Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2011
From ACM Opinion
Misconceptions in Ai: Or Why Watson Can't Talk to Siri
On Tuesday night, I was schooled by Watson on playing Jeopardy in an exhibition match at the Computer History Museum. I discovered that despite our fear of the robot overlords, humans are much smarter than we think. Case in…
From ACM TechNews
Exascale Computing Seen in This Decade
A major focus at the SC11 supercomputing conference was plans to develop an exascale computing system, which would be about 1,000 times more powerful than any existing system. The U.S. Department of Energy wants a functional…
From ACM TechNews
New Computer Interfaces Challenge Touch Screens
Researchers at several recent conferences have shown how new interfaces could change the future of human-computer interaction.
From ACM TechNews
Foreign Firms Troll For Tech Grads
Foreign technology companies, many of which are led by foreign-born tech workers who left the U.S. due to visa issues, increasingly are recruiting some of the U.S.'s best students.
From ACM TechNews
W3c Proposes Do Not Track Privacy Standard
The World Wide Web Consortium released the first draft of its proposed standard for implementing Do Not Track online, which is designed to give consumers the ability to opt out of having their personal information and online…
From ACM TechNews
Beauty Now in the Eye of the Algorithm
Xerox Research Center Europe computer scientists have developed technology that sorts photographs by their content as well as their aesthetic qualities. The technology could help with tasks such as choosing which of hundreds…
From ACM TechNews
Lightning-Fast, Efficient Data Transmission Developed at Stanford
Stanford University researchers have developed a light-emitting diode that uses much less power than laser-based systems and can transmit data at 10 billion bits per second, providing a practical source for on-chip data transmission…
From ACM TechNews
German Court Rules Users Can Modify Free Software
Advocates of free software are hailing a decision by a German court to prevent a DSL router vendor from blocking a software maker from altering the device's Linux kernel.
From ACM TechNews
Authorship Recognition Software From Drexel niversity Lab to Be Released December
Drexel University researchers have developed two software tools focused on authorship recognition.
From ACM TechNews
White House, Congress Work Toward Cybersecurity Plan
Before the U.S. Congress is a White House proposal and several bills concerning government and private-sector cybersecurity improvement.
From ACM TechNews
Accelerating Robotic Innovation
A holistic system for modeling and simulating the behavior of robots is the focus of a collaboration involving researchers at Rice, Texas A&M, and Halmstad universities.
From ACM TechNews
Linux Loses its Luster as a Darling Among Developers
Linux as an application development platform has fallen to third place in popularity behind Mac OS and Windows, according to an Evans Data Corp. survey.
From ACM TechNews
Burns App Could Save Lives at the Touch of a Button
Mersey Burns, an iPhone and iPad app created by University of Manchester student Chris Seaton, has the potential to save the lives of soldiers and prevent severe disfigurement from burns.
From ACM TechNews
Feds Detail Supercomputing's Future
The annual SC11 supercomputing conference's agenda will be partly guided by federal agencies and U.S. national labs focusing on cloud computing, exascale computing, power management, and networking.
From ACM TechNews
Japan's K Computer Retains TOP500 Crown
Japan's K Computer retained its title as the world's most powerful supercomputer, ranking first in the most recent edition of the TOP500 List with a speed of 10.51 petaflops a second, which was four times faster than the second…
From ACM TechNews
Georgia Tech Helps to Develop System That Will Detect Insider Threats From Massive Data Sets
Researchers at DARPA, the Army Research Office, and Georgia Tech are developing new approaches for identifying insider threats before a data breach occurs.
From ACM News
Barcelona Center Makes Super Bet on Cellphone Chips
Supercomputers, once built from handcrafted circuitry, were transformed when companies started assembling them from inexpensive PC-style microprocessors. Researchers in Barcelona are placing an early bet that the next big leap…
From ACM News
Digital Evidence Becoming Central in Criminal Cases
If you are unfortunate enough to land in court after a serious automobile accident, the star witness against you may not be an eyewitness or even a human being. It could be your car.
From ACM News
China Looms Large in Race of the Supercomputers
Ten years ago, a ranking of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers included precisely three entries from China. The most powerful of these—a system used to run credit management software at the Agricultural Bank of China—was…
From ACM TechNews
Cerf Calls Internet Governance Critical Issue in High Tech
Governance of the Internet is a critical issue for the high-tech world, says Internet pioneer Vint Cerf.
From ACM TechNews
Sound, Digested
Backed by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Imagine Research has developed MediaMined, an artificial intelligence system for understanding and indexing sound.
From ACM TechNews
China to Build More Supercomputers With Homegrown Chips
China will rely less on chips made by foreign companies for its supercomputers over the next five years, says the National Supercomputer Center's Pan Jingshan.
From ACM TechNews
Paper ncovers Power of Foldit Gamers' Strategies
University of Washington researchers recently completed a study that examined Foldit players' strategies and compared them to the best-known scientist-developed methods for protein folding.
From ACM News
Study Reveals Resistance to Strong Password Security
One would think that improving the security of your computer against intruders would be universally acceptable. However, an overwhelming number of users in a new Virginia Tech study resisted changing their passwords — even when…
From ACM TechNews
Stanford Team Trains Computer to Evaluate Breast Cancer
Stanford University researchers have developed Computational Pathologist, a machine learning-based method for automatically analyzing images of cancerous tissues and predicting patient survival.
From ACM TechNews
NIST Signs Agreement to Enhance Cybersecurity Education Programs
Formal cybersecurity education will be the focus of a new public-private partnership developed by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Education, and the National Cybersecurity Education…
From ACM TechNews
Html5: A Look Behind the Technology Changing the Web
HTML5 is catching on in popularity as the online community embraces it.
From ACM TechNews
Google's Lab of Wildest Dreams
Google X is a top-secret lab where Google researchers are focusing on 100 blue-sky concepts, including reportedly the U.S. manufacture of driverless cars, space elevators that collect information, and fleets of robots that could…
From ACM TechNews
In a Smart-System World, Data's 'the New Currency'
Modern smart systems produce billions of streams of real-time data, and analytics science is creating services that have even more value than the smart systems themselves.
From ACM News
Pursuing a Piracy Claim Against Apple
David Gelernter is known for many things. As a pioneering computer scientist, he first earned renown by connecting computers together into collaborative networks. Then in 1993, he gained the kind of fame no one wants, as a …