Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2011
From ACM News
Real .s. Stealth-Tech Advantage: Its Assembly Lines
For more than 20 years, the U.S. Air Force had a world monopoly on radar-evading technology—and with it, a huge advantage over any rival. Several generations of stealth fighters and bombers, from the earliest F-117s to the…
From ACM News
Cisco Poised to Help China Keep an Eye on Its Citizens
Western companies, including Cisco Systems Inc., are poised to help build an ambitious new surveillance project in China—a citywide network of as many as 500,000 cameras that officials say will prevent crime but that human…
From ACM News
Hackers Select a New Target: Other Hackers
The hackers, calling themselves the A-Team, assembled a trove of private information and put it online for all to see: names, aliases, addresses, phone numbers, even details about family members and girlfriends. But their…
From ACM News
Interview with Key Lulzsec Hacker
It was early May when LulzSec's profile skyrocketed after a hack on the giant Sony corporation. LulzSec's name comes from Lulz, a corruption of LOL, often denoting laughter at the victim of a prank. For 50 days until it disbanded…
From ACM TechNews
Silver Pen Has the Write Stuff For Flexible Electronics
University of Illinois researchers have developed a silver-inked rollerball pen that can write electrical circuits and interconnects on paper and other materials.
From ACM TechNews
Model Finds Optimal Fiber Optic Network Connections 10,000 Times More Quickly
Designers of fiber-optic networks will be able to find the most efficient way to connect phones and computers that are in different places in just a few seconds by using a new model developed by researchers at North Carolina…
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft Researchers Find Spammers By Graphing Social Networks
Microsoft researchers are studying how to differentiate spammer email accounts from legitimate users' accounts, and have found that attacker accounts do not have friends, do not use instant messaging, and do not receive emails…
From ACM TechNews
Handheld Testing: New Application For Iphone May Support Monitoring and Research on Parkinson's Disease
Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute have developed iTrem, an iPhone application designed to enable Parkinson's disease patients to use an iPhone to collect data on hand and arm tremors and send that information…
From ACM TechNews
DARPA Sharpens Focus on Video Analysis Technology
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing two video-analysis technologies for detecting activity from different imaging-capturing sensors, which could enable the military to better observe dangerous behavior…
From ACM News
Games and Learning: Seven Questions For Mary Flanagan
A professor of digital humanities at Dartmouth College, Mary Flanagan has spent her career thinking critically about a topic that most of us take for granted: Play.
From ACM News
A Roboticist's Trip From Mines to the Moon
Robots created by William "Red" Whittaker have crawled into mines and volcanoes, crossed deserts, won a 60-mile road race, helped clean up nuclear waste and harvested alfalfa. He has sheaves of academic awards and more than…
From ACM News
Autopiloted Glider Knows Where to Fly For a Free Ride
Hawks and albatrosses soar for hours or even days without having to land. Soon robotic gliders could go one better, soaring on winds and thermals indefinitely.
From ACM News
Who
My dad, who at 98 no longer drives, used to complain about women drivers, defensive drivers, slow drivers, cab drivers and, occasionally, fast drivers. I should ask him how he'd feel about no drivers.
From Communications of the ACM
Weighing Watson's Impact
Does IBM's Watson represent a distinct breakthrough in machine learning and natural language processing or is the 2,880-core wunderkind merely a solid feat of engineering?
From Communications of the ACM
Automotive Autonomy
Self-driving cars are inching closer to the assembly line, thanks to promising new projects from Google and the European Union.
From Communications of the ACM
Brave, New Social World
How three different individuals in three different countries — Brazil, Egypt, and Japan — use Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media tools.
From Communications of the ACM
ACM Award Recipients
Craig Gentry, Kurt Mehlhorn, and other computer scientists are honored for their research and service.