Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2017
From ACM TechNews
Robots Won't Take Away Our Jobs, or They Will and It Will Be 'liberating,' Profs Say
Cornell University professor Guy Hoffman called the notion of losing all professions to robots delusional.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Demonstrate 'mind-Reading' Brain-Decoding Tech
Researchers at Purdue University have demonstrated a method for decoding what the brain is seeing.
From ACM News
How High Can High-Rises Go?
Digital technologies and new and better materials have stretched the boundaries of building design.
From ACM News
How We Feel About Robots That Feel
Octavia, a humanoid robot designed to fight fires on Navy ships, has mastered an impressive range of facial expressions.
From ACM News
These Neurons Are Alive and Firing. And You Can Watch Them in 3-D
For patients with epilepsy, or cancerous brain lesions, sometimes the only way to forward is down.
From ACM News
Higgs Boson ncovered By Quantum Algorithm on D-Wave Machine
Machine learning has returned with a vengeance. I still remember the dark days of the late '80s and '90s, when it was pretty clear that the current generation of machine-learning algorithms didn't seem to actually learn much …
From ACM TechNews
Preservation For the (digital) Ages
Researchers are working to enhance the preservation of digital humanities databases.
From ACM TechNews
Bloated Browser Functionality Presents nnecessary Security, Privacy Risks
Researchers have identified browser functionalities that are rarely used or needed by Websites, but which pose security and privacy risks.
From ACM TechNews
Resistive Memory Components the Computer Industry Can't Resist
Researchers have developed new memristor devices that last 1 trillion cycles, an achievement they say far surpasses the endurance of commercial flash memories for computing.
From ACM TechNews
Machine Learning sed to Predict Earthquakes in a Lab Setting
Researchers say they have trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict future seismic events.
From ACM TechNews
Focus Computer Science Funding on Teacher Training, Code.org Founder Says
Code.org founder Hadi Partovi says every dollar committed to computer science education should be channeled into teacher training.
From ACM TechNews
U.s. Should Invest More in Global Quantum Race, Researchers Tell Congressional Committee
Researchers told the U.S. House Science Committee that more federal funding is required to train specialists and advance real-world quantum computing applications.
From ACM News
Like Magic: The Tech That Goes Into Making Money Harder to Fake
In 2005, shortly after earning a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering, Sam Cape was looking for work online when he came across a cryptic help wanted ad.
From ACM News
Photons Pair Up Like Superconducting Electrons
Superconductivity—a phenomenon in which electrons can travel through certain materials with zero resistance—has revolutionized parts of medicine, travel and science. Now, an intriguing experiment has seen the same behaviour that…
From ACM TechNews
Material Could Bring Optical Communication Onto Silicon Chips
Researchers say they have created a solution to the "interconnect bottleneck" that slows communication between different chip elements.
From ACM TechNews
With Commercial Satellite Imagery, Computer Learns to Quickly Find Missile Sites in China
The U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is calling on the private sector to develop machine-learning tools to automate repetitive and time-consuming image analysis tasks.
From ACM TechNews
Wpi Researchers Developing Autonomous Snake-Like Robots to Support Search-and-Rescue Teams
Researchers have received a U.S. National Science Foundation grant to develop snake-like robots that can navigate through debris following a disaster.
From ACM News
Why Blockchain Is Taking Over the World
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are booming—and for good reason.
From ACM News
How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media
Hours after the Las Vegas massacre, Travis McKinney's Facebook feed was hit with a scattershot of conspiracy theories.
From ACM News
Take a Walk on Mars, in Your Own Living Room
When NASA scientists want to follow the path of the Curiosity rover on Mars, they can don a mixed-reality headset and virtually explore the Martian landscape.
From ACM Careers
This Company's Robots Are Making Everything, and Reshaping the World
The headquarters of Fanuc sit in the shadow of Mt. Fuji, on a sprawling, secluded campus of 22 windowless factories and dozens of office buildings.
From ACM News
Fbi Couldn't Access Nearly 7k Devices Because of Encryption
The FBI hasn't been able to retrieve data from more than half of the mobile devices it tried to access in less than a year, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Sunday, turning up the heat on a debate between technology companies…
From ACM TechNews
Rendering the Invisible Visible
Researchers at multiple institutions are working on the Mobile Material Characterization and Localization by Electromagnetic Sensing project.
From ACM TechNews
Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords
Roboticists say they now are focused on human-robot interaction in the performance of complex tasks.
From ACM TechNews
Back to the Canyon
A team of researchers hopes to determine if fatigue can be predicted and whether life-threatening fatigue can be differentiated from recoverable fatigue.
From ACM TechNews
Making Big Data a Little Smaller
Researchers have validated the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma for reducing data dimensionality.
From ACM TechNews
Andrew Ng Has a Chatbot That Can Help With Depression
Stanford University professor Andrew Ng is supporting the development of a Facebook chatbot to offer interactive cognitive behavior therapy to people suffering from depression.
From ACM TechNews
Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries For Scarce AI Talent
With artificial intelligence expertise in short supply, artificial intelligence talent is commanding huge salaries from the largest technology companies.
From ACM News
Deepmind Alphago Team Receives Inaugural Ijcai Marvin Minsky Medal For Outstanding Achievements in AI
The DeepMind team will be presented with the award at the IJCAI-2018 conference in Stockholm, Sweden, next July.
From ACM News
Deep Space Communications via Faraway Photons
A spacecraft destined to explore a unique asteroid will also test new communication hardware that uses lasers instead of radio waves.