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 TechNews
Finding Trust and Understanding in Autonomous Technologies
Whether autonomous technologies become truly ubiquitous will depend on how much they can be trusted.
From ACM News
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy
The Compiler.
From ACM News
Vr Trauma Surgery 101: Going For the Grisly
Medical students experience the controlled chaos of trauma surgery, virtually.
From ACM News
Hubble Provides Interstellar Road Map For Voyagers' Galactic Trek
NASA's two Voyager spacecraft are hurtling through unexplored territory on their road trip beyond our solar system.
From ACM News
Data Could Be the Next Tech Hot Button For Regulators
Wealth and influence in the technology business have always been about gaining the upper hand in software or the machines that software ran on.
From ACM TechNews
Ua-Developed Avatar Is Helping to Screen New Arrivals at Bucharest Airport
University of Arizona researchers have developed a virtual border agent to question international travelers and flag those that seem suspicious.
From ACM TechNews
'transfer Learning' Jump-Starts New AI Projects
Abstracting and reusing knowledge gleaned from a machine-learning application in other, newer apps--or "transfer learning"--is supplementing other learning methods as the backbone of most data science practices.
From ACM TechNews
ltrasound Tracking Could Be sed to Deanonymize Tor sers
Ultrasounds emitted by ads or JavaScript code hidden on a page accessed through the Tor Browser can deanonymize Tor users by making nearby phones or computers send identity beacons back to advertisers, according to a team of …
From ACM TechNews
Transistor Stretchier Than Skin For ltra-Flexible Wearable Tech
Stanford University researchers have developed a new transistor that can be stretched to twice its length without losing conductivity, making it well-suited for use in small devices worn on the body.
From ACM TechNews
Caring Cyborgs
Social robots designed to interact with people could act as caregivers for the elderly and children, but current models struggle to understand and mimic the subtleties of human interaction.
From ACM TechNews
Attackers Can Make It Impossible to Dial 911
A new cyberattack strategy can block access to 911 emergency services by exploiting vulnerabilities in the system.
From ACM TechNews
Back to Self-Driving School: The Simulator Teaching Vehicle Ais Road Sense
Researchers have developed a simulator employing convolutional neural networks and deep learning to enhance how vehicle artificial intelligence systems manage environmental factors such as obstacles.
From ACM News
Coming From Automakers: Voice Control That Understands You Better
Every once in a while, just for laughs, Kevin Smith-Fagan tries to call a friend of his, Priscilla, using the voice-recognition system in his 2013 Chevrolet Volt.
From ACM News
Pcast Releases Report on Ensuring .s. Leadership in Semiconductors
The Computing Research Association has been involved in shaping public policy of relevance to computing research for more than two decades.
From ACM News
New Camera Can See Around Corners
In the last few years, single-pixel cameras have begun to revolutionize the field of imaging.
From ACM News
Complexity Theory Problem Strikes Back
The legendary graph isomorphism problem may be harder than a 2015 result seemed to suggest.
From ACM News
Your Home Planet, as Seen From Mars
From the most powerful telescope orbiting Mars comes a new view of Earth and its moon, showing continent-size detail on the planet and the relative size of the moon.
From ACM TechNews
Tech Trends in 2017: Energy Harvesting
Some experts see energy harvesting technology as essential to successfully realizing the Internet of Things, and research into micro-scale energy harvesting has gained momentum in the last few years.
From ACM TechNews
Man vs. AI Machine in Texas Hold'em Matchup
Four top professional poker players will challenge an artificial intelligence system in a 20-day Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em poker tournament billed as an "epic rematch" by the system's developers at Carnegie Mellon University…
From ACM TechNews
States Wire p Roads as Cars Get Smarter
To prepare for the day when self-driving cars will travel on technology-aided roads, U.S. state transit planners aim to outfit those roadways with fiber optics, cameras, and linked signal devices to make traffic safer and more…
From ACM TechNews
Move Over Bitcoin--MIT Cryptographer Silvio Micali and His Public Ledger Algorand…the Future of Blockchain?
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Silvio Micali recently published a paper describing a decentralized, secure way to manage a shared ledger that provides a solution to the Byzantine General's problem.
From ACM TechNews
CLA Mathematicians Bring Ocean to Life For Disney's 'moana'
University of California, Los Angeles researchers applied their knowledge of math, physics, and computer science to help animate "Moana," a three-dimensional computer-animated Disney film in which the ocean is a character.
From ACM News
Cyberwar For Sale
On the morning of May 18, 2014, Violeta Lagunes was perplexed by a series of strange messages that appeared in her Gmail inbox.
From ACM News
Nasa Chooses Two Asteroid Missions Instead of a Venus Return
For the planetary science community, the day when NASA makes the final call on new Solar System exploration missions always feels bittersweet.
From ACM News
The .s. Goes All-In on Tech Inclusion
A wave of U.S. federal funding aims to make the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields more inclusive.
From ACM News
The Biggest Digital Map of the Cosmos Ever Made
On the summit of Haleakala, a dormant volcano on the island of Maui in Hawaii, a telescope began clicking pictures of the night sky in 2010.
From ACM TechNews
Drones Inspired By Insects Could Keep Flying Even When Damaged
Researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands programmed a robotic fly to mimic insects with different levels of wing damage, enabling them to examine movements beyond the range of a real fly's behavior.
From ACM TechNews
2016 Robotics Roadmap and the National Robotics Initiative 2.0
An updated version of the 2009 "A Roadmap for U.S. Robotics, From Internet to Robotics" report was released in November, expanding on the topics discussed in the original 2009 roadmap and addressing the areas of public safety…
From ACM TechNews
Taming Oceans of Data With New Visualization Techniques
Princeton University researchers say they have transformed complex modeling data of the global ocean into an animated movie that shows how the Earth's heating and cooling system changes over time.
From ACM TechNews
Nanowire 'inks' Enable Paper-Based Printable Electronics
Electrons zip through films made of silver nanowires much easier than films made from other shapes, such as nanospheres or microflakes, according to Duke University scientists.