Editing Self-ImageAlgorithms to Harvest the WindThe BB.docx

Editing Self-Image
Algorithms to Harvest the Wind
The BBC micro:bit
Spotify Guilds
Four Internets
Pivot Tracing
Crowdsourcing
Moral Machines
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Communications of the ACM’s regional special sections—
designed to spotlight a region of the world with the goal of
introducing readers to new voices, innovations, and
technological
research—will feature emerging research and the latest
technical
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technologies
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future potential.
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• The commercialization of 5G services;
• Digitally enabled healthcare ecosystems;
• Singapore’s quest to achieve a fully smart nation;
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• Advances in cybersecurity, data analytics,
and finance technologies;

• Technologies for preserving cultural heritage; and,
• Tracing significant government investment in artificial
intelligence technologies.
East Asia and Oceania
Regional Special Section in April 2020 Issue
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Viewpoints
18 Education
Computing and Community
in Formal Education
Culturally responsive computing
repurposes computer science
education by making it meaningful
to not only students, but also
to their families and communities.
By Michael Lachney and Aman Yadav
22 The Profession of IT
Dilemmas of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence has confronted
us with a raft of dilemmas

that challenge us to decide what
values are important in our designs.
By Peter J. Denning
and Dorothy E. Denning
25 Viewpoint
Through the Lens
of a Passionate Theoretician
Considering the far-reaching
and fundamental implications
of computing beyond
digital computers.
By Omer Reingold
28 Viewpoint
Four Internets
Considering the merits
of several models and approaches
to Internet governance.
By Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall
31 Viewpoint
Unsafe At Any Level
The U.S. NHTSA’s levels
of automation are a liability
for automated vehicles.
By Marc Canellas and Rachel Haga
35 Viewpoint
Conferences in an Era
of Expensive Carbon
Balancing sustainability and science.
By Benjamin C. Pierce, Michael Hicks,
Crista Lopes, and Jens Palsberg
Departments

5 Vardi’s Insights
Advancing Computing as a Science
and Profession—But to What End?
By Moshe Y. Vardi
6 Letters to the Editor
Conferences and Carbon Impact
8 [email protected]
Coding for Voting
Robin K. Hill explains the ethical
responsibility of the computing
professional with respect
to voting systems.
27 Calendar
Last Byte
104 Upstart Puzzles
Stopping Tyranny
A compromise proposal toward
a solution to making it impossible
for a would-be tyrant to exceed
reasonable authority.
By Dennis Shasha
News
10 Can Nanosheet Transistors
Keep Moore’s Law Alive?
The technology promises to advance
semiconductors and computing,
but also introduces new questions
and challenges.

By Samuel Greengard
13 Algorithms to Harvest the Wind
Wake steering can help ever-larger
turbines work together more
efficiently on wind farms.
By Don Monroe
15 Across the Language Barrier
Translation devices are getting
better at making speech
and text understandable
in different languages.
By Keith Kirkpatrick
13
M A R C H 2 0 2 0 | V O L . 6 3 | N O . 3 | C O M M
U N I C AT I O N S O F T H E A C M 3
03/2020
VOL. 63 NO. 03
Practice
38 Securing the Boot Process
The hardware root of trust.
By Jessie Frazelle
43 Above the Line, Below the Line
The resilience of Internet-facing
systems relies on what is above
the line of representation.
By Richard I. Cook

Articles’ development led by
queue.acm.org
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Contributed Articles
48 Crowdsourcing Moral Machines
A platform for creating
a crowdsourced picture of human
opinions on how machines
should handle moral dilemmas.
By Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza,
Jean-François Bonnefon,
Azim Shariff, and Iyad Rahwan
56 Spotify Guilds
When the value increases
engagement, engagement
increases the value.
By Darja Smite, Nils Brede Moe,
Marcin Floryan, Georgiana Levinta,
and Panagiota Chatzipetrou
62 The BBC micro:bit—
From the U.K. to the World
A codable computer half the size
of a credit card is inspiring
students worldwide to develop
core computing skills
in fun and creative ways.
By Jonny Austin, Howard Baker,
Thomas Ball, James Devine,
Joe Finney, Peli de Halleux,
Steve Hodges, Michał Moskal,
and Gareth Stockdale

