Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2023
From ACM News
This Startup Is Using AI to Unearth New Smells
Google Research spinout Osmo wants to find substitutes for hard-to-source aromas. The tech could inspire new perfumes—and help combat mosquito-borne diseases.
From ACM TechNews
Muscle-Powered Robots Have Freedom of Movement
Researchers collaborated on the construction of remote-controlled electronic biological robots powered by organic muscles.
From ACM TechNews
Art, AI Collide in Landmark Legal Dispute
Human artists and artificial intelligence companies are disputing generative AI-intellectual property in a landmark legal case.
From ACM TechNews
LG, Whirlpool Target Customers Disconnected from 'Smart' Appliances
Appliance manufacturers LG Electronics and Whirlpool are trying to entice customers whose "smart" appliances are not connected to the Internet to embrace the technology.
From ACM News
Justice Department Sues Google for Monopolizing Digital Advertising Technologies
Justice Department accuses Google of subverting competition in Internet advertising technologies through serial acquisitions and anticompetitive auction manipulation.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Create Portal of Weird, Wonderful Fish Sounds
Researchers developed an online portal of fish sound information and a catalogue of recordings, featuring data on 989 fish species found to produce active sounds.
From ACM TechNews
Viral ChatGPT Spurs Concerns About Propaganda, Hacking Risks
Researchers at Georgetown University, OpenAI, and the Stanford Internet Observatory issued a report warning about the potential misuse of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot by propagandists.
From ACM TechNews
Hundreds of MSI Motherboards Have a Serious Security Flaw
Polish security researcher Dawid Potocki discovered a vulnerability in MSI's motherboards that occurs when the Secure Boot default settings for "Image Execution Policy" are changed to "Always Execute."
From ACM News
NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Candidate Cracked
It took researchers in Belgium just an hour to crack the SIKE cryptographic algorithm.
From ACM News
Microsoft Invests $10 Billion in ChatGPT Maker OpenAI
The deal will give a boost to Microsoft's Azure cloud, while providing OpenAI with additional specially designed supercomputers to run its complex AI models and fuel its research.
From ACM News
Teaching In The Age Of AI Means Getting Creative
ChatGPT and similar AI systems are being used in realms beyond education, but classrooms seem to be where fears about the bot's misuse — and ideas to adapt alongside evolving technology — are playing out first.
From ACM News
Swedish Quantum Computer to be Made Available to Industry
A Swedish quantum computer is to become more widely available.
From ACM News
Meta Board Trashes Facebook's 'Convoluted and Poorly Defined' Female Nipple Rule
Facebook's rules, the board acknowledged, are "extensive and confusing" and "often convoluted and poorly defined," requiring bizarre, subjective content moderation assessments.
From ACM News
CNET Secretly Used AI on Articles That Didn't Disclose That Fact, Staff Say
"They use AI to rewrite the intros every two weeks or so because Google likes updated content. Eventually it gets so mangled that about every four months a real editor has to look at it and rewrite it."
From ACM News
The AI Magic Show
Explanations about how deep learning and large language models actually work often emphasized incomprehensibility, or a model's explainability or interpretability, or lack thereof
From ACM News
Finally, a Fast Algorithm for Shortest Paths on Negative Graphs
Researchers can now find the shortest route through a network nearly as fast as theoretically possible, even when some steps can cancel out others.
From ACM TechNews
Decoding Brainwaves to Identify What Music Is Being Listened To
A brainwave-monitoring technique created by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Essex can identify to which specific piece of music people are listening.
From ACM TechNews
Rentokil Pilots Facial Recognition System as Way to Exterminate Rats
U.K. pest control services provider Rentokil is testing facial recognition software as a tool for rat extermination.
From ACM TechNews
Faces from Ancient Egypt Coming Back to Life in Extraordinary Detail
Researchers at the U.K.'s Liverpool John Moores University and Egypt's Cairo University used software and a "reverse aging" process to replicate ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II's face.
From ACM News
ChatGPT Stole Your Work. So What Are You Going to Do?
Creators need to pressure the courts, the market, and regulators before it's too late.
From ACM News
Microsoft Announces 10,000 Job Cuts
Microsoft said that its cost-cutting measures will lead to costs of around $1.2 billion in Q2, resulting from severance pay, changes to its hardware portfolio and its "lease consolidation" efforts.
From ACM News
Google Calls In Help From Larry Page and Sergey Brin for A.I. Fight
A rival chatbot has shaken Google out of its routine, with the founders who left three years ago re-engaging and more than 20 A.I. projects in the works.
From ACM News
Google Cuts 12,000 Jobs Amid Economic Pressure
Big Tech layoffs continue as Google CEO Sundar Pichai breaks the news in an email to staff.
From ACM TechNews
ACM Names 57 Fellows for Contributions That Propel Technology Today
ACM has named 57 of its members Fellows for their exceptional contributions to fields as diverse as cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and recommender systems.
From ACM TechNews
TAU Robot Can 'Smell' Odors Using Biological Sensor
Scientists at Israel's Tel Aviv University have created a biological sensor to help robots detect and interpret odors.
From ACM TechNews
How the Netherlands Is Taming Big Tech
Netherlands government and educational institutions have pushed big tech companies to make significant privacy changes by negotiating their compliance with European data privacy standards.
From ACM TechNews
Is It Human or AI? Tools Help Spot the Bots
Researchers are developing tools that can identify content created by bots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, which generates text that can be difficult to distinguish from works created by humans.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Fix Pandemic Prediction Model, Improving Its Accuracy
North Carolina State University's Mohammad Farazmand and Konstantinos Mamis corrected a flaw in a popular pandemic model, improving the accuracy of its predictions.
From ACM News
Qubits Are at the Heart of Quantum Computing. They're Also Its Greatest Weakness
Quantum states are incredibly delicate and easily destroyed. The perfect solution could lie in imperfect crystals.
From ACM TechNews
Turning Robots into Skilled Waiters
Researchers at Germany's Technical University of Munich (TUM) adopted the pendulum's underlying mathematics to develop a model that could improve robots' drinks-serving skills.