Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2017
From ACM TechNews
New Mapping Technique Can Help Fight Extreme Poverty
Researchers say they have developed a new way to create poverty maps by using computational tools such as cellphone records, data from satellites, and geographic information systems.
From ACM TechNews
How Implants Powered By Ultrasound Can Help Monitor Health
Researchers have unveiled small implants designed for disease diagnosis and treatment by using ultrasound to safely beam both energy and instructions.
From ACM TechNews
Artificial Intelligence and Supercomputers to Help Alleviate rban Traffic Problems
Researchers are working to develop tools enabling searchable traffic analyses using deep learning and data mining.
From ACM News
Estonia, the Digital Republic
Up the Estonian coast, a five-lane highway bends with the path of the sea, then breaks inland, leaving cars to follow a thin road toward the houses at the water's edge.
From ACM News
Higher Education Not Neutral on Net Neutrality
The nature of today's Internet may mean trouble for the very community that birthed it, if network neutrality rules change.
From ACM News
Nasa's Juno Probes the Depths of Jupiter's Great Red Spot
Data collected by NASA's Juno spacecraft during its first pass over Jupiter's Great Red Spot in July 2017 indicate that this iconic feature penetrates well below the clouds.
From ACM TechNews
AI Researchers Are Trying to Combat How AI Can Be sed to Lie and Deceive
Artificial intelligence researchers gathered last week to discuss measures against the technology's use for deceit and disinformation.
From ACM TechNews
Seeing Through Walls of nknown Materials
A new technique exploits a wall's symmetry to see through it using a narrow band of microwave frequencies without any advance knowledge of the material making up the wall.
From ACM TechNews
This Machine-Learning Algorithm Can Turn Any Line Drawing Into Ascii Art
Osamu Akiyama at Osaka University in Japan says he has developed a machine-learning neural network that can render any kind of line drawing in ASCII.
From ACM TechNews
Diagnosing Performance Problems in Supercomputers
The Lightweight Distributed Metric Service is a framework to automatically monitor and diagnose performance issues in supercomputers.
From ACM TechNews
Twitter Can Reveal Our Shared Mood
Researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. have found that tweets reflect strong patterns of positive and negative moods over a 24-hour day.
From ACM TechNews
Revolutionizing Electronics sing Kirigami
Researchers in Japan have developed an ultrastretchable bioprobe using Kirigami designs, which enables the device to follow the contours of deformable biological samples.
From ACM News
It's Super Hard to Find Humans in the Fcc's Net Neutrality Comments
The Federal Communications Commissions''public comment period on its plans to repeal net neutrality protections was bombarded with bots, memes, and input from people who don't actually exist.
From ACM News
Berners-Lee, Woz, Cerf: Cancel Flawed Net Neutrality Vote
Internet and technology luminaries, including Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and "Father of the internet" Vint Cerf, have called on the FCC to cancel its planned net neutrality vote this week, arguing…
From ACM News
Google Is Giving Away AI That Can Build Your Genome Sequence
Today, a teaspoon of spit and a hundred bucks is all you need to get a snapshot of your DNA. But getting the full picture—all 3 billion base pairs of your genome—requires a much more laborious process.
From ACM TechNews
Esnet's Petascale Dtn Project Speeds Up Data Transfers Between Leading Hpc Centers
The U.S. Department of Energy runs the Energy Sciences Network that connects three of the world's leading supercomputers. The effort aims to achieve regular disk-to-disk, end-to-end transfer rates of one petabyte a week between…
From ACM TechNews
Criminology, Computer Science Researchers Developing Next-Gen Electronic Monitoring
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell are developing an electronic monitoring system that uses smartphones, sensor technology, and GPS tracking to promote and reward constructive behaviors that can keep people…
From ACM TechNews
Virtual Reality Makes Journalism Immersive, Realism Makes It Credible
Researchers at Pennsylania State University have found virtual reality can help journalists pull readers into their stories, but flashier design elements of VR can damage credibility.
From ACM News
Alien Probe or Galactic Driftwood? Seti Tunes In to 'oumuamua
Ever since its discovery in mid-October as it passed by Earth already outbound from our solar system, the mysterious object dubbed 'Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "first messenger") has left scientists utterly perplexed.
From ACM News
Scientists 'inject' Information Into Monkeys' Brains
When you drive toward an intersection, the sight of the light turning red will (or should) make you step on the brake. This action happens thanks to a chain of events inside your head.
From ACM TechNews
Tracking Dolphins With Algorithms You Might Find on Facebook
Researchers have used a machine learning algorithm similar to Facebook's friend recommender program to track dolphins.
From ACM TechNews
Reading a Neural Network's Mind
Researchers at MIT CSAIL and the Qatar Computing Research Institute have used an interpretive method to analyze neural networks trained for machine translation and speech recognition. They've found empirical support for some …
From ACM TechNews
Scientists Create Stretchable Battery Made Entirely Out of Fabric
Researchers have created an entirely textile-based biobattery that can generate maximum power similar to that produced by previous paper-based microbial fuel cells.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Launch Moon Mission Audio Site
Researchers are using a 2012 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to develop Explore Apollo, a public website featuring audio from the Apollo moon missions.
From ACM TechNews
New Algorithm Repairs Corrupted Digital Images in One Step
A new algorithm incorporates artificial neural networks to simultaneously apply a wide range of fixes to corrupted digital images.
From ACM TechNews
Computerized Biology, or How to Control a Population of Cells With a Computer
Two studies from European researchers detail their use of hybrid experimental platforms to enable the production of new and reprogrammable behaviors of cell populations.
From ACM News
'malware-Free' Attacks Mount in Big Breaches, Crowdstrike Finds
Despite the rise of massive crypto-ransomware attacks, an even more troubling trend emerged in data gathered by the security firm CrowdStrike this past year and published in the company's 2017 "Intrusion Services Casebook."
From ACM Careers
Tech Is Taking Over Our Lives, and Our 401(k) Accounts
As technology takes over more of people's daily lives, it's also taking over ever-bigger chunks of their retirement accounts.
From ACM TechNews
'grinch Bots' Attempt to Steal Christmas By Driving p Toy Prices
Online fraudsters are frustrating Christmas shoppers by using software bots to buy up the most popular toys to resell at inflated prices at third-party websites.
From ACM TechNews
Google's 'superhuman' Deepmind AI Claims Chess Crown
Google says its DeepMind unit's AlphaGo Zero algorithm defeated world-leading specialist software Stockfish 8 in a chess match within hours of teaching itself the game.