Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2018
From ACM TechNews
Smart Buildings That Can Manage Our Electricity Needs
Researchers have developed a system to collect data on consumers' energy usage and comfort within buildings.
From ACM Careers
Big Bets on A.i. Open a New Frontier For Chip Start-ps, Too
For years, tech industry financiers showed little interest in start-up companies that made computer chips.
From ACM News
The James Webb Space Telescope Has Emerged from the Freezer
After spending three months at a temperature of just 20 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, the massive James Webb Space Telescope emerged from a large vacuum chamber at the end of 2017. Now, after reviewing data from testing…
From ACM News
Geocarb: A New View of Carbon Over the Americas
A new NASA Earth science mission in the early stages of design may achieve a transformational advance in our understanding of the global carbon cycle by mapping concentrations of key carbon gases from a new vantage point: geostationary…
From ACM TechNews
Wavy Transistors That Vertically Gain Width Without Increasing Their On-Chip Footprint For Future Flexible Displays
Researchers say they have developed a unique transistor architecture that improves the performance of display circuitry in next-generation mobile electronics.
From ACM TechNews
Incorporating Social Media Reviews Can Improve Surveillance of Restaurant Health Problems
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has used a system that tracks food-borne illness via online Yelp restaurant reviews to identify instances of food-borne illness in restaurants.
From ACM TechNews
Exascale a 'main Priority' For Doe
Exascale computing is a priority for the U.S. Department of Energy, which last year alloted $258 million to research the hardware, software, and applications needed to achieve it.
From ACM News
Are International Students Still Coming to the .s.a.?
Is the U.S. political situation, including its on-again/off-again immigration bans, scaring away foreign students?
From ACM News
In ‘listening In,’ a Surveillance Expert Warns That No Secret Is Safe
Smartphones, smart cars, smart fridges: all are connected to the Web, and hackers and governments alike are all too eager to peer inside.
From ACM News
Big Brother on Wheels: Why Your Car Company May Know More About You Than Your Spouse.
Daniel Dunn was about to sign a lease for a Honda Fit last year when a detail buried in the lengthy agreement caught his eye.
From ACM News
Bbva Foundation Recognizes Goldwasser, Micali, Rivest, Shamir, For Enabling a Secure Digital Society
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category goes to Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Ronald Rivest and Adi Shamir.
From ACM News
How to See a Memory
For someone who's not a Sherlock superfan, cognitive neuroscientist Janice Chen knows the BBC's hit detective drama better than most.
From ACM News
Nasa Test Proves Pulsars Can Function as a Celestial Gps
From its perch aboard the International Space Station, a NASA experiment has shown how future missions might navigate their way through deep space.
From ACM TechNews
Developing a Secure, n-Hackable Net
A team of researchers say they have developed a technique of securely communicating among three or more quantum devices, regardless of who made them.
From ACM TechNews
These States Embraced Computer Science Education in 2017
Schools across the U.S. started to embrace computer science last year, with several states now moving ahead with legislation to make computer science education mandatory.
From ACM TechNews
'holostream' Allows High-Quality Wireless 3D Video Communications
Holostream is a new platform enabling high-quality three-dimensional video communications on mobile devices.
From ACM TechNews
Making the Internet of Things Possible With a New Breed of 'memristors'
Researchers at Aalto University in Finland say they have designed and fabricated the building blocks of future components for neuromorphic computers.
From ACM TechNews
New Discovery Could Improve Brain-Like Memory and Computing
Researchers say they have demonstrated the existence of a new type of magnetoresistance involving topological insulators that could improve computing and computer storage.
From ACM News
Can We Make a Hack-Proof Internet with Quantum Physics?
Is it possible to build a network that's impossible to hack? Quantum physicists believe it might.
From ACM News
Nasa Space Telescopes Provide a 3D Journey Through the Orion Nebula
Astronomers and visualization specialists from NASA's Universe of Learning program have combined visible and infrared vision of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to create an unprecedented, three-dimensional, fly-through…
From ACM News
Silicon Gains Ground in Quantum-Computing Race
In the next few weeks, a research group at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands expects to receive an important package. Its contents promise to increase competition in the race to produce useful quantum computers…
From ACM TechNews
Ornl Researchers se Titan to Accelerate Design, Training of Deep-Learning Networks
Combining artificial intelligence with high-performance computing yielded a peak speed of 20 petaflops in the creation and training of deep-learning networks on Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer.
From ACM TechNews
Student Device Detects Potholes, Car Crashes
Researchers say they have developed a device that can detect car crashes and alert emergency services.
From ACM TechNews
This AI Hunts Poachers
Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security is an artificial intelligence program that uses machine learning algorithms to predict where poaching is likely to occur.
From ACM TechNews
Trojan Team's Bias-Busting App Wins Third Prize at Facebook Global Hackathon
Team Artemis of the University of Southern California won third prize at the 2017 Facebook Global Hackathon for a virtual reality tool designed to rid the workplace of gender bias.
From ACM Careers
Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley For Riches Back Home
A few years ago, Wang Yi was living the American dream. He had graduated from Princeton, landed a job at Google and bought a spacious condo in Silicon Valley.
From ACM News
"when Performance Is Pursued Above All"
Long-overlooked CPU vulnerabilities have come to light.
From ACM News
When Wi-Fi Won't Work, Let Sound Carry Your Data
If you've ever struggled to pair your phone with a Bluetooth speaker or set up a wireless printer, you know that it's often easier to connect to a server halfway around the world than to a gadget across the room.
From ACM Opinion
Meltdown and Spectre Expose the Dark Side of Superfast Computers
Hundreds of gadget makers and software companies at this week's annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas are staking the success of their newest products on the latest and greatest processors from Intel, AMD, ARM and…
From ACM TechNews
A New AI That Detects 'deception' May Bring an End to Lying as We Know It
The Deception Analysis and Reasoning Engine uses artificial intelligence to autonomously detect deception in courtroom trial videos.