Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2017
From ACM TechNews
It Begins: Bots Are Learning to Chat in Their Own Language
OpenAI's Igor Mordatch is investigating new ways for machines to converse with each other.
From ACM TechNews
How Aristotle Created the Computer
Modern computers would not exist without the influence of Aristotelean principles.
From ACM TechNews
DARPA Wants to Cultivate the ltimate Transistor of the Future
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this month will present the Dynamic Range-enhanced Electronics and Materials program, which aims to develop a new generation of radiofrequency and millimeter-wave transistors…
From ACM News
Origami-Inspired Robot Can Hitch a Ride with a Rover
The next rovers to explore another planet might bring along a scout.
From ACM News
Inside the Hunt For Russia's Most Notorious Hacker
On the morning of December 30, the day after Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 US election, Tillmann Werner was sitting down to breakfast in Bonn, Germany.
From ACM News
How Pedestrians Will Defeat Autonomous Vehicles
A recently published paper in the Journal of Planning Education and Research explores how interactions between humans and self-driving cars could change the rules of the road.
From ACM News
How Aristotle Created the Computer
George Boole is often described as a mathematician, but he saw himself as a philosopher, following in the footsteps of Aristotle.
From ACM TechNews
Stanford Researchers Map Fear and Happiness in Historic London
Researchers have mapped out how readers of 18th- and 19th-century British novels felt emotionally about London.
From ACM TechNews
Bringing Augmented Reality to Warehouses
Researchers have created PickAR, a headset that uses AR technology to overlay picking information so warehouses can find and process orders with greater efficiency.
From ACM TechNews
New Extension Improves Inflight Wi-Fi
A new Google Chrome browser extension dramatically upgrades Wi-Fi browsing speeds at an altitude of 30,000 feet.
From ACM News
Beta Boom
Crowdsourcing opens up opportunities for 'civilian' beta testers.
From ACM News
Does Mars Have Rings? Not Right Now, But Maybe One Day
As children, we learned about our solar system's planets by certain characteristics—Jupiter is the largest, Saturn has rings, Mercury is closest to the sun. Mars is red, but it's possible that one of our closest neighbors also…
From ACM News
It Begins: Bots Are Learning to Chat in Their Own Language
Igor Mordatch is IS working to build machines that can carry on a conversation.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Are sing Darwin's Theories to Evolve Ai, So Only the Strongest Algorithms Survive
Researchers at Google Brain and OpenAI are applying Darwinian principles of evolution to advance artificial intelligence.
From ACM TechNews
X-Rays Map the 3D Interior of Integrated Circuits
Researchers have used x-rays to peer within commercial integrated circuits and reconstruct them in three dimensions.
From ACM TechNews
Quantum Physics Offers Insights Into Music Expressivity
Researchers have pioneered a new approach to understanding the musical experience by analyzing the vibrato effect using the Filter Diagonalization Method in music signal processing.
From ACM TechNews
Wi-Fi on Rays of Light: 100 Times Faster, and Never Overloaded
Researchers have developed a Wi-Fi network based on directable infrared light rays.
From ACM TechNews
A Scientist and a Supercomputer Re-Create a Tornado
Researchers are using supercomputer simulations to study the structure of tornado-producing supercell thunderstorms.
From ACM TechNews
Computing With Spiders' Webs
Researchers at the universities of Bristol and Oxford in the U.K. are examining spiders' webs to determine their computational capabilities.
From ACM News
Sorry, a Robot Is Not About to Replace Your Lawyer
Impressive advances in artificial intelligence technology tailored for legal work have led some lawyers to worry that their profession may be Silicon Valley's next victim.
From ACM News
Chemists Are First in Line For Quantum Computing's Benefits
This month IBM and Google both said they aim to commercialize quantum computers within the next few years (Google specified five), selling access to the exotic machines in a new kind of cloud service.
From ACM News
How Chip Designers Are Breaking Moore's Law
Microprocessors got smaller, faster, and more power-efficient, but as they reach their physical limitations, chip architecture is driving performance gains.
From ACM News
Experiments Show Titan Lakes May Fizz with Nitrogen
A recent NASA-funded study has shown how the hydrocarbon lakes and seas of Saturn's moon Titan might occasionally erupt with dramatic patches of bubbles.
From ACM TechNews
Ancestryai Algorithm Traces Your Family Tree Back More Than 300 Years
Researchers have developed a family tree artificial intelligence algorithm that looks for connections between 5 million baptisms from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th century.
From ACM TechNews
Why We Need Exascale Computing
Potentially everyone on earth could be affected by the benefits of exascale computing, writes Paul Messina, director of the Argonne National Laboratory's Exascale Project.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Present Early Warning System For Mass Cyberattacks
Researchers have developed an early warning system for massive distributed denial-of-service attacks.
From ACM TechNews
Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen By 2045
Google director of engineering and ACM Fellow Ray Kurzweil this week predicted the technological singularity will arrive by 2045.
From ACM TechNews
Robot Eavesdrops on Men and Women to See How Much They Talk
Researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have developed a robotic head that analyzes how people interact with each other.
From ACM News
.s. Science Agencies Face Deep Cuts in Trump Budget
The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health are big losers — but planetary science at NASA stands to gain.
From ACM TechNews
Cineca's Hpc Systems Tackle Italy's Biggest Computing Challenges
Cineca, the leading Italian high-performance computing consortium, manages a supercomputing resource hub to advance innovations in scientific computing.