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 News
Hovering Drones Flock Together Using 3D Vision
If you're going to have a group of drones flying around each other, it would probably be wise to have each of them know where the other is.
From ACM TechNews
Google Spdy Accelerates Mobile Web
The SPDY protocol can help provide much faster access to mobile Web sites, according to Google engineers.
From ACM TechNews
Carnegie Mellon Researchers Create Dynamic View of City Based on Foursquare Check-in Data
A dynamic view of a city's activities and character that reflects the ever-fluctuating patterns of city life can be generated by the millions of check-ins produced by foursquare, according to CMU researchers.
From ACM TechNews
Look Ma No Hands, in 140 Characters or Less...
Clifford Nass, founder of Stanford University's Communications Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, says future automobiles will boast full automation and will be centered on social media platforms.
From ACM News
Osama Bin Laden Didn't Use Encryption: 17 Documents Released
It appears that Osama bin Laden didn’t encrypt any of his computer files. If he had, U.S. authorities probably wouldn’t have been able to do much after confiscating them from his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
From ACM News
What Makes Heroic Strife
For the past decade or so, generals commanding the world's most advanced armies have been able to rely on accurate forecasts of the outcomes of conventional battles.
From ACM TechNews
Programming Languages Can't Have Copyright Protection, Eu Court Rules
The European Court of Justice has ruled that the functionality of computer programs and the language they are written in cannot be protected by copyright.
From ACM TechNews
Ieee Fellow: Don't Expect Nfc Payments to Have a Major Mobile Impact
Although many companies are hoping that mobile payments enabled by near-field communications technology will catch on among consumers, the technology's impact will not be as significant as vendors believe it will be, cautions…
From ACM News
Steganography: How Al-Qaeda Hid Secret Documents in a Porn Video
When a suspected al-Qaeda member was arrested in Berlin in May of 2011, he was found with a memory card with a password-protected folder—and the files within it were hidden.
From ACM News
London 2012: The Importance of Olympic Timekeeping
Olympic timekeepers Omega are unveiling the latest technology that will be used at the London 2012 Games. It can monitor athletes' performance to the nearest one thousandth of a second.
From ACM News
Moore's Law Lives Another Day
"[Gordon] Moore is my boss, and if your boss makes a law, then you'd better follow it," says Mark Bohr, who leads Intel's efforts to make advances in microchip design practical to manufacture.
From ACM TechNews
Tempering the Rise of the Machines
A report written by former Tufts University president Lawrence S. Bacow and former Princeton University president William G. Bowen analyzes the state of online education and machine learning in the university system.
From ACM TechNews
A Stock Exchange For Your Personal Data
The creation of a marketplace for personal information would be a way for people to regain control of their data in the information age, says Hewlett-Packard Labs senior fellow Bernardo Huberman.
From ACM TechNews
A Ride on MIT Media Lab's Digital Bandwagon
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab recently hosted its annual Inside Out conference where speakers from several projects discussed the future of technology and design.
From ACM TechNews
Research Breakthrough Takes Supercomputing Out of the Lab
University of Toronto researchers have developed a system that they say will make the production of a special class of photons used in supercomputing faster and easier.
From ACM Opinion
How and Why You Should Do Data Journalism
One of the big areas of focus for technology companies over the past year has been "big data"—in other words, the idea that there can be a lot of value in finding patterns in the massive quantities of user data and other information…
From ACM TechNews
A 100-Gigbit Highway For Science
The U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is laying the foundation for a high-speed network that can transport an increasing amount of scientific data.
From ACM News
The Indoor Positioning System Era
GPS rules your life. At least, it rules mine.
From ACM News
Amateur Astronomers Scour the Sky For Government Secrets
Earlier this year Iran's defense minister put the world on notice: His nation had developed the ability to "easily" watch spacewalking astronauts from the ground.
From ACM News
Data Engineer in Google Case Is Identified
At the center of the uproar over a Google project that scooped up personal data from potentially millions of unsuspecting people is the company software engineer who wrote the code.
From ACM TechNews
Nist Physicists Benchmark Quantum Simulator With Hundreds of Qubits
U.S. NIST researchers have developed a quantum simulator that can engineer interactions among hundreds of qubits, which is 10 times more than previous devices.
From ACM TechNews
Samsung Patent Wants to Get in User's Face
Samsung has filed a patent for a method and device that can read a user's emotions based on facial expressions.
From ACM TechNews
Icann to Notify Domain Applicants of Data Breaches
ICANN announced that it will notify all companies who were affected by the recent data breach in the top-level domain Applicant System that allowed other applicants to view their user and file names.
From ACM News
'bullet Time' to Stop Cyber Attacks on Power Grids
In The Matrix, the famous "bullet time" effect showed how Keanu Reeves's character Neo was able to sway out of the path of incoming bullets, as time appeared to slow.
From ACM News
Americans
It is taking Americans a bit longer than the rest of the world to catch on to the idea of “mobile wallets.”
From ACM News
California Chosen as Home for Computing Institute
The Simons Foundation, which specializes in science and math research, has chosen the University of California, Berkeley, as host for an ambitious new center for computer science, the university plans to announce on Tuesday.
From Communications of the ACM
A Workshop Revival
The success of Germany's Dagstuhl Seminars has inspired a proliferation of Dagstuhl-like venues, especially in India.
From Communications of the ACM
Robots Like Us
Thanks to new research initiatives, autonomous humanoid robots are inching closer to reality.
From Communications of the ACM
Automating Scientific Discovery
Computer scientists are teaching machines to run experiments, make inferences from the data, and use the results to conduct new experiments.
From Communications of the ACM
Digitally Possessed
Virtual possessions play an increasingly important role in our daily lives. How we think about them and deal with them is changing the way we think and interact with others.