Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2009
From ACM TechNews
New Method to Assemble Nanoscale Elements Could Transform Data Storage Industry
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst say that a new, innovative technique in which nanoscale elements precisely assemble themselves over large surfaces could…
From ACM TechNews
Computer Science Meets the Grid
University of California, Berkeley professor Randy Katz says future computers need to be designed to meet the energy efficiency needs of data centers, and the power grid needs to adapt and become more like the Internet. At a…
From ACM TechNews
SIGGRAPH 2009 Seeks Live Real-Time Video Games Content
The SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival will include a segment on real-time rendering projects, in which the top selections will be played and demonstrated live on various platforms. A jury of industry professionals and…
From ACM TechNews
Lighting Up the Lives of the Elderly - Adaptively
Researchers working on the European Union-funded Aladin project say lighting that can adapt automatically to meet a user's needs could have significant benefits for anyone who spends long periods in artificially-lit buildings…
From ACM TechNews
Development of Mobile Applications Is Easy With the Elephant Platform
The Fraunhofer Institute for Communications Systems ESK's Elephant research project is a software platform that makes it easier for programmers to develop applications for mobile devices. With the Elephant platform, which is…
From ACM TechNews
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Collaborate to Clean p Web
Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that they will support Google's technology for detecting duplicate pages on Web sites. Web publishers will be able to use Google's new Web standard, dubbed the Canonical Link Tag, to find the principal…
From ACM News
Does Drm Have a Future?
Digital rights management (DRM) has emerged as a widespread tool to combat piracy. So far, however, DRM systems have proved highly inconvenient to consumers who wish to view or listen to content on multiple devices, including…
From ACM TechNews
Stealthier Mac Attacks
A security expert at the recent Black Hat DC computer security conference demonstrated a technique for attacking the Mac operating system OS X without leaving any evidence. Similar attacks have plagued Windows and Linux machines…
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft Researcher Stores Digital Life
Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has been recording virtually all aspects of his life digitally for 10 years through his Microsoft-funded MyLifeBits project. He describes the project as a memory aid, and says he envisions MyLifeBits…
From ACM TechNews
It's All Relative: Uc San Diego's Einstein Robot Has 'emotional Intelligence'
Researchers at the University of California San Diego's (UCSD's) California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) have outfitted a robot modeled after Albert Einstein with special software that…
From ACM TechNews
ACM Policy Group Applauds Congressional Passage of Increased Investment in Research
ACM's Public Policy Committee (USACM) applauds the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's focus on science and technology innovation as a crucial element of economic growth. "The computing field has a long history of creating…
From ACM TechNews
Download, Install and Drive - The Future of Automotive Software
European researchers working on the DySCAS project have developed an automotive software architecture that will enable cars to receive software updates just like computers and mobile phones. "Cars take many years to develop…
From ACM TechNews
Gadget Reads Users' Minds From Their Grip
Computer-human interface researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a prototype control device that predicts what function the user is trying to access based on how the device is handled. "The…
From ACM TechNews
Carnegie Mellon Professor Earns Lifetime Achievement Award For Her Work in Human-Computer Interaction
ACM's Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) has named Carnegie Mellon University professor Sara Kiesler the winner of this year's Lifetime Achievement Award. A leading social psychologist, Kiesler has…
From ACM TechNews
A Serious Approach to Games
Coventry University in the United Kingdom has opened the Serious Games Institute (SGI), a new program designed to develop hardware and software applications that are intended for games that focus on purposes other than entertainment…
From ACM TechNews
A New Internet?
There is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that the only way to fix Internet security is to recreate the Internet from scratch. What a new Internet might look like is being discussed, but one possible solution…
From ACM TechNews
Intelligent Home Environment
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) in Kaiserslautern, Germany, are developing an intelligent home automation system that collects detailed environment information through a network…
From ACM TechNews
Cornell Develops Analysis Tools for Large-Scale Web Data
The Web Lab project has developed a family of data analysis tools for searching the Internet Archive. The project, a joint effort by researchers at Cornell University and the Internet Archive, is funded by the National Science…
From ACM TechNews
UCLA Team Creates Virtual Library of Medieval Manuscripts
Over the past decade, as many as 10,000 of the rarest and most important medieval manuscripts have been scanned into digital formats that could be studied on the Internet, but finding these documents online can be extremely difficult…
From ACM TechNews
Project Uses Cell Phones as Computers in the Classroom
University of Michigan professor Elliot Soloway and University of North Texas professor Cathleen Norris have developed the Mobile Learning Environment, a suite of educational software that turns smart phones into personal computers…
From ACM TechNews
Sensors Help Keep the Elderly Safe, and at Home
Sensors and other monitoring technologies offer senior citizens more freedom to live independently and at less risk within the home. Motion sensors, medication reminder systems linked to mobile phones, pill compliance detectors…
From ACM TechNews
Berkeley Releases Cloud Computing Study
University of California, Berkeley professors David Patterson and Armando Fox, researchers at Berkeley's Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory, have co-authored "Above the Clouds," a paper that analyzes the emerging…
From ACM TechNews
Japanese Robot/humanoid Innovations pdate: Mankind's Best New Friend Is Getting Better
Japan's Information and Robot Technology Research Technology Initiative is working on the Home Assistant Robot Project, an effort to create a robot capable of serving as a housekeeper and caregiver. Such a robot would need fine…
From ACM TechNews
Professors Regard Online Instructions as Less Effective Than Classroom Learning
Many education professionals believe that online courses are less effective than classroom courses, concludes two surveys conducted by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. The surveys also…
From ACM TechNews
Setting the Stage For Agile Development
Corporate trainers are increasingly applying methods from acting, improvisation, and other art forms to agile development training so that software developers can be better prepared for changing requirements and other unanticipated…
From ACM TechNews
Researcher Calls For New Approach in Computer Education
A paper that proposes a new approach to teaching computer science in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was the top presentation at the Seventh Worldwide Conference on Education and Culture, held recently in Rome, Italy. Uma Gunasilan…
From ACM TechNews
How to Beat the Recession sing nderutilized Technology
Experts say there are underutilized digital applications that could be tapped to pull the world out of the economic recession. Several categories of corporate innovation--customer-oriented innovation, product innovation, process…
From ACM TechNews
Road to Grid Computing Remains Difficult
Grid computing pioneer Ian Foster says that grid and cloud computing have not yet reached their full potential. Foster says the reliable infrastructure management that is needed for remote applications and data is still difficult…
From ACM TechNews
Semantic Web Promises a Smarter Electricity Grid
European researchers working on the S-TEN project have developed a generic framework for information and communications technology architectures and applied semantic Web technologies to make networks self describing. In such…
From ACM TechNews
The Cybercrime Wave
The online crime business has never been better and the rising threat of cybercrime stems from criminals' realization that the Internet offers a more profitable, efficient, and less risky avenue for theft than physical attacks…