Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2018
From ACM News
Newly Discovered Form of Water Ice Is 'really Strange'
Scientists have confirmed a form of water that is simultaneously solid and liquid. It is the latest advance in the study of water, a seemingly simple substance that can shift between many different configurations.
From ACM TechNews
Supercomputing More Light Than Heat
Researchers have used the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment to gain access to more than 975,000 compute hours on the Maverick supercomputing system.
From ACM TechNews
Automating Materials Design
Researchers say they have developed a system that can numerically specify the properties designers want in a material, then generate a microstructure that matches the specification.
From ACM TechNews
New C Riverside Research Advances Spintronics Technology
Researchers have advanced spintronics via new methods to detect signals from spintronic components made of inexpensive metals and silicon.
From ACM News
Quantum Algorithms Struggle Against Old Foe: Clever Computers
The quest for "quantum supremacy" – unambiguous proof that a quantum computer does something faster than an ordinary computer – has paradoxically led to a boom in quasi-quantum classical algorithms.
From ACM News
New Nasa Space Sensors to Address Key Earth Questions
Why is the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the planet?
From ACM News
The Era of Quantum Computing Is Here. Outlook: Cloudy
After decades of heavy slog with no promise of success, quantum computing is suddenly buzzing with almost feverish excitement and activity.
From ACM TechNews
NSF Grant Awarded to Fund Study of sing Augmented Reality to Interest Girls in STEM
Researchers at the University of Maryland' Center for Environmental Sciences' Appalachian Laboratory have received a U.S. National Science Foundation grant to use augmented reality design experiences to pique teenaged girls' …
From ACM TechNews
China Plans to se AI to Boost the Thinking Skills of Nuclear Submarine Commanders
China is planning to enhance its nuclear submarines' computer systems with artificial intelligence to augment the potential thinking skills of commanding officers, according to a senior scientist involved with the program.
From ACM TechNews
Quantum Algorithm Could Help AI Think Faster
Researchers at the Center for Quantum Technologies in Singapore propose a "quantum linear system algorithm" to help crunch numbers on a wide array of problems.
From ACM TechNews
Neural Networks Allow S to 'Read Faces' in a New Way
Stanford University professor Michal Kosinski is using deep neural networks to illustrate the use of facial-recognition technology for invasive monitoring
From ACM TechNews
.k. Humandrive Initiative to Test Self-Driving Cars on Country Roads
The HumanDrive initiative in the U.K. seeks to refine driverless automobile navigation systems for conditions that include country roads and high-speed roundabouts, via a new autonomous car trial.
From ACM News
How to Control a Machine sing Your Mind
Bill Kochevar's life was changed, seemingly irrevocably, when he was paralysed from the shoulders down following a cycling accident nearly a decade ago.
From ACM News
Physicists Harness Twisted Mathematics to Make Powerful Laser
Researchers have exploited the twisty nature of topological physics to produce a high-quality beam of laser light—a step that could lead to the first practical application of this burgeoning field.
From ACM News
If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (and Amazon Has a Patent For It.)
What if your employer made you wear a wristband that tracked your every move, and that even nudged you via vibrations when it judged that you were doing something wrong?
From ACM News
China Wants to Make the Chips that Will Add AI to Any Gadget
In an office at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a computer chip is crunching data from a nearby camera, looking for faces stored in a database.
From ACM TechNews
MIT Enlisting Hundreds of Scientists in Effort to Make Computers Think More Like People
MIT has launched the MIT Intelligence Quest, an agenda to coordinate the efforts of MIT's many experts to train computers to think in a more human-like manner.
From ACM TechNews
Vanderbilt Wins Top Prize in First Round of DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge
Vanderbilt University's MarmotE team has won the first round of the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which focuses on using machine intelligence to allocate bands for use on the radio frequency spectrum.
From ACM TechNews
Breaking Down Barriers to Computer Science For Students With Disabilities
Disabled students are often shortchanged in computer science education, and Sheryl Burgstahler, director of the University of Washington's DO-IT Center, is working with others to make it more widely available.
From ACM TechNews
Penn Engineering Research Gives Optical Switches the 'contrast' of Electronic Transistors
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say they have found a way to precisely control a combination of optical signals, producing outputs with a near-perfect contrast and extremely large on/off ratios.
From ACM TechNews
A Small-Scale Demonstration Shows How Quantum Computing Could Revolutionize Data Analysis
An experiment by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China used quantum computers to calculate Betti numbers. The work "suggests that data analytics may be an important future application for quantum computing…
From ACM Careers
Inside Amazon's Artificial Intelligence Flywheel
In early 2014, Srikanth Thirumalai met with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
From ACM News
Speed of Light Could Be Dropped to Zero sing Crystals
In a vacuum like space, the speed of light is just over 186,280 miles per second. Scientists have now shown it's possible to slow it down to zero miles per second without sacrificing its brightness, regardless of its frequency…
From ACM TechNews
Applying Machine Learning to the niverse's Mysteries
Berkeley Lab scientists and their collaborators used neural networks to analyze simulations of heavy ion collisions.
From ACM TechNews
Facebook Is Trying to Teach Chatbots How to Chit-Chat
Researchers at Facebook's FAIR lab have developed Persona-Chat, a dataset of more than 160,000 lines of dialogue taken from workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk marketplace, to train chatbots to be more lifelike when they interact…
From ACM TechNews
a Researchers Observe Electrons Zipping Around in Crystals
Researchers at the University of Arizona are investigating transition metal dichalcogenides' potential for enabling new techniques for data processing and storage.
From ACM TechNews
cf Researchers Lend a Hand on Additive Manufacturing
The U.S. Army and the U.S. Office of Naval Research are working with University of Central Florida researchers to help push the limits of additive manufacturing with metallic alloys.
From ACM News
Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries Into Fake Accounts
More than a million followers have disappeared from the accounts of dozens of prominent Twitter users in recent days as the company faces growing criticism over the proliferation of fake accounts and scrutiny from federal and…
From Communications of the ACM
Quantum Technology Forgoes Unconditional Security to Extend its Reach
Two projects in China demonstrate the possibility of global quantum key distribution networks.
From Communications of the ACM
Going Serverless
Serverless computing lets businesses and application developers focus on the program they need to run, without worrying about the machine on which it runs, or the resources it requires.