Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2011
From ACM TechNews
Computer Simulations For Safer Planes
European researchers are exploring the use of computer simulation in the building of aircraft. Forty-four partners from 11 countries are measuring aircraft parts to create a numerical simulation of a complete helicopter at the…
From ACM TechNews
U.s. Revamps Science, Technology Standard-Setting Efforts
As part of the America Competes Reauthorization Act of 2010, the U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology has been instructed to expand cooperation with the private sector to develop standards for key technologies…
From ACM TechNews
Madrid Opts For Robotics For Its Citizens Services
The Autonomous Community of Madrid is sponsoring Robocity2030, a consortium aimed at developing new applications for service robots to help improve humans' quality of life. The group includes more than 60 Ph.D.s and 100 researchers…
From ACM News
Breaking Bottlenecks
A new algorithm enables much faster dissemination of information through self-organizing networks with a few scattered choke points.
From ACM News
Smart Contact Lenses For Health and Head-up Displays
Lenses that monitor eye health are on the way, and in-eye 3D image displays are being developed too—welcome to the world of augmented vision.
From ACM News
What to Expect at CES 2012
A preview of consumer electronics in the years to come.
From ACM News
Scaling p: The Future of Nanoscience
Four prominent scientists—David Awschalom of UCSB; Angela Belcher of MIT; Donald Eigler of IBM Almaden Research Center; and Michael Roukes of Caltech—discuss the future of nanoscience in the next 50 years.
From ACM TechNews
U.s. Patent Awards Up 31 Percent in 2010
The number of U.S. patent awards rose 31 percent in 2010, with the U.S. Patent Office issuing a record 219,614 patents. "The number of grants continues to grow even after a period of economic downturn," says IFI Claims Patent…
From ACM TechNews
White House Calls For Internet Identity Ecosystem to Protect Online Users
The Obama administration has announced a plan to establish an Internet identity ecosystem that will lower the incidence of fraud and identity theft while making online transactions simpler.
From ACM Opinion
Shigeru Miyamoto: Master of Play
The many worlds of a video-game artist.
From ACM News
Intel's Truce with Nvidia Shows Industry's Shifts
Intel Corp.'s decision to pay Nvidia Corp. $1.5 billion for the right to its patents highlights the seismic shifts the semiconductor industry is undergoing.
From ACM News
NFL Fighting Head Injuries with Technology
The NFL is turning to technology to both measure and mitigate pro football's effect on players' brains, pushing into unexplored territory as officials try to protect personnel from the violence of the sport.
From ACM News
Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street
Last spring, Dow Jones launched a new service called Lexicon, which sends real-time financial news to professional investors. This in itself is not surprising. The company behind The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires…
From ACM TechNews
Ces: The Future of Interfaces
People are no longer limited to interacting with computers via a mouse and keyboard. HCI experts say that new applications are driving new interfaces—smartphones with touchscreens, voice-controlled entertainment systems, and…
From ACM TechNews
1986 Privacy Law Is Outrun By the Web
Rising use of the Internet has overtaken the main statute governing communication privacy, according to many Web companies and consumer proponents, who say they must contend with a hodgepodge of standards that the courts have…
From ACM TechNews
Text-Based Video Navigation
The MIT150 website, celebrating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's 150th anniversary, offers a collection of video interviews that makes use of a new navigation interface that enables viewers to browse through video…
From ACM TechNews
Fcc Challenges App Makers to Protect Open Internet
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has launched the Open Internet Challenge, which calls on software developers to create applications that will help Internet users determine when their Internet service provider (ISP)…
From ACM TechNews
Local Coders Help Improve Government Functions
Local software programmers are helping to enhance U.S. government functions through efforts such as Code for America, a fellowship program that matches cities with coders to produce easily transferable applications for cities…
From ACM TechNews
Mimic-Bots Learn to Do As We Do
Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea have developed a robotic system that responds to the actions of the person confronting it. The robot observes the person's actions and responds…
From ACM TechNews
How New COMPETES Science Law Broadens NSF Education Programs
The reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act outlines program changes designed to guarantee that all the elements of the U.S. National Science Foundation are involved in training the next generation of researchers and enhancing…
From ACM News
CES: Smart Grid Outshines Green Tech at CES
Consumer electronics companies used to tout the energy efficiency of individual gadgets. Now many want to make your whole house more efficient.
From ACM TechNews
Epitaxial Graphene Shows Promise For Replacing Silicon in Electronics
Georgia Tech researchers recently created an array of 10,000 top-gated transistors on a 0.24-square centimeter chip, believed to be the highest density graphene device ever created. They utilized a new technique involving templates…
From ACM TechNews
Biometrics For Care Environments
U.K. researchers are exploring user-friendly ways to enable telecare systems and applications to recognize individuals from their facial and vocal characteristics. They want to make it easier for individuals receiving health…
From ACM News
Virtual Reality Maps
Images from public photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Google are being used by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington to help build accurate 3-D models of the real world.
From ACM TechNews
Gigapixel Cameras Create Highly Revealing Snapshots
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been developing a camera that can take gigapixel images with one snapshot. Columbia University researchers are developing three, single-snapshot gigapixel camera designs. …
From ACM TechNews
European Exascale Project Drives Toward Next Supercomputing Milestone
The goal of the European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI) is to help effect the migration from petascale to exascale systems over the next 10 years by bringing together industry and government organizations.
From ACM TechNews
Better Benchmarking For Supercomputers
Many computer scientists say the High-Performance Linpack test is not the best performance measurement for the world's top supercomputers. The new Graph500 benchmark rates supercomputers based on gigateps instead of petaflops…
From ACM TechNews
Iit-M to Aid Research on Innovative Projects
IIT-Madras will establish an interdisciplinary center of excellence for facilitating research on embedded systems, very large scale integration design, and enabling technologies. Partnerships will be formed with industrial players…
From ACM TechNews
2011: The Year of the Personal Robot?
Willow Garage's PR2 personal robot platform, released last year, could lead to new advances in robotic technology. Georgia Tech professor Charles Kemp. Kemp and his researchers are one of 16 teams that experimented with the…
From ACM TechNews
Biological Evolution Gives Cues to Stronger Computer Software
The universities of Virginia and New Mexico recently received a $3.2 million U.S. DARPA grant to develop more resilient software systems based on the biological concepts of immunity and evolution, with the goal of stopping cyberattacks…