Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2020
From ACM TechNews
Ubisoft Uses AI to Teach a Car to Drive Itself in Racing Game
Ubisoft is testing a reinforcement-learning algorithm that can manage discrete, continuous video game actions in a principled, predictable manner.
From ACM TechNews
Simplifying How Scientists Share Data
Researchers have developed an open-source data-management system that will help scientists share data with each other.
From ACM News
In Memoriam Peter T. Kirstein: 1933-2020
Kirstein often was recognized as the 'father of the European Internet.'
From ACM TechNews
Facebook Bans 'Deepfake' Videos
Facebook has banned doctored videos, or deepfakes, designed to spread misinformation as the 2020 U.S. presidential election approaches.
From ACM TechNews
A Lazy Fix 20 Years Ago Means the Y2K Bug Is Taking Down Computers Now
A glitch connected to the Y2K bug addressed two decades ago is crashing payment systems and computers, due to a poor fix.
From ACM TechNews
Dating Apps Need Women, Advertisers Need Diversity. AI Companies Offer a Solution: Fake People
Artificial intelligence startups are marketing images of computer-generated faces created without the use of actual people.
From ACM TechNews
White House Proposes Guidelines for Regulating Use of AI
The Trump administration is proposing new federal rules for regulating the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the private sector.
From ACM TechNews
Robotic Device Helps Spine Injury Patients Sit More Comfortably
Columbia University researchers have built a robotic device to assist and train people with spinal cord injuries to sit with greater stability, which could help with recovery.
From ACM News
Message from the ACM President Regarding Open Access
ACM is committed to a sustainable future where all peer-reviewed scholarly articles will be Open Access.
From ACM News
Demanding the Truth
The role of social media in stopping fake news.
From ACM TechNews
Baidu Has Trick for Teaching AI the Meaning of Language
Chinese technology company Baidu outperformed Microsoft and Google in the General Language Understanding Evaluation, a benchmark for artificial intelligence comprehension of human language.
From ACM TechNews
5G Underwhelms in Its First Big Test
Users of 5G services say the first implementation of the next-generation network technology in South Korea has fallen short of expectations.
From ACM News
Donald Knuth on Algorithms, Complexity, and The Art of Computer Programming
Computer scientist Donald Knuth discusses Alan Turing, neural networks, machine learning, and other topics from ant colonies and human cognition.
From ACM News
Silicon Valley's Newest Rival: The Banks of the Hudson
Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google will soon have 20,000 workers in New York City, many in offices on the West Side.
From ACM TechNews
Gym Class Without the Gym? With Technology, It's Catching On
Wearable fitness trackers are helping make online physical education more popular for students by adding the dimension of accountability.
From ACM TechNews
On University of Texas at Dallas' Growing Campus, Meal-Delivering Robots Make Splashy Debut
A fleet of cooler-shaped autonomous robots has started delivering snacks and meals at the University of Texas at Dallas.
From ACM TechNews
People Too Trusting of Virtual Assistants
Researchers have found that people tend to share increasingly more with online agents because of their tendency to assign them personalities and physical features like age, facial expressions, and hairstyles.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Try to Teach Computers to Forecast Traffic Like the Weather
Netherlands-based location/transportation data supplier Here Technologies has pushed researchers to apply big-data techniques to films of traffic in Berlin, Istanbul, and Moscow, to predict traffic.
From ACM News
Chuck Peddle's $25 Microprocessor Ignited Computer Market
Engineer led team whose cheap device, launched in 1975, made desktop machines affordable.
From ACM News
A Computer Made From DNA Can Compute the Square Root of 900
A computer made from strands of DNA in a test tube can calculate the square root of numbers up to 900.
From ACM News
Roomba Mistaken For a Burglar by Spooked Homeowners
Police called to investigate possible home intruders found a hard-working robotic vacuum instead.
From ACM TechNews
Finding a Good Read Among Billions of Choices
MIT and IBM researchers have developed a new text-analysis method for rapidly narrowing down reading material from billions of online options.
From ACM TechNews
Chinese Hacker Group Caught Bypassing 2FA
Dutch cybersecurity firm Fox-IT said in a report that a hacker group associated with the Chinese government has been bypassing two-factor authentication (2FA) in a recent series of attacks.
From Communications of the ACM
Multiplication Hits the Speed Limit
A problem "around since antiquity" may have been resolved by a new algorithm.
From Communications of the ACM
Will Deepfakes Do Deep Damage?
The ability to produce fake videos that appear amazingly real is here. Researchers are now developing ways to detect and prevent them.
From Communications of the ACM
How the Internet Spans the Globe
The modern Internet is made possible by hundreds of thousands of miles of undersea cables.