Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2021
From ACM News
Defense Department Issuing AI Ethics Guidelines for Tech Contractors
The controversy over Project Maven shows the department has a serious trust problem. This is an attempt to fix that.
From ACM News
Boston Startup Says It Made a Quantum Leap in Computing
QuEra's new technology comes from researchers at Harvard and MIT.
From ACM News
Trends in Industrial Robotics to Watch in 2022
Worker shortages continue, even as employment subsidies fall off. As the economy recovers, certain jobs are being permanently replaced by collaborative robots.
From ACM News
Apple to Launch Self-Service Repair Program
Apple noted the program is "intended for individual technicians with the knowledge and experience to repair electronic devices."
From ACM News
Another Intel Chip Flaw Puts a Slew of Gadgets at Risk
The vulnerability allows an attacker with physical access to the CPU to bypass the security measures protecting some of its most sensitive data.
From ACM TechNews
Supercomputer Simulations Provide Clue to Missing Planets Mystery
Researchers in Japan used the world's most powerful astronomical supercomputer to simulate a planet moving away from its initial formation site.
From ACM TechNews
UCI Invention Lets People Pay with a High-Five
A battery-free body area network integrates advanced metamaterials into flexible textiles to facilitate communication between garments and nearby devices.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Use AI to Create Better VR Experiences
Stanford University researchers have combined optics and artificial intelligence to improve holographic displays for virtual and augmented reality experiences.
From ACM News
'Logic Gate' Paves Way for Nanoscale Computers To Treat Cancer and Other Diseases
The team's logic gate comprised two sensor domains designed to respond to two inputs—light and the drug rapamycin.
From ACM News
Top 200 Most Common Passwords
The list of passwords was compiled in partnership with independent researchers specializing in research of cybersecurity incidents. They evaluated a 4TB database.
From ACM News
Big Data Privacy for Machine Learning Just Got 100 Times Cheaper
Rice University hashing method slashes cost of implementing differential privacy.
From ACM News
Ransomware Hackers Have the Upper Hand
Hackers put companies under intense pressure to pay ransoms quickly to get their computers systems back online.
From ACM News
The Chip That Changed the World
Most of the wealth created since 1971 is a result of Intel's 4004 microprocessor.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Uncover Software Flaws Leaving Medical Devices Vulnerable to Hackers
Researchers say they have discovered over a dozen software vulnerabilities that could be used to crash medical devices and other equipment.
From ACM TechNews
AI Behind Deepfakes May Power Materials Design Innovations
Researchers have trained a generative adversarial network to create refractory high-entropy alloys that can maintain their strength in ultra-high temperatures.
From ACM TechNews
Experts Establish 'North Star' for Domestic Robotics Field
Stanford University researchers have created a catalogue of the physical and intellectual details of 100 everyday household tasks, to set benchmarks for domestic robots.
From ACM News
What Caused the Facebook Outage?
Why was the social media service and its related properties out of service for hours, frustrating users and Facebook engineers alike?
From ACM News
Japan's Fugaku Retains Title as World's Fastest Supercomputer
Said Satoshi Matsuoka, director of RIKEN R-CCS, "Fugaku has once again proven most powerful in a wide range of areas."
From ACM News
IBM Achieves Quantum Computing Breakthrough
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told "Axios on HBO," "It is impossible to simulate it on something else, which implies it's more powerful than anything else."
From ACM TechNews
High-Tech Approaches to America's Sewer Problem
U.S. cities and service contractors use flying drones, crawling robots, and remote-operated swimming machines to explore, diagnose, and fix municipal sewer systems.
From ACM TechNews
True, Untrue Viral News Move Equally Through Twitter
A study found both true and untrue viral news spread through Twitter at the same speed, breadth, and depth.
From ACM TechNews
Unique Robotic Hand Can Rotate Objects Without Releasing Grasp
A novel robotic hand can change a grasped object's orientation without letting go.
From ACM TechNews
More Than a Third of Women in Tech Eyeing the Exit in Next Two Years
More than a third of 1,000 surveyed women in the technology sector intend to quit in the next two years, driven by the pandemic and gender inequality.
From ACM TechNews
What's in the Water?
Researchers have mapped the global pathways of nitrogen and pathogens from human wastewater.
From ACM News
Why Facebook Won't Let You Control Your Own News Feed
Lawmakers want social networks to offer users a chronological timeline. Leaked documents help to explain why Facebook doesn't.
From ACM News
When Finnish Researchers Took On the Twitter Trolls
A nation's scientists took to social media in response to criticism of their research, with surprising results. Sami Syrjämäki describes what happened.
From ACM TechNews
Nuclear Radiation Used to Transmit Digital Data Wirelessly
Digitally encoded information has been transmitted wirelessly using nuclear radiation.
From ACM TechNews
Dexterous Robotic Hands Manipulate Objects with Ease
A new system can enable robotic hands to handle more than 2,000 different objects.
From ACM TechNews
AI Brings Power of NLP to African Languages
A neural network model developed by researchers at Canada's University of Waterloo enables computer-based analysis of text in 11 African languages.
From ACM TechNews
Can Electric Cars Help Strengthen Electrical Grids?
A computational model shows how using vehicle-to-grid technology to store electricity in electric vehicles, selling it back to the utility as needed, can improve local electric grid stability.