Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2012
From ACM TechNews
Miragetable: Microsoft Presents Augmented Reality Device
Microsoft is developing an augmented reality system that allows users in different locations to work together on a tabletop and share and handle objects. The MirageTable deceives the eye of users into believing they are using…
From ACM TechNews
More Search Could Be Crowdsourced
MIT and Microsoft researchers determined that search engines could use crowdsourcing to expand the range of answers they provide for users. Most search engines could be radically expanded through data mining techniques and crowdsourced…
From ACM News
Daniela Rus's Robotic Sand
History holds lessons, even for those designing futuristic robots.
From ACM TechNews
Picking the Brains of Strangers Improves Efforts to Make Sense of Online Information
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research recently presented their findings on distributed sensemaking at CHI 2012.
From ACM News
Nasa Dawn Mission Reveals Secrets of Large Asteroid
NASA's Dawn spacecraft has provided researchers with the first orbital analysis of the giant asteroid Vesta, yielding new insights into its creation and kinship with terrestrial planets and Earth's moon.
From ACM News
FBI: We Need Wiretap-Ready Web Sites
The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require the firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.
From ACM TechNews
Engineers Develop Textile Sensors That Monitor Cardiac Signs and Communicate With Smart Phones
University of Arkansas researchers have developed a wireless health-monitoring system that gathers patient information and communicates that data in real time to an online network.
From ACM TechNews
The Open Source Problem Solvers Creating Government 2.0
Technologically adept citizens are increasingly using their skills to address problems in government, says Personal Democracy Media founder Andrew Rasiej.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Demonstrate New Way to Control Nonvolatile Magnetic Memory Devices
The spin Hall effect is useful for memory applications because it can switch magnetic poles back and forth, according to researchers at Cornell University.
From ACM Opinion
Thomas Sterling: 'i Think We Will Never Reach Zettaflops'
As supercomputing makes its way through the petascale era, the future of the technology has never seemed so uncertain.
From ACM News
Movie Magic to Leave Home For?
Someday, if the dreams of movie-technology designers come true, you'll flash your smartphone ticket, settle into your plush cinema seat and be greeted with a hyper-real picture, sounds from every direction and—if you need them—closed…
From ACM News
Bill Would Have Businesses Foot Cost Of Cyberwar
Business executives and national security leaders are of one mind over the need to improve the security of the computers that control the U.S. power grid, the financial system, water treatment facilities and other elements of…
From ACM TechNews
Algorithm Weighs Up Strategies For Bridge Management
Concordia University engineers have developed an algorithm designed to help public officials decide how to manage bridges.
From ACM TechNews
Implanted ser Interface Gives Patients New Options
Researchers at the universities of Potsdam and Toronto have demonstrated that it is possible to communicate with a small user interface device that is implanted just below the skin.
From ACM TechNews
DARPA Wants Gamers to Design Medical Training Software
DARPA is seeking proposals for a game-based interactive system to train medical first responders.
From ACM News
The Man Who Started the Hacker Wars
In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile subscriber.
From ACM News
How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet
Legal and technology researchers estimate that it would take about a month for Internet users to read the privacy policies of all the Web sites they visit in a year.
From ACM TechNews
Internet Group Says Quality Over Speed in Restoring Domain-Name Expansion
A system used by ICANN to allow companies and organizations to propose new generic top-level domain names remains shut down indefinitely, three weeks after the discovery of a software glitch that resulted in some private data…
From ACM TechNews
Facebook's Open Source Data Center Project Gains Industry Support
Hewlett-Packard, Advanced Micro Devices, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, Canonical, and Supermicro have joined Facebook's Open Compute Project.
From ACM TechNews
Graphene-Based Terahertz Devices: The Wave of the Future
University of Notre Dame researchers have been able to manipulate terahertz (THz) electromagnetic waves using atomically thin graphene layers, which they say sets the stage for the development of compact, efficient, and cost-effective…
From ACM News
The Giants Among S
The patent world is quietly undergoing a change of seismic proportions. In a few short years, a handful of entities have amassed vast treasuries of patents on an unprecedented scale.
From ACM News
10 Years of Aqua Satellite's Incredible Images of Earth From Space
The view of Earth from space has transformed our understanding of, as well as our admiration for, the planet.
From ACM News
How Steve Jobs Revolutionized Business
It is ironic that Steve Jobs, the man who focused on building consumer-friendly devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, is also radically reshaping the business world.
From ACM News
Gesture Control System Uses Sound Alone
When you learned about the Doppler Effect in high school physics class—the wave frequency shift that occurs when the source of the wave is moving, easily illustrated by a passing ambulance—you probably didn't envision it helping…
From ACM TechNews
Turning Big Ideas Into Solutions
Student teams' development of innovative tools has earned them awards in the University of California Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society's recent Big Ideas competition.
From ACM TechNews
Struggle Continues to Plug Embedded Programming Gap
Critics say the growing embedded programming gap can be attributed to university curriculums for introductory computer science courses, which recently have focused more on Java than other languages.
From ACM TechNews
London to Test 'smart City' Operating System
London is preparing to test an operating system designed to power the smart cities of the future.
From ACM News
The State of Mobile: Less Talking, Fewer Texts, More Data
People generally talk less on the phone and send fewer text messages now because there are so many ways to communicate over an Internet connection. Though this may seem obvious to anyone who owns a smartphone, a new study confirms…
From ACM News
Objects Know How They Are Being Touched
A doorknob that knows whether to lock or unlock based on how it is grasped, a smartphone that silences itself if the user holds a finger to her lips, and a chair that adjusts room lighting based on recognizing if a user is reclining…
From ACM News
A Brief History of Warnings About the Demise of Moore's Law
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku rekindled a perennial discussion last week by saying Moore's Law, the pacesetter of technological advancement over the last half-century, will hold true for only about 10 more years.