Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2011
From ACM TechNews
Google Manager: Technology Needs to Attract More Women
The technology industry needs to do more to bring women into the field, according to Google's Marissa Mayer. Speaking during a recent conference, Mayer said girls are expressing little interest in computer science as early as…
From ACM TechNews
DARPA Will Spend $20 Million to Search For Crypto's Holy Grail
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to spend $20 million over five years to find a way to both encrypt data and let it be used and manipulated.
From ACM TechNews
Ut Debuts Its Newest Supercomputer
The University of Texas at Austin, along with the Texas A&M University, Texas Tech, the University of Texas System, and others, has built the Lonestar 4 supercomputer, which contains 1,888 Dell blade servers, each with two Intel…
From ACM News
Software Pinpoints Afghan Fighters
The ongoing military campaign against Afghan insurgents may get a boost from new computer software designed to zero in on the locations of weapons caches and warlords.
From ACM News
Students Worldwide Share Mobile Addiction
College students around the world are "strikingly similar" in their addiction to their cellphones and need to be connected to social media like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, according to a new study, which tracked the students'…
From ACM News
Jean Bartik, Software Pioneer, Dies at 86
Jean Jennings Bartik, one of the first computer programmers and a pioneering forerunner in a technology that came to be known as software, died on March 23. She was 86. Bartik discussed her work on ENIAC in an 1973 interview…
From ACM News
Facebook Shares Server Design
Facebook Inc. said it would share details for its new server systems and computer rooms with other companies, hoping to set off what it characterized as an open movement for hardware design.
From ACM News
How Much Information?
In 2008, the world's servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information, almost 10 to the 22nd power, or ten million million gigabytes. This was 12 gigabytes of information daily for the average worker, or about 3 terabytes…
From ACM News
Military
The Pentagon has spent decades and gazillions of dollars trying to build the perfect translation device. Now, its far-out research arm is looking at a new direction: a robot that can interpret all sorts of languages—and think…
From ACM TechNews
Self-Cooling Observed in Graphene Electronics
University of Illinois researchers have found that graphene transistors have a nanoscale cooling effect that reduces their temperatures.
From ACM TechNews
What a Cyberwar With China Might Look Like
A cyberwar scenario hypothesized by former U.S. State Department diplomat Christopher Bronk in a report published in the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Studies paints a different picture from many people's assumptions.
From ACM TechNews
Garbage-Sorting Robot Gets Its Hands Dirty
Robots could fill the role of sorting through and categorizing discarded material from construction and demolition projects for recyclers as a result of the efforts of ZenRobotics researchers.
From ACM TechNews
Neighborhood Wireless Grid Project Gains Support
Rochester Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, and Virginia Tech researchers have collaborated to create wireless grid technologies as part of the Wireless Grid Innovation Testbed.
From ACM News
Darpa's Humanoid Robbie Never Takes His Eyes Off You
In preparation for National Robotics Week, an initiative of the Congressional Robotics Caucus, at the National Museum of American History, which kicks off on Saturday, April 9, the Smithsonian Institution is in the process…
From ACM News
A Browser that Speaks Your Language
Early adopters can now get a sneak peek at the future of the Web by downloading the latest prerelease, or "beta," version of Chrome, Google's Web browser. One of the most interesting new features is an ability to translate…
From ACM News
Nasa Readies Jobs For Robonaut
The space android called Robonaut 2 was just unpacked from its box last month, but NASA is already thinking up jobs for the darn thing to do, such as replacing parts on the International Space Station and wielding a fire extinguisher…
From ACM News
Moshe Y. Vardi, 2011 Harry H. Goode Memorial Award Recipient
"For fundamental and lasting contributions to the development of logic as a unifying foundational framework and a tool for modeling computational systems."
From ACM News
At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force…
From ACM TechNews
sing Adjacent Phone Antennas Could Improve Data Transfer
University of Bristol researchers are studying multiple-input multiple-output technology, which uses several antennas to transmit and receive data, in order to make mobile phones transfer data faster.
From ACM News
Who Is Epsilon and Why Does It Have My Data?
If you didn't get an email warning this week that your name and email address were part of a database that was breached, consider yourself lucky, and unique.
From ACM News
Secure, Synchronized, Social Tv
Network coding is an innovative new approach to network design that promises much more efficient use of bandwidth, and MIT researchers have made seminal contributions to its development. But in recent work, some of those researchers…
From ACM News
More Pupils Are Learning Online, Fueling Debate on Quality
Jack London was the subject in Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course. In a high school classroom packed with computers, he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But…
From ACM News
Being John Malkovich: Personal Control of Individual Brain Cells
In philosophy of mind, a "cerebroscope" is a fictitious device, a brain-computer interface in today's language, which reads out the content of somebody's brain. An autocerebroscope is a device applied to one's own brain. You…
From ACM News
'predator' Smart Camera Locks Onto, Tracks Anything
Zdenek Kalal’s Predator object-tracking software is almost uncanny. Show anything to its all-seeing camera eye, and it will quickly learn to recognize it and then track it, whether it fades into the distance, hides amongst…
From ACM TechNews
How Natural Disasters and Political nrest Affect the Internet
Northwestern University researchers have developed software that analyzes how natural disasters and political upheaval affect the Internet.
From ACM TechNews
Software Builds 3-D Models From Search Results
University of North Carolina researchers have developed software that can create 3D models of landmarks and geographical locations using 2D photos from online photo-sharing Web sites.
From ACM TechNews
The Transition From Search to Social Media: the Future of Information Networks
Social Web sites are replacing search engines through their ability to identify the information that people pay attention to, which mirrors a basic axiom about information and communication in complex networked systems, writes…
From ACM News
How the University of Utah Turns Academic Research Into Successful Startups
The University of Utah ranks first in the U.S. in terms of creating startups based upon campus research. Here are four reasons for its great success.
From ACM News
Promoting Science, and Google, to Students
Google is synonymous with "search engine," and now, for students, it wants to be synonymous with "science."
From ACM News
Quantum Trickery Could Lead to Stealth Radar
Stealthy radar systems and the ability to transmit large amounts of data over long distances are a step closer thanks to a technique that could improve the efficiency of modern optics by a factor of 1,000.