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 TechNews
Relief From "parking Wars"
Researchers have developed PARKAGENT, a computer simulator that models the real-life parking challenges of specific cities, identifying different strategies for improvement and testing the impact of new policies before they are…
From ACM TechNews
Ibm's Watson Edges Harvard Students in 'jeopardy!' Quiz
IBM's Watson supercomputer recently defeated teams of students from Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management in a Jeopardy! quiz-show battle.
From ACM TechNews
Cyber-Attackers Already Targeting Critical Infrastructure: DHS
Hackers are already targeting critical U.S. infrastructure, and have even come close to bringing down segments of them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano.
From ACM TechNews
Crowdsourcing Nutrition in a Snap
Harvard University researchers have developed PlateMate, software that enable users to utilize crowdsourcing to determine the calorie levels of their meals. Users take a picture of each meal and submit it to the crowd, which…
From ACM TechNews
Could Social Media Be sed to Detect Disease Outbreaks?
University of Bristol researchers are studying whether social media can be used to track an event or phenomenon. Professors Nello Cristianini and Vaseleios Lampos geo-tagged user posts on Twitter as the input data to investigate…
From ACM TechNews
Report Finds Internet Privacy Tools Are Confusing, Ineffective For Most People
Internet users that want to protect their privacy by stopping advertisers and other companies from tracking their online behavior will have a hard time doing so with the available opt-out tools, according to a recent Carnegie…
From ACM News
The Future of Riots
On 6 August, peaceful protests over the police shooting of a local man in London's Tottenham district exploded into full-blown riots. During four days of assaults, arson, and looting, some of London's thousands of closed-circuit…
From ACM News
How Technical Glitches Foiled the Russian Sleeper Spies
Spying for Russia can be a hard life. The feds are on your trail, always trying to find out who you’re meeting with and talking to.
From ACM News
Gartner: 10 Key It Trends For 2012
If you had to pick 10 technology-related trends that will affect your enterprise infrastructure in the coming year, Gartner says you'd do well to start with virtualization and move to such issues as social media influence,…
From ACM TechNews
Pivoting Pixels
National Chiao Tung University researchers have developed a method for using micro-electromechanical systems to create mechanical pixels for computerized displays.
From ACM TechNews
Ibm, Georgia Tech Launch Children's Health Data Modeling Project
The Georgia Institute of Technology will use IBM analytics technology to study data models as a way to systematically improve the pediatric health system.
From ACM TechNews
Searching For Balloons in a Social Network
In the process of winning DARPA's Red Balloon Challenge, the MIT researchers collected and analyzed a large amount of data on the size and scope of Internet connections and recently published their research.
From ACM TechNews
Internet Responsible For 2 Percent of Global Energy sage
The Internet is responsible for 170 to 307 gigawatts of global energy consumption, according to the University of California, Berkeley's Justin Ma and the International Computer Science Institute's Barath Raghavan.
From ACM News
Quantum Keys Let Submarines Talk Securely
Submarines must be able to talk securely with remote naval bases while remaining submerged. Could quantum communications allow them to pull off this technically challenging feat?
From ACM News
A New Chapter For E-Books
The problem with the Harry Potter series, for me and many others, was that it had to end.
From ACM News
Filling Space With Polyhedra
Salvatore Torquato’s unique space-packing method has implications in information theory and materials science.
From Communications of the ACM
Risky Business
Governments, companies, and individuals have suffered an unusual number of highly publicized data breaches this year. Is there a solution?
From Communications of the ACM
Hacking Cars
Researchers have discovered important security flaws in modern automobile systems. Will car thieves learn to pick locks with their laptops?
From Communications of the ACM
Modeling Chaotic Storms
Scientists say improvements to extreme-weather prediction are possible with new weather models and a reinvention of the modeling technologies used to process them.