Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
A Sea Hero Quest to understand our navigation skills
Video games can be a very successful way to do citizen science, getting ordinary people involved in research. Sea Hero Quest is an extremely successful example....
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Robert Weitbrecht and his telecommunication device for the deaf
Robert Weitbrecht was born deaf. He went on to become an award winning electronics scientist who invented the acoustic coupler (or modem) and a teletypewriter (or...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Debugging your sandwich maker
Do you know how to make a sandwich? More importantly do you know how to write down a set of precise, detailed instructions that could tell someone else how to make...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Making mistakes creatively – putting error messages to good use
Have you ever seen a website say “404 – page not found” or something very similar? This can happen if a page has since been moved or deleted, or if you’ve typed...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Always check the text before sending to print!
One of our tasks here at CS4FN is to proofread our magazines before we put them in the post and send them out to our subscribers. We’re not just checking for spelling...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Super-plant supercapacitors
There are a whole range of plants that have been called superfoods for their amazing claimed health benefits because of the nutrients they contain. But plants can...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
The wrong trousers? Not any more!
Inspired by the Wallace & Gromit film ‘The Wrong Trousers’, Johnathan Rossiter of the University of Bristol builds robotic trousers. We could all need them as we...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Language-mangling rude word filters
What we have here on the right is a water butt also known as a rainwater tank. These are large containers which collect rainwater so are an environmentally friendly...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Broadband, by carrier pigeon
There’s a joke, about a Victorian football newspaper reporter, who takes a homing pigeon with him to the match so that he can swiftly return the score to his editor...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Music-making mates for Mortimer
Robots are cool. Fact. But can they keep you interested for more than a short time? Over months? Years even? Louis McCallum of Queen Mary University of London tells...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Philippa Gardner bringing law and order to a wild west
Verified Trustworthy Software The computing world is a wild west, with bugs in software the norm, and malicious people and hostile countries making use of themContinue...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Soft squidgy robots
Think of a robot and you probably think of something hard, metal, solid. Bang into one and it would hurt! But researchers are inventing soft robots, ones that are...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Aaron and the art of art
Aaron is a successful American painter. Aaron’s delicate and colourful compositions on canvas sell well in the American art market, and have been exhibited worldwide...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Sue Sentance: Teaching the world to program
How do you learn to program? How do you best teach programming. When the English school curriculum changed, requiring even primary school students to learn programming...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Ancient Egyptian Numerals
How data is represented is an important part of computer science. There are lots of ways numbers can be represented. Choosing a good representation can make things...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Hiroshi Kawano and his AI abstract artist
Piet Mondrian is famous for his pioneering pure abstract paintings that consist of blocks of colour with thick black borders. This series of works is iconic now...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Piet Mondrian and Image Representation
Piet Mondrian was a pioneer of abstract art. He was a Dutch painter, famous for his minimalist abstract art. His series of grid-based paintings consisted of rectangles...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Maria Cunitz: astronomer and algorithmic thinker
When did women first contribute to the subject we now call Computer Science: developing useful algorithms, for example? Perhaps you would guess Ada Lovelace inContinue...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Maria Kirch: human computer of the 1600s and 1700s
Maria Kirch was a very early female human computer. Working in the late 1600s into the early 1700s, with her husband, she created astronomical tables that while...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)