Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2015
From ACM News
What's Killing Mars?
The question of whether there is life on Mars is woven into a much larger thatch of mysteries. Among them: What happened to the ancient ocean that once covered a quarter of the planet’s surface? And, relatedly, what made Mars’s…
From ACM News
Technology Replaces the Credit Card
New alternatives will further disrupt the payment cards market.
From ACM Careers
New Report Puts Numbers on Data Scientist Trend
Data scientist–a job that barely existed a decade ago–has become one of the hottest and best-paid professions in the U.S.
From ACM News
U.s. Tech Firms Look To Data Centers on European Soil
Silicon Valley companies say they’ve been preparing for yesterday's European Court of Justice decision invalidating the U.S.-Europe Safe Harbor agreement on data transfers.
From ACM TechNews
Cardiff University Develops Virtual Assistant Dubbed Sherlock
A virtual assistant developed at Cardiff University recently had its first public trial at the BBC's Make It Digital event.
From ACM TechNews
Novel Nanostructures Could Usher in Touchless Displays
The swipe--without actually needing to touch a screen with a finger--will be the next dominant computer interface method, according to researchers in Germany.
From ACM TechNews
Predicting Change in the Alzheimer's Brain
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are developing a computer system that uses multiple types of data to help predict the effects of disease on brain anatomy.
From ACM TechNews
How Artificial Intelligence Could Lead to Self-Healing Airplanes
Boeing and Carnegie Mellon University have launched an Aerospace Data Analytics Lab to mine insights from the vast body of data generated by the aerospace industry.
From ACM TechNews
Raising Computers to Be Good Scientists
A new project aims to develop a computer that reads scientific papers, derives data on biochemical pathways, and plugs it into large-scale interactive models.
From ACM TechNews
Robot See, Robot Do: How Robots Can Learn New Tasks By Observing
The University of Maryland's Autonomy, Robotics, and Cognition Lab is developing robots that can learn how to do a new job by watching others do it first.
From ACM Careers
Mars Is Pretty Clean. Her Job at Nasa Is to Keep It That Way.
At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Catharine A. Conley has a lofty job title: planetary protection officer.
From ACM News
Scientists Tap Dragonfly Vision to Build a Better Bionic Eye
What can humans learn from dragonflies?
From ACM News
New Auto Safety Technologies Leave Some Drivers Bewildered
Many Americans buying new cars these days are baffled by a torrent of new safety technology.
From ACM TechNews
How Keystroking Style Could Replace Passwords For Authentication
Researchers at Jeppiaar Engineering College in Chennai, India, have developed a biometric keystroke algorithm that learns how the user types.
From ACM TechNews
Search Engine For More Accurate and Fast Recognition of Metabolites
A new machine learning-based search engine could benefit scientists in the life and medical sciences.
From ACM TechNews
Titan Helps npuzzle Decades-Old Plutonium Perplexities
Researchers relied on density functional theory calculations and the dynamical mean field theory technique to calculate the electronic structure of plutonium.
From ACM News
Jpl's Role in Making 'the Martian' a Reality
When fictional astronaut Mark Watney becomes stranded alone on the Red Planet in the novel and film "The Martian," people and technology from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, play important roles in his…
From ACM News
One Brain to Teach Them All
How the new field of cloud robotics will impact intelligent machines.
From ACM News
Europe's Highest Court Strikes Down Safe Harbor Data Sharing Between Eu, US
Europe's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has struck down the 15-year-old Safe Harbour agreement that allowed the free flow of information between the US and EU.
From ACM News
The Battle Over Genome Editing Gets Science All Wrong
Nobel Prize speculation, gossip, and betting pools kick off every fall around the time Thomson Reuters releases its predictions for science's most prestigious prize. This year, one prediction was unusual: a genome-editing tool…
From ACM News
The Future of Cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and Beyond
When the digital currency Bitcoin came to life in January 2009, it was noticed by almost no one apart from the handful of programmers who followed cryptography discussion groups.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Develop Deep-Learning Method to Predict Daily Activities
Researchers have developed a new method to train computers to recognize and comprehend a wide range of human activities in a single day.
From ACM TechNews
On What Facebook Knows--An Interview With the Man Behind Facebook's Personality Experiment
A researcher discusses a report issued earlier this year on how individuals' Facebook activities could be used to measure their psychological profiles.
From ACM TechNews
More-Flexible Machine Learning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers plan to present a machine-learning technique that enables semantically-related concepts to reinforce each other.
From ACM TechNews
Got 'em! Researchers Steal Crypto Keys From Amazon Cloud
Worchester Polytechnic Institute researchers have demonstrated how to use an instance of Amazon EC2 to recover the full 2,048-bit RSA key from a separate Amazon instance.
From ACM TechNews
Picture This: An App For Blind Photographers
A University of California, Santa Cruz researcher has developed a smartphone app that helps visually-impaired users handle their photos.
From ACM TechNews
Activist Bots Recruit Humans to Their Cause on Twitter
The Botivist program uses Twitter to rally people to social causes, thanks to the efforts of Saiph Savage and colleagues at West Virginia University.
From ACM TechNews
A Manifesto For Algorithms in the Environment
Researchers at Stockholm University researcher are developing a Biosphere Code Manifesto.
From ACM News
Robot See, Robot Do: How Robots Can Learn New Tasks By Observing
It can take weeks to reprogram an industrial robot to perform a complicated new task, which makes retooling a modern manufacturing line painfully expensive and slow.
From ACM News
Martian Life Could Be a Biotech Bonanza
When NASA scientists announced that instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sensed signs of liquid water seeping on the Martian surface, they meant a solution salty enough to kill most living things on Earth.