Watch the authors
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videos/crowdsourcing-
moral-machines
Watch the authors
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in the exclusive
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videos/spotify-guilds
Review Articles
70 Editing Self-Image
Technologies for manipulating
our digital appearance alter the way
the world sees us as well as the way
we see ourselves.
By Ohad Fried, Jennifer Jacobs,
Adam Finkelstein,
and Maneesh Agrawala
80 Toward Model-Driven
Sustainability Evaluation
Exploring the vision of
a model-based framework that
may enable broader engagement
with and informed decision making
about sustainability issues.
By Jörg Kienzle, Gunter Mussbacher,
Benoıt Combemale, Lucy Bastin,
Nelly Bencomo, Jean-Michel Bruel,

Christoph Becker, Stefanie Betz,
Ruzanna Chitchyan, Betty H.C. Cheng,
Sonja Klingert, Richard F. Paige,
Birgit Penzenstadler, Norbert Seyff,
Eugene Syriani, and Colin C. Venters
Research Highlights
93 Technical Perspective
A Perspective on Pivot Tracing
By Rebecca Isaacs
94 Pivot Tracing: Dynamic
Causal Monitoring for
Distributed Systems
By Jonathan Mace, Ryan Roelke,
and Rodrigo Fonseca
Association for Computing Machinery
Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession
38
About the Cover:
This month’s cover story
explores how to build
intelligent machines into
moral machines. Case in
point: Design autonomous
vehicles that respond
to emergencies with
intelligent and ethical
aptitude. As the authors
of “Crowdsourcing Moral
Machines” contend, it is
a challenge that takes a

village. Cover illustration
by Kollected Studio.
http://queue.acm.org
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https://cacm.acm.org/videos/spotify-guilds
https://cacm.acm.org/videos/spotify-guilds
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U N I C AT I O N S O F T H E A C M 5
vardi’s insights
Advancing Computing as a Science
and Profession—But to What End?

F
O U N D E D I N 1 9 4 7 , the Associa-
tion for Computing Machinery
(ACM) is the oldest educational
and scientific society dedicated
to the computing profession.
With over 100,000 members around the
world it is also the largest. According it
its 1947 Certificate of Incorporation, the
purpose of the association was to “ad-
vance the science, design, development,
construction and application of modern
machinery and computing techniques,
for performing operations in math-
ematics, logic, statistics, accounting,
automatic control, and kindred fields.”
The narrowness of this purpose was rec-
ognized in the ACM Constitution, last
changed in 1998, whose Article 2 offers
the purpose of “advancing the art, sci-
ence, engineering, and application of
information technology, serving both
professional and public interests by fos-
tering the open interchange of informa-
tion and by promoting the highest pro-
fessional and ethical standards.” ACM’s
website at acm.org offers yet a broader
description of ACM’s purpose, stating:
“Advancing Computing as a Science &
Profession—We see a world where com-
puting helps solve tomorrow’s prob-
lems, where we use our knowledge and
skills to advance the profession and
make a positive impact.”

One can clearly see a growing com-
mitment to the public good between
the Certificate of Incorporation, the
Constitution, and the descriptive text
on ACM’s website. While the latter text
is nonbinding and could be seen as
“marketing,” the Preamble of ACM’s
Code of Ethics states: “Computing pro-
fessionals’ actions change the world.
To act responsibly, they should reflect
upon the wider impacts of their work,
consistently supporting the public
good.” So ethical computing profes-
sionals have a responsibility to support
the public good. But what is ACM’s re-
sponsibility to the public good?
This year, we celebrate the 75th an-
niversary of “Science, The Endless Fron-
tier,” a highly influential report sub-
mitted in July 1945 to the President of
the United States by Vannevar Bush, an
American engineer and science admin-
istrator, who during World War II head-
ed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research
and Development, through which al-
most all wartime military research and
development was carried out. The re-
port, which led to the establishment of
the U.S. National Science Foundation,
argued that scientific progress is essen-
tial to human progress: “Progress in
the war against disease depends upon
a flow of new scientific knowledge. New
products, new industries, and more

