Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2019
From ACM TechNews
Auto Engineers Warn Your Car Might Be Easier to Hack Than You Think
Adding sophisticated features to vehicles to make drivers' daily commutes easier also make their new vehicles more vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to a new report.
From ACM TechNews
Open Access Satellite Data Allows Tracking of Seasonal Population Movements
Researchers have provided open access to detailed satellite data on brightness for five cities in Niger and Nigeria.
From ACM TechNews
New York Beats Out San Francisco to Be World's Best Tech City
New York City is the best city in the world for the technology industry, according to the Savills Index.
From ACM TechNews
'Robbie the Robot' Can Spot Worsening Dementia After Watching 13 Episodes of Emmerdale
A robot equipped with artificial intelligence learned to recognize facial expressions by watching TV.
From ACM TechNews
Trump's Plan to Keep America First in AI
U.S. President Donald Trump today will sign an executive order for the federal government to channel funds, programs, and data in support of artificial intelligence research and commercialization.
From ACM News
The Era of General Purpose Computers is Ending
The computational economics enabled by Moore's Law is now changing.
From ACM News
There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology
Opinion by Bruce Schneier, a security technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School.
From ACM News
The Real Reason America Is Scared of Huawei: Internet-Connected Everything
There was a time when the world's two great superpowers were obsessed with nuclear weapons technology.
From ACM News
Bless the Overclockers: In the Data Center World, Liquid Cooling Is Becoming King
In Iron Man 2, there is a moment when Tony Stark is watching a decades-old film of his deceased father, who tells him "I'm limited by the technology of my time, but one day you'll figure this out. And when you do, you will change…
From ACM TechNews
How Analytics are Making Peace Between Fishermen, Turtles
New predictive analytics technologies are helping researchers protect turtles, albatrosses, whales, and other endangered species from fishermen.
From ACM TechNews
Software That Can Automatically Detect Fake News
Researchers have developed a system that automatically analyzes social media posts and filters out fake news and disinformation.
From ACM TechNews
Mind-Controlled Robot Lets You Weld Metal Without sing Your Hands
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers have developed a robot that can follow mental instructions from its operator to weld metal.
From ACM TechNews
A DNA Search Engine for Microbes
Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute have developed a DNA search engine for microbial data.
From ACM TechNews
Argonne Researchers Develop Method to Reduce Quantum Noise
Argonne National Laboratory researchers have developed a technique for reducing the effects of "noise" in quantum information systems.
From ACM News
Friendly Nurse or Nightmare-Inducing Machine? How Culture Programs Our Taste in Robots.
Slowly and silently, they glide across the floor wearing bright yellow dresses that look as though they were plucked from a haunted 1920s boarding school.
From ACM News
Making New Drugs With a Dose of Artificial Intelligence
You can think of it as a World Cup of biochemical research.
From ACM TechNews
MIT Robot Combines Vision, Touch to Learn Game of Jenga
Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have created a robot that taught itself to play Jenga.
From ACM TechNews
Google Releases Dataset to Help AI Systems Spot Fake Audio Recordings
The Google News unit and artificial intelligence research division Google AI have released a speech database in an attempt to identify bogus audio recordings.
From ACM TechNews
British Military Invests £1M into Headsets that Create Hostile VR Environments for Soldiers Training
The British Army is testing virtual reality headsets that can combine virtual environments with physical objects for a mixed-reality experience.
From ACM TechNews
C Allows High-School Computer Science as Core Curriculum Credit
The University of California system will count high school computer science courses toward core curriculum prerequisites for admission to its nine universities.
From ACM News
Eyes in the Skies
Privacy concerns arise around the New York Police Department's drone program.
From ACM News
Germany to Restrict Facebook's Data Gathering Activities
Facebook has been ordered to curb its data collection practices in Germany after a landmark ruling on Thursday that the world's largest social network abused its market dominance to gather information about users without their…
From ACM News
The Ethical Dilemma Facing Silicon Valley’s Next Generation
Stanford has established itself as the epicenter of computer science, and a farm system for the tech giants. Following major scandals at Facebook, Google, and others, how is the university coming to grips with a world in which…
From ACM News
Extreme Chemistry: Experiments at the Edge of the Periodic Table
If you wanted to create the world's next undiscovered element, number 119 in the periodic table, here's a possible recipe.
From ACM News
The CRISPR Machines that Can Wipe Out Entire Species
Charles Darwin had no idea what a gene was. If we dropped the father of evolution into 2019, the idea that humans can willfully alter the genes of an entire species would surely seem like wizardry to him.
From ACM News
Lawmakers Put Pentagon's Cyber in Their Sights
Congress has a new rising target when it comes to cyber: The Pentagon.
From ACM TechNews
Moving the Needle on Cyber Norms
The Global Commission on Stability in Cyberspace is working to establish principles that states, non-state actors, and the privacy industry should follow when cyberattacked.
From ACM TechNews
New 3D Printing Technique Creates Solid Objects sing Rays of Light
Researchers have created a three-dimensional printer that can generate whole objects at once, instead of printing them layer by layer.
From ACM TechNews
Scientists Connect Human Brain, 'Rat Cyborg' Brain Together
Chinese researchers have constructed a wireless brain-to-brain interface that enables a human to direct a rat through a maze.
From ACM TechNews
Winners Announced for the Zillow Prize
The Zillow Prize competition pitted nearly 4,000 teams against one another in an effort to develop a computerized system that could predict the future sale price of homes.