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)
Mary Clem: getting it right
Mary Clem was a pioneer of dependable computing long before the first computers existed. She was a computer herself, but became more like a programmer.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Black in Data
Careers do not have to be decided on from day one. You can end up in a good place in a roundabout way. That is what happened to Sadiqah Musa, and now she is helping...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Reclaim your name
In 2021 the Canadian government announced that Indigenous people would be allowed to use their ancestral family names on government-issued identity documents. For...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Al-Jazari: the father of robotics
Science fiction films are full of humanoid robots acting as servants, workers, friends or colleagues. The first were created during the Islamic Golden Age, a thousand...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
A PC Success
We have moved on to smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, but for 30 years the desktop computer ruled, and originally not just any desktop computer, the IBM PC...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
In space no one can hear you …
Johanna Lucht could do maths before she learned language. Why? Because she was born deaf and there was little support for deaf people where she lived. Despite,...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
The last piece of the continental drift puzzle
A computer helped provide the final piece in the puzzle of how the continents formed and moved around. It gave a convincing demonstration that the Americas, Europe...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
The tale of the mote and the petrel
Biology and computer science can meet in some unexpected, not to mention inhospitable, places. Who would have thought that the chemical soup in the nests of Petrels...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Fran Allen: Smart Translation
Computers don't understand the instructions they are given in programs. They have to translate them in to actual computer languages first. Fran Allen won the top...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
A gendered timeline of technology
Women have played a gigantic role in the history of computing. Their ideas form the backbone to modern technology, though that has not always been obvious.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Operational Transformation
How do online word processing programs manage to allow two or more people to change the same document at the same time without getting in a complete muddle? One...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Manufacturing Magic
Can computers lend a creative hand to the production of new magic tricks? That's a question Howard Williams and Peter McOwan wrestled with.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
News you can trust
Having reliable news matters. Artificial Intelligence expert Sameena Shah gave news provider Thomson Reuters a head start with her Artificial Intelligence system...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Object-oriented pizza at the end of the universe
Object-oriented programming is a popular kind of programming. To understand what it is all about it can help to think about cooking a meal (Hitchhiker's Guide to...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Understanding Parties
Kavin Narasimhan studied how people move and form groups at parties, creating realistic computer models of what is going on. Her work could help avatars and robots...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Mood Gloves
When we watch a film, it's not just the pictures that make the experience, it's the soundtrack too. The music and sound effects play a big part in setting the mood...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
What the real Pros say
Here is what some (female) computer scientists and electronic engineers said that they most liked about their job and the subject.
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Susan Kare: Icon Draw
Graphical User Interfaces completely changed the way we used computers. A key to their success were clear and simple icons that had clear meanings. They were thanks...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Barbara Liskov: Byzantine birthdays
You may not think of computers as argumentative, but some of them do bicker quite a lot, and for good reason. They often need to, including to get things right...
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)