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
DARPA Launches Subterranean Challenge to Improve nderground Ops
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Subterranean Challenge asks participants to develop systems that could help humans map, traverse, and search underground locations.
From ACM TechNews
Physicists Take First Step Toward Cell-Sized Robots
Researchers say they have developed a microscale robot exoskeleton that can quickly change its shape upon sensing chemical or thermal changes in the surrounding environment.
From ACM TechNews
Your Phone Will Know You Better Than Your Friends Do, U of T Researcher Predicts
Richard Zemel at the University of Toronto in Canada discusses artificial intelligence developments he anticipates for the year ahead.
From ACM News
Meltdown and Spectre: Here's What Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Others Are Doing About It
The Meltdown and Spectre flaws—two related vulnerabilities that enable a wide range of information disclosure from every mainstream processor, with particularly severe flaws for Intel and some ARM chips—were originally revealed…
From ACM News
Russia and Venezuela's Plan to Sidestep Sanctions: Virtual Currencies
Russian and Venezuelan officials are hoping virtual currencies can help their countries make an end run around American sanctions.
From ACM TechNews
Hierarchical Opportunistic Routing With Moderate Clustering For Ad Hoc Networks
Researchers at the University of Electro Communications, Tokyo have developed a novel routing paradigm that is a broadcast-based forwarding scheme and does not rely on a specific route to improve route diversity and end-to-end…
From ACM TechNews
A Giant Technical Leap in Speech Recognition
Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas are developing speech-processing technology to transcribe audio conversations between astronauts, mission-control specialists, and back-room support staff during the Apollo moon…
From ACM TechNews
To Explore Cures For Diseases Like Alzheimer's, Msu Researchers Massage Brain Cells
Researchers at Montana State University are gently stretching small branches of individual rat neurons with magnets to gain insights on brain function and deterioration in the pursuit of new treatments and cures for degenerative…
From ACM TechNews
Login Managers Abused By Third-Party Scripts For Tracking Purposes
Researchers at Princeton University have found that Web trackers are exploiting browser login managers, and that a long-known vulnerability is being abused by third-party scripts for tracking websites.
From ACM News
A Critical Intel Flaw Breaks Basic Security For Most Computers
One of the most basic premises of computer security is isolation: If you run somebody else's sketchy code as an untrusted process on your machine, you should restrict it to its own tightly sealed playpen.
From ACM News
The Labs that Protect Against Online Warfare
Several months after the WannaCry cyber-attack, much of the world still seems to be asleep to the potential catastrophic effects of cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure systems.
From ACM News
How Do You Vote? 50 Million Google Images Give a Clue
What vehicle is most strongly associated with Republican voting districts? Extended-cab pickup trucks. For Democratic districts? Sedans.
From ACM News
Deep Learning Sharpens Views of Cells and Genes
Eyes are said to be the window to the soul—but researchers at Google see them as indicators of a person's health.
From ACM TechNews
Wisdom of the Crowd Accurately Predicts Supreme Court Decisions
Researchers say they have analyzed how well crowdsourcing can predict decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court by crunching data from the online FantasySCOTUS league.
From ACM TechNews
Does Your Phone Know If You're Sick?
A Notre Dame University professor suggests in the next two years there will be significant progress in incorporating software into smartphones to assess one's health.
From ACM TechNews
AI Early Diagnosis Could Save Heart and Cancer Patients
Ultromics is a new artificial intelligence system that can diagnose heart scans with much greater accuracy than conventional methods, picking up details physicians may overlook.
From ACM TechNews
It's Time to Weave Computational Thinking Into K-12
A new study stresses the need for computational thinking to be integrated across K-12 school curriculums.
From ACM TechNews
How an AI 'cat-and-Mouse Game' Generates Believable Fake Photos
A new artificial intelligence system analyzes thousands of celebrity photos, infers common patterns, and generates new images that are similar.
From Communications of the ACM
Smartphone Science
A new generation of portable scientific instruments is taking shape, thanks to mobile processors and innovative data-gathering techniques.
From Communications of the ACM
The New Jobs
As automation takes on more and more tasks, what will human workers do?
From Communications of the ACM
Feeling Sounds, Hearing Sights
A new wave of sensory substitution devices work to assist people who are blind or deaf.