Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2015
From ACM TechNews
Vanderbilt's Medical Capsule Robots' Hardware, Software Goes Open Source
Vanderbilt University researchers have made their capsule robot hardware and software open source.
From ACM TechNews
Queen's University Professor to Unveil Self-Levitating Displays, Allowing Physical Interactions With Mid-Air Virtual Objects
Queen's University researchers have developed BitDrones, an interactive swarm of flying three-dimensional pixels.
From ACM TechNews
Can Robots Come to Your Rescue in a Burning Building?
Researchers at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering are developing robots that could help rescue people from fires.
From ACM TechNews
System Recognizes Objects Touched By User, Enabling Context-Aware Smartwatch Apps
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research have developed technology to enable smartwatches to recognize the kinds of objects users .
From ACM TechNews
Toyota's A.i. Research Efforts Could Mean Cars That Anticipate Traffic, Pedestrian Moves
Toyota is making high-profile investments in artificial intelligence research and development that could yield many benefits in human-machine interaction.
From ACM News
Mars' Moon Phobos Is Slowly Falling Apart
The long, shallow grooves lining the surface of Phobos are likely early signs of the structural failure that will ultimately destroy this moon of Mars.
From ACM Careers
The Nsa School: How the Intelligence Community Gets Smarter, Secretly
Leonard Reinsfelder's wife found a note on her car as she was leaving a shopping center one day: "Have your husband give us a call. We think we could use him."
From ACM News
The Crispr Quandary
One day in March 2011, Emmanuelle Charpentier, a geneticist who was studying flesh-eating bacteria, approached Jennifer Doudna, an award-winning scientist, at a microbiology conference in Puerto Rico.
From ACM TechNews
Wpi Research Team Develops Virtual Human
Worcester Polytechnic Institute researchers have created a comprehensive virtual model of a human body for use in a wide range of medical experiments.
From ACM TechNews
Robot Revolution: Rise of 'thinking' Machines Could Exacerbate Inequality
More than one third of U.K. employees and nearly half of U.S. workers could lose their jobs to "thinking" machines over the next 20 years, according to a study.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Take Two Big Steps Toward Quantum Computing
Two related teams of Austrian researchers have made a pair of discoveries related to quantum entanglement they describe in two new papers.
From ACM News
ACM Sigs Reach Golden Anniversaries
Special Interest Groups celebrate standing the test of time.
From ACM Careers
To Study the Brain, a Doctor Puts Himself Under the Knife
Phil Kennedy no longer saw any other way to get the data.
From ACM News
Google Just Open Sourced Tensorflow, Its Artificial Intelligence Engine
Tech pundit Tim O'Reilly had just tried the new Google Photos app, and he was amazed by the depth of its artificial intelligence.
From ACM News
Nsa Says How Often, Not When, It Discloses Software Flaws
The U.S. National Security Agency, seeking to rebut accusations that it hoards information about vulnerabilities in computer software, thereby leaving U.S. companies open to cyber attacks, said last week that it tells U.S. technology…
From ACM TechNews
Where Computing Hits the Wall: 3 Things Holding Us Back
Jason Matheny, director of the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, warns several challenges to data analytics still need to be addressed.
From ACM News
Icy Volcanoes May Dot Pluto's Surface
Two icy volcanoes may lurk near Pluto's south pole, images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft suggest.
From ACM TechNews
Toyota Invests $1 Billion in Artificial Intelligence in .s.
Toyota on Friday announced a five-year, $1-billion investment to establish an artificial intelligence research laboratory in Silicon Valley.
From ACM TechNews
Google Tries to Make Machine Learning a Little More Human
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says advances in machine learning would soon affect every product and service the company provides.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Threatened a Robot With a Knife to See If Humans Cared
A recently published study found that human beings will readily empathize with human-like robots.
From ACM TechNews
The Solution to Faster Computing? Sing to Your Data
Sound could be the solution to faster computing, according to researchers from the universities of Sheffield and Leeds.
From ACM News
Same Rhetoric Permeates Going Dark Encryption Debate
The Going Dark encryption debate surfaced again on Wednesday at a small security conference here, and as in previous iterations before larger technical audiences and even Congress, the issue continues to spin on a hamster wheel…
From ACM TechNews
Nomadic Computing Speeds p Big Data Analytics
The latest research by Inderjit Dhillon is a non-locking, stochastic multi-machine algorithm for asynchronous and decentralized matrix completion.
From ACM TechNews
Get Smart
Researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan have developed a system they say could lead to the next generation of home thermostats.
From ACM News
Cerf Cites Challenges Facing the Internet of Things
Moving the Internet of Things forward will require, among other things, standards, the ability to configure massive numbers of devices, and a healthy dose of paranoia.
From ACM Opinion
I'm Going to Make Facebook's AI Predict What Happens in Videos
What are the big challenges ahead for you?
From ACM News
Nasa Mission Reveals Speed of Solar Wind Stripping Martian Atmosphere
NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission has identified the process that appears to have played a key role in the transition of the Martian climate from an early, warm and wet environment that might have…
From ACM News
Toyota Invests $1 Billion in Artificial Intelligence in .s.
Silicon Valley is diving into artificial intelligence technology, with start-ups sprouting up and Google and Facebook pouring vast sums into projects that would teach machines how to learn and make decisions. Now Toyota wants…
From ACM News
Could Your Social Media Footprint Step On Your Credit History?
In December 1912, financier John Pierpont "J.P." Morgan testified in Washington before the Bank and Currency Committee of the House of Representatives investigating Wall Street's workings of the time.
From ACM TechNews
Europe's Largest Data Observatory Turns Big Data Into Big Images
This week marks the official opening of Imperial College London's KPMG Data Observatory, the largest such facility in Europe.