Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2011
From ACM News
Freaks, Geeks, and Gdp
Why hasn't the Internet helped the American economy grow as much as economists thought it would?
From ACM News
Silicon Valley's Innovators Take Aim at Your Wallet
Hang on to your wallets and purses. In the constant search for the next thing to disrupt, Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs and venture capitalists believe that lugging around all that plastic and cash is a cumbersome system…
From ACM News
Professor Gets Computing's 'Nobel'
Harvard University professor Leslie G. Valiant, an artificial intelligence pioneer, has been awarded ACM's 2010 A.M. Turing Award. Valiant's research was the basis for applications including email spam filters, speech recognition…
From ACM News
Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software
When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of "discovery"—providing documents relevant to a lawsuit—the studios examined…
From ACM News
Go for It on Fourth Down? Ask Coach Watson
If humans can't beat a computer at "Jeopardy!" why should we trust them to make the right call on fourth down in the Super Bowl? That was the fundamental question asked by some researchers at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics…
From ACM News
Data as Art: 10 Striking Science Maps
The computer age triggered a seemingly endless stream of scientific data, but such incoming mountains of information come at a cost. The more data you amass, the tougher it is to comprehend what you're dealing with.
From ACM News
2010 Visualization Challenge
An "ocean" composed of a single layer of molecules; an intricate depiction of an HIV particle as a study in orange and gray; a phantasmagoria of fungi; a video tracing the long-distance travels of items dumped in the trash…
From ACM News
World Mobile Data Traffic to Explode by Factor of 26 by 2015
Anyone who thinks that the Internet revolution is in anything but its early phase had better take a look at Cisco's latest Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast.
From ACM News
Turning Augmented Reality Into an Open Standard
A research team at Georgia Tech hopes to make augmented reality on smart phones more useful by developing an open standard for it.
From ACM Opinion
Google Schools Its Algorithm
To humans, computer intelligence is a puzzle, as if the machines have split personalities. They can be so remarkably smart at times, yet so bafflingly dumb at others.
From ACM News
The 'Panda' That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google
Google's new update to its search engine addressed the growing complaint that low-quality content sites (derisively referred to as content farms) were ranked higher than higher-quality sites that seemed to be more important to…
From ACM News
Service Robots: Rise of the Machines (again)
In 1961, just after America's Sputnik moment, the world's first industrial robot debuted at a General Motors assembly plant in Trenton, N.J.
From ACM News
Is the Navy Trying to Start the Robot Apocalypse?
Whenever the military rolls out a new robot program, folks like to joke about SkyNet or the Rise of the Machines. But this time, the military really is starting to venture into robot-apocalypse territory: swarms of little…
From ACM TechNews
A Tangled Web of Shortened Links
Link-shortening services may be slowing down parts of the Internet, according to the Foundation for Research and Technology and Microsoft Research. And it might just get worse.
From ACM TechNews
The Quantum Singularity
MIT professor Scott Aaronson and grad student Alex Arkhipov will present a paper at ACM's 43rd Symposium on Theory of Computing that describes an experiment, which, if successful, would offer strong support for the power of quantum…
From ACM TechNews
Improved Method Developed to Locate Ships in Storms
University of Alcala de Henaresresearchers have developed a system for detecting ships in stormy seas that analyzes radar images by applying an algorithm based on artificial neural networks.
From ACM News
20 Hot It Security Issues
From malware on Google's Android phones to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency trying to understand how stories or narratives impact security and human behavior, the security world certainly is never boring.…
From ACM News
Will Goal-Line Technology Bring Justice to Soccer?
A sporting miscarriage of justice that occurred last summer triggered a series of experiments that could this weekend see soccer (that's football to the rest of the world) change forever.
From ACM News
10 Questions For David Ferrucci
Why aren't you letting Watson speak for himself today?
Watson is trained to answer questions for Jeopardy! It's not an interactive dialogue system, so it can't conduct its own interviews. You can imagine giving it information…From ACM News
Web's Hot New Commodity: Privacy
As the surreptitious tracking of Internet users becomes more aggressive and widespread, tiny start-ups and technology giants alike are pushing a new product: privacy.
From ACM TechNews
Increasing Processor Efficiency By 'shutting Off the Lights'
Harvard University's Wonyoung Kim has developed an on-chip, multicore voltage regulator (MCVR) that could reduce semiconductor power requirements and lead to more energy-efficient smartphones, laptops, and data centers.
From ACM TechNews
Google Researchers Reveal Lessons Learned in Large-Scale Cloud Storage
There is a lot of information on how storage systems fail, but new research about Google's main storage infrastructure provides more answers about the overall availability for cloud-based storage services.
From ACM News
The New Police Siren: You
Joe Bader tried setting the two tones of his invention four notes apart on the musical scale, but the result sounded like music, not a siren. Same thing when he played around with a five-note interval.
From ACM Opinion
Psych-Out Sexism
The innocent, unconscious bias that discourages girls from math and science.
From ACM TechNews
China's Homemade Supercomputer May Be the Most Efficient Ever
China plans to launch a new homegrown supercomputer, the Dawning 6000, this summer, and it "could rival even Blue Gene/Q systems for performance per watt supremacy," according to HPC Wire.
From ACM News
Thinking Your Way Through Traffic in a Brain-Control Car
John Prine wasn’t far off when he sang in "Living In the Future" that "we're all driving rocket ships and talking with our minds." We're still waiting for our rocket ships, but German researchers have developed a car you can…
From ACM TechNews
Share of Black S&e Degrees From Hbcus Declines in 2008
Recent U.S. National Science Foundation studies have shown that the percentage of minorities earning bachelor's degrees in science and engineering from historically black colleges and universities has declined in recent years…
From ACM TechNews
Grid Pioneer Ian Foster Discusses the Future of Science in the Cloud
University of Chicago professor Ian Foster has a vision to facilitate a transformational change in scientific research, to the point where research capabilities such as massive data and exponentially faster computers become accessible…
From ACM TechNews
Retooling Algorithms
MIT professor Charles Leiserson says the best method for rewriting algorithms to run on parallel processors is to use a divide-and-conquer technique, allowing the computer to cater an algorithm's execution to the resources available…
From ACM TechNews
Cra Launches Effort to nderstand Opinions About Recent Postdoc Surge
The Computing Research Association (CRA) has launched a program to engage the computing research community in the state of postdoctoral fellows.