Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2017
From ACM News
Hackers Trigger Yet Another Power Outage in Ukraine
From ACM News
A Darker Theme in Obama's Farewell: Automation Can Divide S
Underneath the nostalgia and hope in President Obama's farewell address Tuesday night was a darker theme: the struggle to help the people on the losing end of technological change.
From ACM TechNews
5 State Policies to Sustain Computer Science Education
The Southern Regional Education Board recently convened a group of U.S. state legislators and secondary and postsecondary education leaders to develop policies and actions that positively support computer science education.
From ACM TechNews
Army of 350,000 Star Wars Bots Found Lurking on Twitter
Researchers at University College London in the U.K. discovered a Twitter botnet that could be comprised of more than 350,000 accounts.
From ACM TechNews
How Northeastern Plans to Reach Equal Male-Female Computer Science Enrollment By 2021
Carla Brodley, dean of Northeastern University's College of Computer and Information Science, aims to reach an equal male/female balance in computer science enrollment by 2021.
From ACM TechNews
Graphene Temporary Tattoo Tracks Vital Signs
University of Texas at Austin researchers are developing graphene-based health sensors that stick to a person's skin like a temporary tattoo and take measurements with the same precision as conventional medical equipment.
From ACM TechNews
Air Force Tests Ibm's Brain-Inspired Chip as an Aerial Tank Spotter
The U.S. Air Force Research Lab is exploring whether brain-inspired computer chips could give satellites, aircraft, and drones the ability to automatically identify vehicles.
From ACM TechNews
Nram Set to Spark a 'holy War' Among Memory Technologies
A non-volatile memory technology based on carbon nanotubes could be more disruptive to enterprise storage, servers, and consumer electronics than flash memory when it is commercialized next year.
From ACM News
N.s.a. Gets More Latitude to Share Intercepted Communications
In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government's 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy…
From ACM News
Poker Play Begins in 'brains vs. Ai: Upping the Ante'
Play began Jan. 11 for "Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante," a competition at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh that pits a Carnegie Mellon University artificial intelligence called Libratus against four of the world's…
From ACM News
Robots Will Take Jobs, but Not as Fast as Some Fear, New Report Says
The march of automation will displace jobs more gradually than some alarming forecasts suggest.
From ACM News
Huygens: 'ground Truth' From an Alien Moon
After a two-and-a-half-hour descent, the metallic, saucer-shaped spacecraft came to rest with a thud on a dark floodplain covered in cobbles of water ice, in temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing.
From ACM News
Stepping Stones in an Ocean of Data
An interview with science writer, entrepreneur, and National Public Radio’s “Math Guy,” Keith Devlin.
From ACM News
Dod Successfully Tests Terrifying Swarm of 104 Micro-Drones
The Department of Defense has released video of a test of swarming drones conducted in the skies over the US Navy's test range at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California.
From ACM TechNews
New Framework Could Help Online Addicts Reduce Their sage
Binghamton University researchers have developed a new computer model that could help Internet addicts realize their usage is a problem and reduce it.
From ACM TechNews
Watch These Mini-Robots Self-Assemble Into Different Shapes
Harvard University's Self-Organizing Systems Research group has developed a "large-scale robot collective" that can self-assemble into different shapes.
From ACM TechNews
DARPA Wants to Create Secure Data-Sharing Tech
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is launching the Secure Handhelds on Assured Resilient networks at the tactical Edge project.
From ACM TechNews
Semiconductor Eyed For Next-Generation 'power Electronics'
Purdue University researchers have demonstrated the high-performance potential of an experimental transistor made of beta gallium oxide.
From ACM Opinion
He Helped Create the 'google Brain.' Here's What He Thinks About AI Now
Trucks that can drive themselves along delivery routes. Computers capable of defeating world champions in a notoriously complex game. Apps that can translate sentences with near human-like accuracy.
From ACM News
Robots Will Destroy Our Jobs, and We're Not Ready For It
The McDonald's on the corner of Third Avenue and 58th Street in New York City doesn/t look all that different from any of the fast-food chain's other locations across the country.
From ACM News
Black Holes Hide in Our Cosmic Backyard
Monster black holes sometimes lurk behind gas and dust, hiding from the gaze of most telescopes. But they give themselves away when material they feed on emits high-energy X-rays that NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope…
From ACM TechNews
Innovators Wanted: Machine Learning, Iot Jobs on the Rise
The job market for machine learning and artificial intelligence-related positions is heating up.
From ACM TechNews
Jill Watson, Round Three
The Georgia Institute of Technology is beginning its third semester using a virtual teaching assistant system in an online course about artificial intelligence.
From ACM TechNews
Searching Deep and Dark: Building a Google For the Less Visible Parts of the Web
Apache Tika could help with the effort to teach computers to recognize, index, and search all the different types of material that is available online.
From ACM TechNews
Taking Graphics Cards Beyond Gaming
A new mathematical solver enables the graphics cards found in gaming computers to solve computationally intensive mathematical problems.
From ACM TechNews
New Camera Can See Around Corners
Researchers at Xi'an Jiaotong University in China have built a single-pixel camera that can capture images of objects even when they are not in direct view.
From ACM News
Air Force Tests Ibm's Brain-Inspired Chip as an Aerial Tank Spotter
Satellites, aircraft, and growing numbers of drones—the U.S. Air Force has a lot of electronic eyes in the sky.
From ACM News
The Many-Moons Theory
Unbeknownst to most earthlings, the moon is experiencing a crisis.
From ACM TechNews
Utsa Study Shows How Phishing Scams Thrive on Overconfidence
University of Texas at San Antonio researchers have examined overconfidence in detecting phishing emails, based on the theory that most people believe they are smarter than the criminals behind these schemes.
From ACM TechNews
Additive Manufacturing: A New Twist For Stretchable Electronics?
Missouri University of Science & Technology researchers are studying electronic components that can be elongated or twisted, which could soon be used to power a range of electronic devices.