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 News
Robot Suit Will Turn You Into Ironman
A cybernetic bodysuit developed by Cyberdyne Corp. and Daiwa House of Japan augments body movement and increases user strength by up to tenfold. The HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) suit uses pads placed on specific areas of the body…
From ACM TechNews
Supercomputer Project Moves Forward in Wyoming
Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal has signed a bill to contribute approximately $40 million to the National Center for Atmospheric Research's new supercomputer project. The legislation represents the last piece of funding from the…
From ACM TechNews
Nominations Open For Marie R. Pistilli Eda Achievement Award
Nominations are now being accepted for the 10th Annual Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Automation Achievement Award, which is named after the former organizer of the Design Automation Conference (DAC). Nominations…
From ACM TechNews
Cyber Spying a Threat, and Everyone Is In On It
The computers of Tibetan exiles and the U.S. electrical grid were recently breached by hackers, highlighting the growing threat of cyber espionage. The White House is currently finishing a 60-day review of how the federal government…
From ACM TechNews
Artificial Intelligence to Tackle Rogue Traders
The University of Sunderland's Computerized Analysis of Stocks and Shares for Novelty Detection of Radical Activities (CASSANDRA) project is developing a software tool to detect financial fraud by combining artificial intelligence…
From ACM TechNews
A Twitter-Based Graphing Tool
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Human-Computer Interaction Institute Ph.D. student Ian Li (pictured) has developed Grafitter, a Twitter-based program that lets users create and see a graph of their behavior. Grafitter won the…
From ACM TechNews
Carnegie Mellon to Oversee IBM Smart Grid Model
The Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition, which is composed of IBM and several utility companies, has passed control of their Smart Grid Maturity Model to Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI)…
From ICT Results
Internet of Things Plays With Hand of Aces
European researchers have created new software components called Autonomic Communication Elements (ACEs) which can be combined to create services for any type of device on any type of network. The ACEs may make the 'Internet…
From ACM TechNews
Deep Sky Project Provides a Portal Into Data Universe
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center receives about 3,000 astronomical files every night from automated sky scanning systems from around the world. The center holds a decade's worth of files comprising…
From ACM TechNews
Yahoo! Partners With Top Universities to Advance Cloud Computing Research
Yahoo! has expanded its partnerships with top U.S. universities to advance cloud computing research. The University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie…
From ACM TechNews
Computers Analyze Fruit-Flies to Find Genes For Aggressive Behavior
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists have trained computers to automatically analyze aggression and courtship in fruit flies, allowing researchers to perform large-scale, high-throughput screens for the genes…
From ACM TechNews
Keep On Spinning
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Materials Science Division researchers have made a major advancement in spintronics by controlling the spin states of highly mobile electrons at different locations in a semiconductor and…
From ACM TechNews
Quantum Computers Will Require Complex Software to Manage Errors
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) theorists have demonstrated that a type of software operation, believed to be a solution to the fundamental problems with computer hardware, will not function as originally…
From ACM TechNews
Demand for H-1B Visas Tumbles
Applications for H-1B visas are down about a third from a year ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. The agency began accepting applications for H-1B visas on April 1, and says the preliminary…
From ACM TechNews
Dual Degree Programs Aim to Create Better Engineers
The Computing Research Association recently reported that enrollment in engineering and computer science programs increased by 8 percent over the 2007-2008 school year, and many schools are still working to improve enrollment…
From ACM News
Darpa Awards $16 Million to Rice University to Improve Compilers
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Rice University $16 million to develop a new set of tools that can improve the performance of virtually any application running on any microprocessor. The PACE…
From ACM TechNews
Hpc Experts Meet to Discuss Fault Tolerance
At the Fault Tolerance for Extreme Scalability Workshop, co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure's Blue Waters and TeraGrid projects, national experts gathered to discuss topics surrounding…
From ACM TechNews
Video Game Competition Announced For Siggraph 2009
ACM's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) 2009 will feature GameJam!, a new international video game competition and will give three-person teams 24 consecutive hours to create, design, and…
From ACM TechNews
Electrosmog on the Circuit Board
Electronic components continue to be made smaller and smaller, which reduces the amount of power that they require but increases signal-to-noise ratios. If electronic components are too densely packed they can start to interfere…
From ACM TechNews
World's Most Efficient Supercomputer Gets to Work
The new Fujitsu FX1 supercomputer in Japan has a peak performance of 110.6 teraflops, making it the most powerful machine in Japan and the most efficient supercomputer in the world. It was inaugerated earlier this month by the…
From ACM TechNews
Rti Sponsors Hpc Adoption Conference
The 2009 High-Performance Computing Adoption Conference will be held May 11-13 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel. The three-day event will define the challenges of high-performance adoption and provide solutions…
From ACM TechNews
Robot That Can Turn Cartwheels, Do Somersaults
Sherry Randhawa of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, recently demonstrated some of the school's progress in robotics and computing. A major attraction was a robot capable of performing cartwheels, somersaults, balancing…
From ACM TechNews
Scholarship For Cis Program Seeks to Close the Gap
Florida A&M University's Computer Information Sciences (CIS) Program has been awarded a $552,000 National Science Foundation grant to recruit minority women to computer science and information technology fields. "The latest…
From ACM TechNews
The Mobile Future of the Keyboard
Touchscreen keyboards could stand some improvement before they become the norm in smartphones and make their way to desktop computers, gaming devices, and even coffee tables. With such touch screens, users tap the image of buttons…
From ACM TechNews
A Step Toward Superfast Carbon Memory
Researchers at the National University of Singapore have made computer memory devices using graphene, a flat sheet of hexagonally arranged carbon atoms capable of transporting electrons at high speeds. The researchers' graphene…
From ACM TechNews
25 Highly Anticipated Open-Source Releases Coming This Year
The free and open source software community is hotly anticipating a large number of new releases this year, including an upgrade to Mozilla's Firefox browser that features a native parser for JavaScript Object Notation, a data…
From ACM TechNews
The Best Computer Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future
The 2009 Computer-Human Interaction conference will feature a display that recalls interfaces from the past, shows the most modern interfaces available today, and predicts what interfaces could become available in the future. …
From ACM TechNews
Google's Power Play
Google and General Electric (GE) have teamed up on an ambitious project to transform the United States' energy production infrastructure from a model characterized by inefficiency and overconsumption to a decentralized, distributed…
From ACM TechNews
White House Working Group Releases Strategy for Digital Scientific Data
The United States should develop a strategic policy for digital preservation of and access to scientific data, concludes a report by the National Science and Technology Council's (NSTC's) Interagency Working Group on Digital…
From ACM TechNews
Talking in Color: Voice Imaging Helps Social Skills
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer scientist Karrie Karahalios has developed a technique to digitize conversations and represent them as images, which enables people to "see" their own conversations on computer…