Below is a list of papers over the last 5 decades in three broad areas of computer science. Choose a paper from one of the fields and email me your choice. I will allow no more than 4 choices from each category, and will make selections with you in another area in case your first choice is not available.

Systems

  • Codd, E. F. (1970). A relational model of data for large shared data banks. Communications of the ACM, 13(6), 377–387.

  • Fischer, M. J., Lynch, N. A., & Paterson, M. S. (1985). Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. Journal of the ACM, 32(2), 374–382.

  • Rosenblum, M., & Ousterhout, J. K. (1992). The design and implementation of a log-structured file system. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 10(1), 26–52.

  • Necula, G. C. (1997). Proof-carrying code. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL ‘97) (pp. 106–119).

  • Herlihy, M., & Shavit, N. (1999). The topological structure of asynchronous computability. Journal of the ACM, 46(6), 858–923.

  • Ghemawat, S., Gobioff, H., & Leung, S. T. (2003). The Google file system. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 37(5), 29–43.

  • Dean, J., & Ghemawat, S. (2004). MapReduce: Simplified data processing on large clusters. In Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘04) (pp. 137–150).

Theory

  • Cook, S. A. (1971). The complexity of theorem-proving procedures. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC ‘71) (pp. 151–158).

  • Karmarkar, N. (1984). A new polynomial-time algorithm for linear programming. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC ‘84) (pp. 302–311).

  • Edelsbrunner, H., Kirkpatrick, D., & Seidel, R. (1983). On the shape of a set of points in the plane. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 29(4), 551–559.

  • Goldreich, O., Micali, S., & Wigderson, A. (1991). Proofs that yield nothing but their validity or all languages in NP have zero-knowledge proof systems. Journal of the ACM, 38(3), 690–728.

  • Arora, S., & Safra, S. (1998). Probabilistic checking of proofs: A new characterization of NP. Journal of the ACM, 45(1), 70–122.

  • Karger, D. R., Klein, P. N., & Tarjan, R. E. (1995). A randomized linear-time algorithm to find minimum spanning trees. Journal of the ACM, 42(2), 321–328.

  • Dasgupta, S., & Gupta, A. (2003). An elementary proof of a theorem of Johnson and Lindenstrauss. Random Structures & Algorithms, 22(1), 60–65.

AI/ML

  • Hopfield, J. J. (1982). Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 79(8), 2554–2558.

  • Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E., & Williams, R. J. (1986). Learning representations by back-propagating errors. Nature, 323(6088), 533–536.

  • Cortes, C., & Vapnik, V. (1995). Support-vector networks. Machine Learning, 20(3), 273–297.

  • Tibshirani, R. (1996). Regression shrinkage and selection via the lasso. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 58(1), 267–288.

  • Lafferty, J., McCallum, A., & Pereira, F. (2001). Conditional random fields: Probabilistic models for segmenting and labeling sequence data. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2001) (pp. 282–289).

  • Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., & Hinton, G. E. (2012). ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (NeurIPS 2012).

  • Goodfellow, I., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde-Farley, D., Ozair, S., Courville, A., & Bengio, Y. (2014). Generative adversarial networks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27 (NeurIPS 2014).