jobs require continuous additions to
knowledge of the laws of nature, and
the application of that knowledge to
practical purposes. Similarly, our de-
fense against aggression demands new
knowledge so that we can develop new
and improved weapons.” Bush argued,
“this essential, new knowledge can be
obtained only through basic scientific
research” and is “the pacemaker of
technological progress.” As such, he
concluded it is the role of the Federal
Government to support the advance-
ment of knowledge. His philosophy
can be summarized in one phrase:
“Science for the public good.”
Bush’s 1945 vision was recently revis-
ited in the article “Science Institutions
for a Complex, Fast-Paced World,”a by
Marcia McNutt, president of the Nation-
al Academy of Sciences, and Michael M.
a https://issues.org/science-institutions/
Crow, president of Arizona State Univer-
sity. Writing in Issues in Science and Tech-
nology, McNutt and Crow point out that
“today’s understanding of how knowl-
edge, innovation, economic growth, and
social change are all intimately interde-
pendent is something of which Bush—
and his world—had barely an inkling.”
Building on that, they note, “In the past
75 years, the challenges—from nucle-
ar proliferation to climate change to

wealth concentration to social media’s
impact on expertise and truth—that
have resulted, at least in part, from so-
ciety’s application of scientific advances
are now subjects that science itself must
directly help to solve.”
McNutt and Crow stress the institu-
tions that carried out much of the sci-
entific progress over the past 75 years
must re-assess their mission and be
committed not only to advancing scien-
tific knowledge but also to addressing
the societal problems that technology,
driven by scientific knowledge, has cre-
ated. In other words, the commitment
to “science for the public good” should
be to pursue the public good via science.
Computing professionals, like their
colleagues in the sciences, must also ac-
cept the challenges of our era. It is time,
in other words, to revisit and update the
purpose of ACM. It is not enough to fo-
cus on science and profession. ACM’s
purpose must be “to advance the sci-
ence and profession of computing for
the public good.” A vigorous discussion
and debate on how best to work toward
this purpose must now begin.
Follow me on Facebook and Twitter.
Moshe Y. Vardi ([email protected]) is the Karen Ostrum
George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational
Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for

Information Technology at Rice University, Houston, TX, USA.
He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Communications.
DOI:10.1145/3381047 Moshe Y. Vardi
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3381047
http://www.facebook.com/moshe.vardi.1
https://twitter.com/vardi
http://acm.org
https://issues.org/science-institutions/
R C H 2 0 2 0 | V O L . 6 3 | N O . 3
letters to the editor
But if the cause of reducing computing’s
carbon footprint excites you, recognize
that conference travel is a pittance when
compared to the negative climate impact
of computing’s power consumption. Our
research collaborators’ work of 2019
datacenter global power consumption
estimates are nearly double earlier
estimates—now 400 TWh! These numbers
are a large multiple higher than the best
projections based on 2013 data.3 There has
been an important major change. These
numbers are shockingly large—and worse—
they are growing fast. Recent press about
hyperscale cloud reveal growth rates of
perhaps 40% per year.2
For more, see my broader call to action1

for computing professionals to address
computing’s growing and problematic
direct environmental impact. Let’s all get
moving on this!
References
1. Chien, A. Owning computing’s environmental impact.
Comm. ACM 62, 3 (Mar. 2019), 5.
2. Kniazhevich, N. and Eckhouse, B. Google tops green-
energy buys, BlackRock seen jogging new growth.
Bloomberg Green (Jan. 28, 2020); https://bloom.
bg/31qdPNt.
3. Shehabi, A. et al. United States Data Center Energy
Usage Report. LBNL, June 2016.
Andrew A. Chien, Chicago, IL, USA
Reducing Biases in
Clinical Prediction Modeling
In “Algorithms, Platforms, and Ethnic
Bias” (Nov. 2019), Selena Silva and Mar-
tin Kenney visualized a chain of major
potential biases. The nine biases, which
are not mutually exclusive, indeed must
be considered in the design of any data-
driven application that may affect indi-
viduals, especially if the biases have the
potential to negatively affect a person’s
health condition.
Users may be slightly affected if they
are exposed to irrelevant online adver-
tisements or more greatly affected if

