Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2015
From ACM News
New Research Suggests Hackers Can Track Subway Riders Through Their Phones
Underground subways offer no place to hide from hackers.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Find the 'key' to Quantum Network Solution
University of York researchers have developed a protocol to achieve key-rates over dozens of kilometers at three orders of magnitude higher than ever before.
From ACM Opinion
Behind the Downfall at Blackberry
Ever since Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis stepped down as co-chairmen and co-chief executives of BlackBerry, neither has spoken much in public about the once-dominant smartphone maker's fall into near market obscurity.
From ACM TechNews
Standard Knowledge for Robots
A working group of 166 experts from 23 countries has developed a global standard for capturing and conveying the knowledge that robots possess.
From ACM TechNews
STEM Gender Stereotypes Common Across the World
A study published by researchers at Northwestern University found people in the Netherlands were the most likely to associate science with men more than women.
From ACM News
Mars Rover's Laser-Zapping Instrument Gets Sharper Vision
Tests on Mars have confirmed success of a repair to the autonomous focusing capability of the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover.
From ACM News
Java at 20: How It Changed Programming Forever
Java synthesized sound ideas, repackaging them in a practical format that turned on a generation of coders.
From ACM News
Finally, Neural Networks That Actually Work
Jeff Dean, who helped create the fundamental computing systems that underpin Google's vast online empire, has returned to the world of neural networks.
From ACM News
Boyhood
On the first weekend of January, many of the leading researchers in artificial intelligence traveled to Puerto Rico to take part in an unusual private conference.
From ACM News
Machine Dreams
To rescue its struggling business, Hewlett-Packard is making a long-shot bid to change the fundamentals of how computers work.
From ACM News
New Approach Trains Robots to Match Human Dexterity and Speed
In an engineering laboratory here, a robot has learned to screw the cap on a bottle, even figuring out the need to apply a subtle backward twist to find the thread before turning it the right way.
From ACM Careers
Mit's Humanoid Robot Goes to Robot Boot Camp
As Russ Tedrake flings up the garage door to the dusty MIT lab, light whooshes in, revealing a 360-pound humanoid robot hanging from a rope.
From ACM News
The House Just Passed a Bill About Space Mining
For as long as we've existed, humans have looked up at the stars—and wondered.
From ACM TechNews
9 Programming Languages and the Women Who Created Them
Women have made many important and lasting contributions to software development, including the development of programming languages.
From ACM TechNews
With One False Tweet, Computer-Based Hack Crash Led to Real Panic
A false tweet sent from a hacked account caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to fall and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to lose more than $136 billion in seconds.
From ACM TechNews
New Technology Could Fundamentally Change Future Wireless Communications
A new technique that can estimate and cancel out interference from a transmission allows a radio device to simultaneously transmit and receive data on the same channel.
From ACM TechNews
Oculus Rift Hack Transfers Your Facial Expressions Onto Your Avatar
Researchers have developed a system to track the facial expressions of users wearing a virtual-reality headset and transfer them to a virtual avatar.
From ACM TechNews
Could a Computer Predict the Next Pandemic?
In a new study, researchers used machine learning to make accurate forecasts of whether animals carry dangerous pathogens.
From ACM TechNews
Real-Time Data Sharing Can Make Airports Greener
University of Lincoln researchers have created a new framework designed to reduce delays, improve efficiency, and curb pollution at major international airports.
From ACM TechNews
South African Scientists Create Cheap Computer
University of Witwatersrand researchers are leading a project to create inexpensive computers or tablets to potentially be used by every student in South Africa.
From ACM News
Microsoft’s Hololens Will Put Realistic 3D People in Your Living Room
Demonstrations of augmented-reality displays typically involve tricking you into seeing animated content such as monsters and robots that aren’t really there.
From ACM News
How Stargazing Became a Numbers Game
People have long thought of astronomy as the science of looking to the stars, but discoveries in the cosmos increasingly come from a different kind of observational power.
From ACM News
NASA's WISE Spacecraft Discovers Most Luminous Galaxy in niverse
A remote galaxy shining with the light of more than 300 trillion suns has been discovered using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
From ACM TechNews
Wolfram's Id Project Launch Touts Imageidentify Function
Wolfram Research's artificial intelligence-based Language Identification Project is equipped with an ImageIdentify function.
From ACM TechNews
Better Predicting Flu Outbreaks With Wikipedia
A team of researchers has developed a method for forecasting the course of upcoming flu seasons by analyzing the views of Wikipedia articles.
From ACM TechNews
Project Oxford Apis Offer Facial, Voice Recognition Capabilities
Microsoft's age-guessing site, How-Old.net, is powered by Project Oxford, which now offers tools developers can use to incorporate intelligence into their apps.
From ACM TechNews
Fast Track Program Invites Non-Traditional Roboticists to Help Bolster National Security
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Robotics Fast Track program aims to create a system for the rapid, cost-effective development of new robotics.
From ACM News
Quantum Life Spreads Entanglement Across Generations
Computer scientists have long known that evolution is an algorithmic process that has little to do with the nature of the beasts it creates.
From ACM News
Your Brain's nique Response to Words Can Reveal Your Identity
Watch your language. Words mean different things to different people—so the brainwaves they provoke could be a way to identify you.
From ACM Careers
Humans Out-Play an AI at Texas Hold 'em—for Now
In 1997 chess master Gary Kasparov went to battle against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in a landmark match. After six games Deep Blue prevailed, marking the first time that a computer defeated a reigning world champion under…