Reviewing System Security Papers
Works that describe defenses are often harder to publish than papers that demonstrate attacks. This blog post provides some insight on why this may be the case.
Quantum Computing is Getting Real
Quantum computing sits poised at the verge of a revolution. Quantum machines may soon be capable of performing calculations in chemistry, physics, and other fields that are extremely difficult or even impossible for today’s computers. Yet there is a significant gap...
SIGARCH CARES to Report on Discrimination and Harassment
Recent events have brought concerns about discrimination and harassment in our community to the fore. In particular, Margaret Martonosi’s reading of the diversity statement at Micro has snowballed to bring forward accounts that have surprised and shocked many. If you...
What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You
This blog post is a personal account of sexism, harassment, and racism that I and some anonymous members of the computer architecture community have experienced. We are sharing these experiences in part because of encouragement by male colleagues who found them...
Architectural Myopia
Richard Thaler won the 2017 Nobel prize in Economics for his work on Behavioral Economics. He observed that humans are not “rational’ creatures and that our behavior is impacted by how we react to the world. People have a myriad of biases that influence how we think...
Inclusion and Conference Governance
Inclusiveness is not limited to gender and race. The more our community can limit bias in all its aspects, the more inclusive our community will be, and the more people will want to join it and stay. All of us, our research, and society will benefit.
A Primer on the Meltdown & Spectre Hardware Security Design Flaws and their Important Implications
As previously reported in the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blog, two major hardware security design flaws—dubbed Meltdown and Spectre—were broadly revealed to the public in early January 2018. These flaws are described in detail by the discoverers in research...
Kalman filtering without Bayesians and Gaussians (II)
This is the second of a multi-part post that introduces Kalman filtering in an accessible way to computer systems researchers. In the previous post, we described how two noisy estimates of a scalar quantity such as temperature can be fused using the optimal linear...
MICRO Diversity Survey
As part of the MICRO-50 business meeting, there was a session devoted to discussing diversity in MICRO and more broadly computer architecture conferences. One of the decisions the SC co-chairs made (in consultation with many members of the MICRO community) was to get...
When to Prototype? When to Simulate? – Part II
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