Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2009
From ACM TechNews
Computing Revolution Creating Desktop Supercomputers
University of Western Australia (UWA) Ph.D. candidate Chris Harris is investigating the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) in radio astronomy data processing. Harris says the GPUs typically used in desktop computers could…
From ACM News
Hackers: The China Syndrome
For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China's government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has discovered it's worse: It's hundreds of thousands of everyday civilians. And they've only just…
From ACM News
China Insists It Does Not Hack Into US Computers
China insisted on Thursday (April 23) that it was opposed to Internet crimes, following a U.S. media report that said Chinese hackers may have been behind a cyber attack on computers linked to a new US fighter jet. "Some people…
From ACM News
A Genomic Clue For Cloud Computing
University of Maryland computer science researchers recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation Cluster Exploratory Program (CluE) to fund research aimed at discovering how remote cluster computers, computer…
From ACM TechNews
Telepresence Seen as Space Exploration Game-Changer
Some experts say that telepresence could have such a major impact on society that it changes everything, from how humans explore space to how they remotely communicate with others. Telepresence generally refers to a group of…
From ACM News
Russian, Chinese Universities Claim Top Spots in ACM Programming Competition
Of the top 12 winners at the 2009 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) competing for the best computer programmers in the world, four teams were from Russian universities, one was from Georgia (a former member…
From ACM TechNews
Project Shows Researchers a Path to Escience Assets
The rapid evolution of computing, networking, and data capturing technologies, along with advances in data mining and analysis, are fundatmentally changing the way scholarly research is conducted. Web resource aggregations are…
From ACM TechNews
Workplace Wiki a Wakeup For Book-Smart niversity Grads
The University of Technology, Sydney, has developed the UTS Work-Ready Project, a new wiki intended to help better prepare university graduates for the workforce. Work-Ready Project leader Andrew Litchfield says government and…
From ACM News
Crypto Pioneers Differ on Cloud-Computing Risks
A group of pioneers in the security field, whose work in encryption is used to protect Internet data and communications every day, spoke recently about the state of cyber security and the topic that dominated was cloud computing…
From ACM News
Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project
Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks…
From ACM News
Microsoft Executive Sees Rise of Tablets, 'Room Computer'
Technology that changes how people give commands to computers could make touch-based PCs more popular and transform the traditional desktop into a "room computer" in coming years, said Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research…
From ACM News
25 Microchips That Shook the World
In microchip design, as in life, small things sometimes add up to big things. Dream up a clever microcircuit, get it sculpted in a sliver of silicon, and your little creation may unleash a technological revolution. It happened…
From ACM TechNews
Intel Preps Tool For Many-Core Processors
Later this year Intel will release a research project code-named Ct, short for C for Throughput, that will automatically make standard C and C++ compilers work with many-core processors--those with 16 to hundreds of cores. Ct…
From ACM TechNews
Diversity Computing Conference Hits Record Attendance
Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC) chair Pam Williams said this year's Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference was the best gathering so far. A record 400 people from academia, industry, and government…
From ACM TechNews
Smartphones Seen as Eventual Target of Computer Virus Attacks
Northeastern University researchers say that smartphones will soon be targeted by viruses on a massive scale, but a study by the researchers could provide a way to negate these attacks. Northeastern University physicist and…
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft Cooking p New Parallel Programming Language
Microsoft is developing a new language for parallel programming called Axum. Previously known as Maestro, Axum is an incubation project intended to help programmers handle parallel programming in the .NET environment. Microsoft…
From ACM TechNews
'instant On' Computing
Researchers supported by the National Science Foundation have achieved a breakthrough in adding ferroelectric materials to silicon, without intervening reaction layers. The development could help other researchers in their effort…
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Working on Memory to Replace Dram, Nand
Researchers at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) believe that resistive-random access memory (RRAM) could replace dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and NAND flash memory. They say RRAM could be ready…
From ICT Results
Easier Access to Digital Audio Archives
Digital sound archives offer enormously rich resources but accessing them is currently difficult. Sound material is often held separately from other materials and media. Worse, it can be difficult to listen to or to browse the…
From ACM TechNews
DARPA Wants AI Systems to Interpret Surveillance Data
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced an effort to create powerful artificial intelligences (AIs) that can mine and interpret a rapidly mounting volume of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance…
From ICT Results
Reconfigurable Hardware Delivers Design Flexibility
Technology is struggling to meet demands for high-performance, specialised computing systems. A European consortium is responding with a new kind of reconfigurable chip that is both efficient and flexible. The chip merges a…
From ACM News
Researchers Use Brain Interface to Post to Twitter
In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter — just by thinking about it. Just 23 characters long, his message, "using EEG to send tweet," demonstrates a natural, manageable way…
From ACM News
Method For Verifying Safety Of Computer-Controlled Devices Developed
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science have developed a new method for systematically identifying bugs in aircraft collision avoidance systems, high-speed train controls and other complex, computer…
From ACM News
Robots Are Narrowing the Gap With Humans
Robots are gaining on us humans. Guided by increased computing power, robots can now perform such tasks as picking up and peeling bananas, landing jumbo jets, steering cars through city traffic, searching human DNA for cancer…
From ACM TechNews
Funding Supports Diamond-Based Quantum Information Processing and Communication
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) scientists say that diamonds could revolutionize quantum mechanics in computing by enabling ultra-secure communications, super-fast database searches, and unprecedented code-breaking…
From ACM TechNews
H-1b Visas Cuts U.S. Tech Wages By Up to 6 Percent, Study Says
A new study from professors at New York University (NYU) and the University of Pennsylvania found that the use of H-1B workers by U.S. companies has decreased wages for computer programmers, system analysts, and software engineers…
From ACM TechNews
Netbook Chips Create a Low-Power Cloud
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have successfully used a cluster of the same low-power processors that are used in netbooks and mobile devices to create a server architecture that uses less power than a light bulb. The…
From ACM TechNews
Student Innovations Honored at Chi Conference
ACM's recent Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2009) conference gave computing students an opportunity to show off the technology they are developing and how it could change the way people live. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)…
From ACM TechNews
Harnessing Spammers to Solve AI Problems
Some Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) security systems are already being solved by spammers, but CAPTCHA co-creator Luis von Ahn says that when a software program is written…
From ACM News
Technarte to Showcase Innovative Art/Tech in Bilbao
Technarte, the International Conference on Art & Technology organized by Innovalia Association, will bring to Bilbao, Spain, the merge between art, science and engineering. On April 23 and 24, 2009, the Conference Centre Euskalduna…