acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

Blogroll


bg-corner

The last piece of the continental drift puzzle
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...

Digital lollipop: no calories, just electronics!
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Digital lollipop: no calories, just electronics!

by Jane Waite, Queen Mary University of London Can a computer create a taste in your mouth? Imagine scrolling down a list of flavours and then savouring your sweet...

The tale of the mote and the petrel
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...

Fran Allen: Smart Translation
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...

A gendered timeline of technology
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.

Operational Transformation
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...

Engineering a Cloak of Invisibility: Manipulating Light with Metamaterials
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Engineering a Cloak of Invisibility: Manipulating Light with Metamaterials

by Akram Alomainy and Paul Curzon, QMUL You pull a cloak around you and disappear! Reality or science fiction? Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak is surely Hogwarts’...

Manufacturing Magic
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.

Solving problems you care about
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Solving problems you care about

Programmable design challenge: sixth formers on @QMUL's summer internship came up with creative solutions to solve real world problems.

News you can trust
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...

Object-oriented pizza at the end of the universe
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...

Stretching your keyboard – getting more out of QWERTY
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Stretching your keyboard – getting more out of QWERTY

How the QWERTY keyboard has been adapted for languages with different alphabets, using Input Method Editors.

Understanding Parties
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...

Mood Gloves
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...

What the real Pros say
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.

Susan Kare: Icon Draw
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...

Spot the difference – modelling how humans see the world
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Spot the difference – modelling how humans see the world

Can you spot the difference?

Inspiring Wendy Hall
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Inspiring Wendy Hall

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London This article is inspired by a keynote talk Wendy Hall gave at the ITiCSE conference in Madrid, 2008. What inspires...

Barbara Liskov: Byzantine birthdays
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...

Marissa Mayer: Lemons Linking 41 Shades of Blue – A/B Testing
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)

Marissa Mayer: Lemons Linking 41 Shades of Blue – A/B Testing

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London Google, one of the most powerful companies in the world, is famous for being founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin...
Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account