Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2014
From ACM News
ndersea Robot Explores Life Below Arctic Ice
While 2014 has not been kind to rockets, it has been a banner year for robots of all stripes.
From ACM News
Innovators of Intelligence Look to Past
Inside the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, known as AI2, everything is a gleaming architectural white.
From ACM News
New Way to Turn Genes On
Using a gene-editing system originally developed to delete specific genes, MIT researchers have now shown that they can reliably turn on any gene of their choosing in living cells.
From ACM News
NASA Voyager: 'Tsunami Wave' Still Flies Through Interstellar Space
The Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced three shock waves. The most recent shock wave, first observed in February 2014, still appears to be going on. One wave, previously reported, helped researchers determine that Voyager 1…
From ACM News
Robobrain: The World's First Knowledge Engine For Robots
One of the most exciting changes influencing modern life is the ability to search and interact with information on a scale that has never been possible before.
From ACM News
4 Seconds of Body Cam Video Can Reveal a Biometric Fingerprint, Study Says
Researchers say they can have computers examine body camera video footage and accurately identify a person wearing a body-mounted device in about four seconds, according to a recently released paper.
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft's Skype Translator Provides On-the-Fly Translations
Microsoft has launched a preview of its Skype Translator technology as a Windows 8.1 Skype Translator app, which enables the translation of typed and spoken messages in close to real time.
From ACM TechNews
DARPA Offers Free Watson-Like Artificial Intelligence
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has unveiled an open source version of IBM's Watson named DeepDive. The system's performance was ahead of or equal to humans performing identical tasks, researchers say.
From ACM TechNews
Grant to Accelerate Development of Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Video Game
Ohio State University researchers are using a National Multiple Sclerosis Society grant to develop and test a rehabilitation therapy video game that targets upper extremity motor impairment and could help stroke and multiple…
From ACM News
2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past
Physicists have a problem with time.
From ACM News
Material Question
Until Andre Geim, a physics professor at the University of Manchester, discovered an unusual new material called graphene, he was best known for an experiment in which he used electromagnets to levitate a frog.
From ACM News
Signs of Ancient Mars Lakes and Quakes Seen in New Map
Long ago, in the largest canyon system in our solar system, vibrations from "marsquakes" shook soft sediments that had accumulated in Martian lakes.
From ACM TechNews
Watson Wannabes: 4 Open Source Projects For Machine Intelligence
Four groups have been developing IBM Watson-like systems based on open source work.
From ACM TechNews
Optical Illusions Fool Computers Into Seeing Things
University of Wyoming researchers are studying algorithms working together that may resulting in a program that could generate creative pictures by itself.
From ACM TechNews
Ccc Brain Workshop: Research Interfaces Between Brain Science and Computer Science
A recent workshop on the interfaces between brain research and computer science brought together neuroscientists and computer scientists over speeches and panel discussions on topics including brain imaging and mapping, computing…
From ACM TechNews
Artificial Intelligence Isn't a Threat – Yet
New York University professor Gary Marcus says "superintelligent" machines are unlikely to arrive soon, but we already place a great deal of power in the hands of automated systems and need to be certain those systems can handle…
From ACM TechNews
Aiming For 1 Million 'girls Who Code'
Women are the majority in the workforce, in college, and as income earners, but they are being left out of innovating, says Reshma Saujani, who wants to introduce coding to more than 1 million girls over the next decade.
From ACM TechNews
sing Robots to Get More Food From Raw Materials
SINTEF researchers are developing Gribbot, a fully functional robot designed to automate the process of extracting breast fillets from chickens, a task normally performed by humans.
From ACM Opinion
Dumbing It Down in the Cockpit
Long gone are the leather jackets, goggles, and silk scarves flung over the shoulders of aviators who wrestled with flight controls, furiously scanned instruments, and navigated using paper charts.
From ACM News
The Surprising ses of Games Controllers
Games controllers can end up in the strangest places.
From ACM Opinion
Boston Researcher Cynthia Breazeal Is Ready to Bring Robots Into the Home. Are You?
The MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group flanks the soaring atrium on the fourth floor of the Wiesner Building, a wall of metal panels along the southern edge of Cambridge, Mass.
From ACM News
Opals: Light Beams Let Data Rates Soar
You may know opals as fiery gemstones, but something special called OPALS is floating above us in space. On the International Space Station, the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) is demonstrating how laser communications…
From ACM News
Data From Our Wearables Is Now Courtroom Fodder
Courtrooms typically lag in technological innovation.
From ACM TechNews
Two Robots, One Challenge, Endless Possibility
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing robots that can enter dangerous places.
From ACM TechNews
Jesse Jackson Gets Silicon Valley to Talk Diversity
Technology industry representatives attended a summit on diversity in the tech workforce organized by Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition and hosted by Intel.
From ACM TechNews
Web Inventor Berners-Lee: The Hidden Cost of Mass Surveillance
Sir Tim Berners-Lee this week discussed the need for governments to end mass online surveillance.
From ACM TechNews
More-Flexible Digital Communication
Researchers say they have begun to describe theoretical limits on the degree of imprecision that communicating computers can tolerate.
From ACM TechNews
Media Portrayals of Women in Tech: Google Joins Nonprofits to Drive Change
Google has joined with two nonprofits to create a new award for the best media portrayal of women in technology.
From ACM News
Food: The Rarely Seen Robots That Package What We Eat
Last July, while touring a jelly bean factory, I came upon a startling sight.
From ACM News
An Interface For Tracking Botnets That's Fit For a Sci-Fi Starship
What do you get when you ask a bunch of digital artists to dream up a state-of-the-art tool for fighting cybercrime?