they are unjustifiably refused a loan at
the bank. Even worse would be a poorly
designed algorithm that can cause a
physician to make a decision that may
be harmful to patients. An outdated risk-
assessment algorithm can significantly
affect many individuals, especially if
broadly used. An example of such an al-
M
O S H E VA R D I M A K E S an ex-
cellent point in his January
2020 column in noting we,
as a community, should
do more to reduce carbon
emissions and suggests ACM conferenc-
es do more to support remote participa-
tion. While I share his concern about car-
bon emissions, I have several concerns
about his proposals for conferences.
First, time zones often make it difficult
to participate in remote events, a problem
that is also often faced by members of a
distributed development team. At home,
I’m nine hours behind Western Europe
and about 12.5 behind India, so I would
have to join late at night in both cases.
That is just not a workable solution for a
multiday conference.
Second, my own teaching experience
during the past 15 years (plus countless
faculty meetings) has repeatedly dem-
onstrated that remote participants are

less involved. Maybe they are trying (un-
successfully) to multitask, but it is sim-
ply more difficult for remote attendees
to ask questions or join a discussion un-
less it is a virtual event where everyone
is remote and there is a moderator who
recognizes participants in turn.
Third, the experience with online
courses (Udacity, edX, among others)
suggests material should be presented
differently to a remote audience than
to a local one. Khan Academy has long
taught in 10-minute snippets, perhaps
in recognition of the shorter attention
spans of its audience. Personally, a brief
illness last year caused me to deliver a
keynote address remotely. Even though
I cut my talk down to half of its original
length and used slides, there were fewer
questions and less discussion than I
would have expected.
Fourth, it’s important for aspiring
and junior faculty to personally meet
the senior faculty in their specialty
F2F. Not only are they colleagues, but
they are often valuable for supporting
academic promotions. A connection
over LinkedIn, even if accepted, falls
well short of a personal connection.
Vardi recognizes, and I agree, that
there is an important social network-
ing aspect to conferences that cannot
be satisfied by remote participation.

Finally, conferences need to build
their own community to assure their
long-term success, including the lead-
ership of future years of the confer-
ence. While it’s easy to join a program
committee remotely, conference and
program chairs, as well as other mem-
bers of the organizing committees, are
more likely to come from repeat attend-
ees who have developed personal rela-
tionships with conference organizers.
In summary, I’m trying to do my
part (home solar panels, electric car)
to reduce my carbon impact, but I
think there are some difficult issues
with Vardi’s proposal. I hope that we
can continue the important discussion
about our impact on the environment
and find some alternative solutions that
can address the issues raised here.
Anthony I. Wasserman,
Moffett Field, CA, USA
Author’s response
Quoting from my column: “Of course,
conferences are more than a paper-
publishing system. First and foremost,
they are vehicles for information sharing,
community building, and networking. But
these can be decoupled from research
publishing, and other disciplines are able to
achieve them with much less travel, usually
with one major conference per year. Can we

reduce the carbon footprint of computing-
research publishing?”
Reducing our carbon footprint is an
existential imperative. We cannot blindly
cling to the way we have been doing things.
For some fresh thinking, see, for example,
http://uist.acm.org/uist2019/online/
Moshe Y. Vardi, Houston, TX, USA
Response from the Editor-in-Chief
The idea that the field of computing could
reduce its carbon impact by reducing the
prominence of conferences and adopting
practices from a number of other scientific
fields is a good one, and I applaud
Vardi’s column, Wasserman’s response,
and other efforts recently highlighted in
Communications (for example, see
Pierce et al. on p. 35 of this issue.)
Conferences and Carbon Impact
DOI:10.1145/3380448
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3380448
http://uist.acm.org/uist2019/online/
https://bloom.bg/31qdPNt
https://bloom.bg/31qdPNt
M A R C H 2 0 2 …

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