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An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.


Can Amazon Echo Help Solve a Murder? Police Will Soon Find Out.
From ACM News

Can Amazon Echo Help Solve a Murder? Police Will Soon Find Out.

A 2015 Arkansas murder case that had raised privacy questions surrounding "always-on" electronic home devices took a step forward last week after Amazon agreed...

New Nasa Radar Technique Finds Lost Lunar Spacecraft
From ACM News

New Nasa Radar Technique Finds Lost Lunar Spacecraft

Finding derelict spacecraft and space debris in Earth's orbit can be a technological challenge.

Magnetic Hard Drives Go Atomic
From ACM News

Magnetic Hard Drives Go Atomic

Chop a magnet in two, and it becomes two smaller magnets.

How the Cia's Hacking Hoard Makes Everyone Less Secure
From ACM News

How the Cia's Hacking Hoard Makes Everyone Less Secure

When Wikileaks yesterday released a trove of documents purporting to show how the CIA hacks everything from smartphones to PCs to smart televisions, the agency's...

Steering a Turtle With Your Thoughts
From ACM TechNews

Steering a Turtle With Your Thoughts

Researchers have developed a brain-computer interface that can control a turtle using human thought.

Language Learning Robot Could Advance Autonomous Vehicles, Help Emergency Responders in the Future
From ACM TechNews

Language Learning Robot Could Advance Autonomous Vehicles, Help Emergency Responders in the Future

Researchers have developed algorithms that enable a wheeled robot to learn the meanings of words from sentences that describe example paths taken by the robot,...

Quantum Microscope Offers Mri For Molecules
From ACM News

Quantum Microscope Offers Mri For Molecules

A quantum microscope that uses a sensor built from diamonds could allow researchers to study such nanoscale mysteries as how DNA folds in a cell, why drugs work...

Wikileaks: The CIA Is Using Popular Tvs, Smartphones and Cars to Spy on Their Owners
From ACM News

Wikileaks: The CIA Is Using Popular Tvs, Smartphones and Cars to Spy on Their Owners

The latest revelations about U.S. government's powerful hacking tools potentially takes surveillance right into the homes and hip pockets of billions of users worldwide...

How Hard Is It to Get an Intelligence Wiretap? Pretty Hard. 
From ACM News

How Hard Is It to Get an Intelligence Wiretap? Pretty Hard. 

Wiretaps on Americans in foreign intelligence investigations are not easy to get. And if you're a candidate for president, it's even harder. 

Modeling Gun Violence as a Contagion
From ACM News

Modeling Gun Violence as a Contagion

Using data to try to keep people from getting shot.

­sing Game Theory to Predict Cyberattacks on Elections and Voting Machines
From ACM TechNews

­sing Game Theory to Predict Cyberattacks on Elections and Voting Machines

An algorithm based on game theory can be used to protect against efforts to tamper with election results.

Baxter the Robot Fixes Its Mistakes By Reading Your Mind
From ACM News

Baxter the Robot Fixes Its Mistakes By Reading Your Mind

Baxter is but a child, with bright eyes and a subtle grin.

To Keep Tor Hack Source Code Secret, Doj Dismisses Child Porn Case
From ACM News

To Keep Tor Hack Source Code Secret, Doj Dismisses Child Porn Case

Rather than share the now-classified technological means that investigators used to locate a child porn suspect, federal prosecutors in Washington state have ...

Artificial Data Give the Same Results as Real Data--Without Compromising Privacy
From ACM TechNews

Artificial Data Give the Same Results as Real Data--Without Compromising Privacy

The Synthetic Data Vault is a new machine-learning system that automatically creates synthetic data, which can be used in data science efforts that otherwise would...

Software Engineers Have Figured Out a Way to Turn Charts Into Music For the Blind
From ACM TechNews

Software Engineers Have Figured Out a Way to Turn Charts Into Music For the Blind

Legally blind SAS software engineer Ed Summers in February guided the company's release of a free browser plug-in that scans Web pages for graphs or charts and...

Kids Want Parental Help With Online Risk, but Fear Parental Freak Outs
From ACM TechNews

Kids Want Parental Help With Online Risk, but Fear Parental Freak Outs

Researchers found teens rarely talked to their parents about potentially risky online experiences.

Social Media Algorithm Says Trump 'tweets Like a Bachelor'
From ACM TechNews

Social Media Algorithm Says Trump 'tweets Like a Bachelor'

Researchers have developed an algorithm that predicts a user's marital status with 86% accuracy using data from Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram.

Singing Posters and Talking Shirts: Uw Engineers Turn Everyday Objects Into Fm Radio Stations
From ACM TechNews

Singing Posters and Talking Shirts: Uw Engineers Turn Everyday Objects Into Fm Radio Stations

Researchers are enabling everyday objects to communicate directly with smartphones and car radios and transmit information to them.

How Rival Bots Battled Their Way to Poker Supremacy
From ACM News

How Rival Bots Battled Their Way to Poker Supremacy

A complex variant of poker is the latest game to be mastered by artificial intelligence (AI). And it has been conquered not once, but twice, by two rival bots developed...

Nasa Orbiter Steers Clear of Mars Moon Phobos
From ACM News

Nasa Orbiter Steers Clear of Mars Moon Phobos

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft performed a previously unscheduled maneuver this week to avoid a collision in the near future with Mars' moon Phobos.
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