Our Top Three Reads of March

Welcome to the second edition of Advances in Computing, a biweekly newsletter series presenting exciting research, viewpoints, news and more from leading computing experts around the globe, published and handpicked for you by ACM's flagship magazine, Communications of the ACM (CACM). If this sounds like your cup of tea, hit the subscribe button to stay abreast of computing’s the biggest trends and hottest topics.

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Recommended Reads:

1) Measuring GitHub Copilot’s Impact on Productivity

Albert Ziegler , Eirini Kalliamvakou , and their team discover that AI pair-programming tools such as GitHub Copilot have a big impact on developer productivity. This holds for developers of all skill levels, with junior developers seeing the largest gains.

The reported benefits of receiving AI suggestions while coding span the full range of typically investigated aspects of productivity, such as task time, product quality, cognitive load, enjoyment, and learning.

While suggestion correctness is important, the driving factor for these improvements appears to be not correctness as such, but whether the suggestions are useful as a starting point for further development.

Watch Eddie Aftandilian discuss the article here.

2) Verifying Correctness

ACM Prize in Computing recipient Yael Tauman Kalai on her career, proof systems, and certifying correctness:

I worked really hard, and after failing for a long time, I told my dad—who is also an academic, but knows nothing about cryptography—that I was stuck, and he said, “Maybe it’s the time to look for a counterexample.” So, fast forward a little bit, we did get a counterexample. Together with my Ph.D. adviser at the time, shafi goldwasser , we showed you can’t prove in general that this paradigm is sound. Which is not to say that the use of Fiat-Shamir in practice is not sound; it’s just that if you want to come up with a proof of security, you need to limit the scope.

3) Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation

Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without sacrificing the benefits it entails.

Watch Filippo Gualtiero Blancato discuss his provocative article here.

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