Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2012
From ACM TechNews
Security Experts Push Back at 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' Warning
Security experts are pushing back against what they see as alarmist rhetoric from U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano and Department of Defense secretary Leon Panetta, who warn about the potential…
From ACM Careers
Registration Open For 20th Annual Nasa Great Moonbuggy Race
Registration is open for the 20th annual NASA Great Moonbuggy Race, which challenges high school, college, and university students around the world to build and race fast, lightweight "moonbuggies" of their own design.
From ACM News
Obama's Win a Big Vindication for Nate Silver, King of the Quants
In the end, big data won.
From ACM News
Silicon Valley Technology Could Be Key to Connect Cars For Safer Driving
While Google's self-driving car is getting heaps of attention, a lesser-known effort that would employ Silicon Valley technologies to make regular automobiles safer is fast gaining traction.
From ACM News
Apple Said to Be Exploring Switch From Intel For Mac
Apple Inc. is exploring ways to replace Intel Corp. processors in its Mac personal computers with a version of the chip technology it uses in the iPhone and iPad, according to people familiar with the company’s research.
From ACM TechNews
Why You Can't Vote Online
The lack of verifiable security in online voting systems due to unresolved fundamental problems is the main reason such systems are impractical, according to computer security experts at a recent Princeton University symposium…
From ACM TechNews
Professor Develops Eye Tracking Technology
Texas State University researchers have developed ocular biometric software that can be used in the medical field to identify eye movements associated with concussions and traumatic brain injury patients.
From ACM TechNews
Computers 'taught' to Id Regulating Gene Sequences
Johns Hopkins University researchers have developed a tool that can teach computers how to identify commonalities in DNA sequences known to regulate gene activity, and use those commonalities to predict other regulatory regions…
From ACM TechNews
Supercomputing For a Superproblem: A Computational Journey Into Pure Mathematics
Mathematician Yuri Matiyasevich is focusing on finding a solution to the challenging mathematical problem of the Riemann Zeta Function hypothesis.
From ACM TechNews
Intel Researchers Work on New Way to Display, Share Images
Intel researchers are developing Display without Borders, a system to display photos and videos in order to make them more social and collaborative.
From ACM News
Print 2.0
Interactive print technology could change the way you read and interact with documents, newspapers, and more.
From ACM Opinion
Wrath of the Math: Obama Wins Nerdiest Election Ever
Congratulations, Barack Obama: You have prevailed in the nerdiest election in the history of the American Republic.
From ACM News
Everyone Wants a Slice of Raspberry Pi
It's 9am on a lovely autumn morning at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, just outside Geneva.
From ACM TechNews
A Rewired Internet Would Speed p Content Delivery
A new networking technique could accelerate video downloads and other forms of Internet content delivery.
From ACM TechNews
Stanford Election Atlas Maps Votes, Polling Place By Polling Place
Researchers at Stanford and Harvard universities have developed the Stanford Election Atlas, an online interactive data visualization tool that enables users to inspect the precinct-by-precinct results of the 2008 presidential…
From ACM TechNews
Bonfire of the Cables
University of Oxford researchers have developed technology that enables devices such as mobile phones to charge and transmit data without cables and could eventually eliminate power and data cables altogether.
From ACM TechNews
A Reboot in Recruiting Women Into Computer Science
U.S. government agencies, universities, and technology companies have contributed tens of millions of dollars to increase the number of female computer scientists, but their efforts have had limited success.
From ACM TechNews
Computational Medicine Begins to Enhance the Way Doctors Detect and Treat Disease
The Johns Hopkins University Institute of Computational Medicine is using powerful computers to analyze and mathematically model disease mechanisms. The technique enables researchers to offer a new perspective to medical diagnosis…
From ACM Opinion
Future Mars Missions: Can Humans Actually Trump Robots?
For decades scientists have backed the idea of sending robots to collect Martian rocks and return them to Earth, a project that should be possible well before humans crunch their boots into the distant dunes of the Red Planet…
From ACM News
Why You Can't Vote Online Tuesday
A decade and a half into the Web revolution, we do much of our banking and shopping online. So why can't we vote over the Internet? The answer is that voting presents specific kinds of very hard problems.
From ACM News
Intel Wants to Put a Supercomputer in Your Pocket
Five years from now, says Intel, your phone could double as a supercomputer. That's the goal of Intel's experimental Single-chip Cloud Computer project, or SCC.
From ACM News
Efficiency Breakthrough Promises Smartphones that Use Half the Power
Powering cellular base stations around the world will cost $36 billion this year—chewing through nearly 1 percent of all global electricity production. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power…
From ACM News
How Secure Is Your Electronic Vote?
In an era when shadowy hackers can snatch secret government files and humble big businesses with seeming ease, it's an unavoidable question as Election Day approaches: When we go to the polls, could our very votes be at risk?
From ACM News
Google Explains How More Data Means Better Speech Recognition
A new research paper out of Google describes in some detail the data science behind the the company's speech recognition applications, such as voice search and adding captions or tags to YouTube videos.
From ACM News
Predicting What Topics Will Trend on Twitter
Twitter's home page features a regularly updated list of topics that are "trending," meaning that tweets about them have suddenly exploded in volume.
From ACM News
The States with the Riskiest Voting Technology
Next Tuesday's presidential election will likely be extremely close, magnifying the potential impact of vote-counting errors.
From ACM News
Quantum Entanglement Shows that Reality Can't Be Local
Quantum entanglement stands as one of the strangest and hardest concepts to understand in physics.
From ACM News
Ping-Pong Robot Learns to Play Like a Person
A robot that learns to play ping-pong from humans and improves as it competes against them could be the best robotic table-tennis challenger the world has seen.
From ACM News
When Is a Cyberattack an Act of War?
On the night of Oct. 11, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stood inside the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, housed in a former aircraft carrier moored at a New York City pier, and let an audience of business executives in on…
From ACM News
Microsoft Seeks an Edge in Analyzing Big Data
Eric Horvitz joined Microsoft Research 20 years ago with a medical degree, a Ph.D. in computer science and no plans to stay. "I thought I’d be here six months," he said.