.06% that's not available.)
posted by Rhaomi at 12:27 AM on April 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
After plumbing the archives a bit, I finally found it -- not just one article, but a whole series. Creature matchmove! Skinning werewolves! Beheading vampire brides! A 50-page white paper entitled "Jiggly bits (and motion retargeting)"! It was the perfect fusion of nostalgia, titillating horror schlock, and in-depth computer graphics nerdery... or would be, if every one of them hadn't been subtitled "Copyright restrictions prevent ACM from providing the full text for this work." Whomp whomp.
(Bonus disappointment: that "copyright restrictions" boilerplate appears 380 times in the Library's 584,140 records, meaning the only content I actually wanted managed to fall into the minuscule 0.06% that's not available.)
posted by Rhaomi at 12:27 AM on April 4, 2020 [3 favorites]
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... oh, right.
posted by phooky at 9:58 AM on April 1, 2020 [4 favorites]