Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2017
From ACM TechNews
Who Are You on Social Media?
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University and King's College London in the U.K. found social media users frequently adopt different personas for different networks. An analysis of profile images and biographical data found…
From ACM TechNews
What Americans Are Most Worried About When It Comes to Robots
Fifty-seven percent of surveyed U.S. adults already notice the presence of artificial intelligence in their daily lives, but they are divided concerning its threat potential, according to a Morning Consult poll. Forty-one percent…
From ACM TechNews
DARPA Will Bake Cybersecurity Into Circuits
DARPA this month plans to detail its System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware program, with the goal of developing new integrated circuit architectures with no software-accessible exploit points, but which still…
From ACM TechNews
sing Randomness to Protect Election Integrity
Vanderbilt University professor Eugene Vorobeychik and colleagues have combined game theory and computer security expertise to design a method for auditing electoral outcomes to maximize the odds of revealing attacks on voting…
From ACM News
The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI
Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey.
From ACM News
Mobile-Phone Signals Bolster Street-Level Rain Forecasts
Meteorologists have long struggled to forecast storms and flooding at the level of streets and neighborhoods, but they may soon make headway thanks to the spread of mobile-phone networks.
From ACM News
'we All Love the Tomahawk:' A Brief History of .s.'s Favorite Robotic Killer
In the early hours of Friday morning, two U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyers in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean Sea launched a barrage of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) toward a Syrian Air Force airstrip at Ash…
From ACM TechNews
It's Time to Dump Moore's Law to Advance Computing, Researcher Says
R. Stanley Williams, a senior fellow at Hewlett Packard Labs, proposes no longer following Moore's Law in chipmaking, saying in a recent research paper that the end of Moore's Law "could be the best thing that has happened to…
From ACM TechNews
Crowdsourcing a Practical Indoor Gps
Researchers are using crowdsourced Wi-Fi fingerprints from smartphones to build a highly accurate indoor global-positioning system.
From ACM TechNews
Science, Engineering Studies Are Still a Hard Sell to Women
Women earned just 21% of U.S. undergraduate engineering degrees and an even smaller share of computer science degrees, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
From ACM TechNews
Dutch Smallest Computer
Researchers have constructed a small supercomputer from four servers with four professionalized graphics cards.
From ACM TechNews
Why Are csd Scientists Disguising Themselves as Empty Car Seats?
Researchers are observing driver and pedestrian responses to "driverless" research vehicles on campus by wearing costumes resembling empty car seats.
From ACM TechNews
Internet Inventor: Make Tech Accessibility Better Already
Google chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf says technology has a poor record of accommodating people with disabilities, and he would like to see more progress made.
From ACM TechNews
Virginia Tech Professor Builds Algorithm to Detect Traces of Cyberbullying
Virginia Polytechnic and State University professor Bert Huang is working to develop an automatic system for detecting cyberbullying.
From ACM TechNews
Machines Learning Evolves, and Hackers Stand to Gain
Experts say the growing pervasiveness and maturity of machine learning makes it an increasingly attractive candidate for cybersecurity applications.
From ACM TechNews
New Approach Developed By Humanists and Scientists Maps Evolution of Literature
Researchers have partly developed a new approach for identifying subtle patterns to map out how ancient Latin and Greek texts relate to each other.
From ACM News
Into the Breach
Cyber ratings firms help companies evaluate the risks of doing business.
From ACM Careers
Canada Tries to Turn Its A.i. Ideas Into Dollars
Long before Google started working on cars that drive themselves and Amazon was creating home appliances that talk, a handful of researchers in Canada—backed by the Canadian government and universities—were laying the groundwork…
From ACM News
Quantum Computing Is Going Commercial with the Potential to Disrupt Everything
Consider three hair-pulling problems: 1 percent of the world's energy is used every year just to produce fertilizer; solar panels aren't powerful enough to provide all the power for most homes; investing in stocks often feels…
From ACM TechNews
New Computer Vision Challenge Wants to Teach Robots to See in 3D
The progress made in training algorithms to recognize images via the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge has prompted its 2018 replacement with the more formidable task of teaching robots to perceive the world in…
From ACM TechNews
Carnegie Mellon Artificial Intelligence Takes on Chinese Poker Players
Researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence to compete against six professional Chinese poker players in a 36,000-hand exhibition match in China.
From ACM TechNews
In the Future, We Will Control Our Mobiles sing Gestures
Researchers are developing a next-generation interface that will enable people to interact with mobile devices using gestures.
From ACM TechNews
Algorithm and Rhyme
San Jose State University professor Margareta Ackerman has developed an artificial intelligence-based system designed to assist musicians in songwriting.
From ACM TechNews
Few Keep Track of Their Personal Data on the Net
A study found that few users understand how their personal data are compiled and stored on the Internet.
From ACM TechNews
AI Player Alphago to Play Chinese Go Champion
DeepMind's Go-playing artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in May will play against top Chinese Go player Ke Jie in a three-game match in China.
From ACM News
Science Reveals Yet Another Reason Octopuses and Squid Are So Weird
Octopuses are aliens living on Earth.
From ACM News
23andme Given Green Light to Sell Dna Tests For 10 Diseases
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the first at-home genetic test that can help to determine a person's risk of developing certain diseases.
From ACM TechNews
Information Storage With a Nanoscale Twist
Researchers have discovered a rotational force inside magnetic vortices, which they say could make it easier to design ultrahigh-capacity disk drives.
From ACM TechNews
Tim Berners-Lee: Selling Private Citizens' Browsing Data Is 'disgusting'
Sir Tim Berners-Lee says he is appalled by the Trump administration's decision to dismantle net neutrality and let Internet service providers sell customers' browsing data to advertisers.
From ACM TechNews
Chinese Scientists Engineer Flexible, Faster-Swimming Robot
Chinese researchers have developed a flexible, remote-controlled robotic ray that can swim through water nearly twice as fast as previous robo-swimmers without being tethered.