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
Google Aims to Make Vr Hardware Irrelevant Before It Even Gets Going
Google and Facebook are pushing virtual-reality technology along two different lines.
From ACM TechNews
Net of Insecurity: The Kernel of the Argument
The Linux operating system has come to dominate the online world, but critics increasingly warn of security weaknesses that should have been corrected long ago.
From ACM TechNews
With AI Advances, Facebook Tests M, Your Newest Assistant
Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer says the volume of data Facebook serves to users' News Feeds is increasing about 50 percent annually.
From ACM TechNews
Into the ncanny Valley: 80 Robot Faces Ranked By Creepiness
Recent experiments sought to determine the scope of the uncanny valley--the point at which a lifelike robot stops attracting people and instead repels them.
From ACM News
The Significance of an MIT Drone Weaving Around Tree Branches at 30 Mph
To get his Ph.D., MIT grad student Andy Barry packed up a car with a drone and a catapult to launch it. Then he headed west.
From ACM Opinion
America's Crypto Battles
John Miller reckons he can get into pretty much any safe.
From ACM TechNews
Can Big Data Predict Violent Behavior?
Researchers have used machine learning to predict the 5 percent of U.S. Army soldiers who later committed a third of all violent crimes in the workplace during 2004-2009.
From ACM TechNews
IBM Competition Pushes Student Teams to Tackle Big Data Research Problems
Delft Technical University, Tsinghua University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Texas at Austin are competing in the POWER8 University Challenge.
From ACM TechNews
Electrical Engineer's Work May Signal Better Wireless Connections
The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded University of Texas at Dallas researchers grants totaling more than $2 million to study wireless communications.
From ACM TechNews
Clemson Researchers and It Scientists Team Up to Tackle Big Data
Clemson University researchers are studying ways to simplify collaboration and improve efficiency in big data analytics.
From ACM News
Relearning to Speak
New systems can help you not only learn to understand a second language, but how to pronounce it correctly.
From ACM News
Researchers Use Multigrid Method to Dramatically Speed Up Cloth Simulation
Simulating the behavior of clothing and other fabrics in animated films requires animators to make trade-offs between a realistic look and a reasonable amount of computing time.
From ACM News
How NASA Is Steering New Horizons Toward a Tiny Space Rock in the Kuiper Belt
As Pluto disappears into New Horizons' rear view mirror, the little space probe that could is veering towards its next target in the Kuiper belt.
From ACM Careers
Synthetic Biology Lures Silicon Valley Investors
In 2012, Emily Leproust was trying to raise money to start Twist Bioscience, a company that aimed to synthesize DNA more quickly and more cheaply than existing methods allowed.
From ACM News
How Scientists Search the Cosmos For Encrypted Alien Signals (and Other Ones Too)
In a recent conversation with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson asked about communication with alien civilizations, and how such messages might be encoded.
From ACM TechNews
Materials That Couple Sensing, Actuation, Computation, and Communication
Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have conceived of composite materials that integrate sensing, actuation, computation, and communication.
From ACM TechNews
A Data Genius Has Figured Out the ltimate Beer-Drinking Road Trip
Data scientist Nathan Yau created a map of the top breweries in the U.S., and then determined the most efficient route to use to visit them.
From ACM TechNews
Data Mining Reveals the Extent of China's Ghost Cities
China has experienced a tremendous amount of urban growth in the last 30 years, yet many of the newly built residential areas remain vacant.
From ACM TechNews
System Automatically Converts 2d Video to 3D
A new system automatically renders two-dimensional soccer game video footage as three-dimensional video.
From ACM TechNews
Why Artificial Intelligence Researchers Love 'super Mario Bros.'
Artificial intelligence researchers find the video game "Super Mario Bros." especially amenable to testing their work.
From ACM News
Software Predicts Slew of Fiendish Crystal Structures
Sketch the structure of an organic molecule on a napkin and it may not be apparent that there are millions of possible ways that it could assemble as a 3D crystal.
From ACM News
Facebook Aims Its AI at the Game No Computer Can Crack
In the mid-'90s, a computer program called Chinook beat the world's top player at the game of checkers.
From ACM News
.s. Tech Giants May Blur National Security Boundaries in China Deals
One Chinese technology company receives crucial technical guidance from a former People's Liberation Army rear admiral. Another company developed the electronics on China's first atomic bomb.
From ACM TechNews
You Can Now 3D Print a Toupee
Owners of three-dimensional printers will be able to fabricate plastic hair using a method developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
From ACM TechNews
This Is the Best Way to Take a Selfie, According to Artificial Intelligence
A Stanford University Ph.D. student has trained a neural network to determine what constitutes a good selfie.
From ACM TechNews
Usf Team Finds New Way of Computing With Interaction-Dependent State Change of Nanomagnets
Researchers have proposed a new form of computing using circular nanomagnets to solve quadratic optimization problems far faster than a conventional computer.
From ACM News
Nasa Finds New Way to Track Ocean Currents from Space
A team of NASA and university scientists has developed a new way to use satellite measurements to track changes in Atlantic Ocean currents, which are a driving force in global climate.
From ACM News
Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions For Digital Age
Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard's Law School Library.
From ACM News
Artificial-Intelligence Institute Launches Free Science Search Engine
With Google Scholar, PubMed, and other free academic databases at their fingertips, scientists may feel they have plenty of resources to trawl through the ever-growing science literature.
From ACM TechNews
Email Encryption Is Broken
A new study has found technology designed to encrypt and authenticate emails is ineffective.