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Communications of the ACM

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The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.

July 2017


From ACM Careers

­S to Create Independent Military Cyber Command

­S to Create Independent Military Cyber Command

After months of delay, the Trump administration is finalizing plans to revamp the nation's military command for defensive and offensive cyber operations in hopes of intensifying America's ability to wage cyberwar against the …


From ACM News

Elon Musk Lays Out Worst-Case Scenario For AI Threat

Elon Musk Lays Out Worst-Case Scenario For AI Threat

Powerful technology will threaten all human jobs, could even spark a war, Tesla CEO says.


From ACM News

President of ACM Awarded Honorary Degree

President of ACM Awarded Honorary Degree

World-leading computer scientist professor Vicki Hanson has been awarded an honorary degree from Newcastle University.


From ACM News

Want a Robot that Can Really Feel? Give It Whiskers

Want a Robot that Can Really Feel? Give It Whiskers

Among the many reasons humans are bizarre among mammals (the dearth of body hair, the bipedalism, the fact that someone invented the turducken) is a sad shortcoming: You and I don't have sensory whiskers.


From ACM Careers

Intel, While Pivoting to Artificial Intelligence, Tries to Protect Lead

Intel, While Pivoting to Artificial Intelligence, Tries to Protect Lead

The computers in modern data centers—the engine rooms of the digital economy—are powered mainly by Intel chips.


From ACM TechNews

Iran's Newest Robot Is an Adorable Dancing Humanoid

Iran's Newest Robot Is an Adorable Dancing Humanoid

Researchers at the University of Tehran have developed Surena Mini, a small robot with a 3D-printed body, articulated limbs, and a round head with two camera-eyes. 


From ACM TechNews

Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in Dna

Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in Dna

A video clip of a galloping horse, one of the first motion pictures ever made, is now also the first movie ever to be encoded in the DNA of a living cell, where it can be retrieved and manipulated indefinitely as the host divides…


From ACM TechNews

Wikileaks Gave Trump Edge in Campaign, Tweets Show

Wikileaks Gave Trump Edge in Campaign, Tweets Show

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have found that viral tweets during the final two months of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign show Hillary Clinton was much more heavily criticized on social media than Donald Trump…


From ACM TechNews

Your Best Teammate Might Someday Be an Algorithm

Your Best Teammate Might Someday Be an Algorithm

Google's People + AI Research (PAIR) project aims to develop and release tools designed to help make the inner workings of artificial intelligence systems more transparent. 


From ACM TechNews

A New System to Estimate the Duration of a Walk in the Countryside

A New System to Estimate the Duration of a Walk in the Countryside

Researchers at the University of Seville have developed a system to estimate the time that it takes to complete a walk in the countryside. A system algorithm uses length and gradient as the main variables when establishing how…


From ACM News

How Fake News Goes Viral; Here's the Math 

How Fake News Goes Viral; Here's the Math 

NASA runs a child-slave colony on Mars!


From ACM News

Nasa's Juno Spacecraft Spots Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Nasa's Juno Spacecraft Spots Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot reveal a tangle of dark, veinous clouds weaving their way through a massive crimson oval.


From ACM News

Here's a Peek at the Iphone's Next Big Trick

Here's a Peek at the Iphone's Next Big Trick

We've all heard about the promise of augmented reality coming to the iPhone. With iOS 11 due later this year, Apple is releasing ARKit–a software that allows developers to create richer augmented reality apps that utilize the…


From ACM TechNews

­a Pioneers More Effective Control For Border Patrol

­a Pioneers More Effective Control For Border Patrol

Researchers are developing a framework for border surveillance that uses artificial intelligence to integrate data from different sources and respond in real time.


From ACM TechNews

­sing Chip Memory More Efficiently

­sing Chip Memory More Efficiently

Jenga is a new system that reallocates a chip's memory cache access in real time to create "cache hierarchies" designed to the needs of particular programs.


From ACM TechNews

AI Research Seeks to Grow Trust Between Humans and Computers

AI Research Seeks to Grow Trust Between Humans and Computers

Researchers have received a $7.55-million grant to find new ways to have artificial intelligence explain its decision-making process to human users.


From ACM TechNews

Stanford Researchers Find Intriguing Clues About Obesity By Counting Steps Via Smartphones

Stanford Researchers Find Intriguing Clues About Obesity By Counting Steps Via Smartphones

Stanford University researchers found that in countries with little obesity, people mostly walked a similar amount per day.


From ACM News

Inside Earth, Visualized: Hd Video Models Planet's Core

Inside Earth, Visualized: Hd Video Models Planet's Core

Were it not for our Earth's magnetic field, the planet would be bombarded by charged particles from the sun.


From ACM News

Face Scans For ­S Citizens Flying Abroad Stir Privacy Issues

Face Scans For ­S Citizens Flying Abroad Stir Privacy Issues

If the Trump administration gets its way, U.S. citizens boarding international flights will have to submit to a face scan, a plan privacy advocates call a step toward a surveillance state.


From ACM News

Party Lines

Party Lines

Measuring the "immeasurable" could curtail electoral gerrymandering.


From ACM News

Web Inventor ­rges Support For Net Neutrality

Web Inventor ­rges Support For Net Neutrality

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, urged people to show support for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission rules that are likely to be repealed.


From ACM News

Curiosity Mars Rover Begins Study of Ridge Destination

Curiosity Mars Rover Begins Study of Ridge Destination

The car-size NASA rover on a Martian mountain, Curiosity, has begun its long-anticipated study of an iron-bearing ridge forming a distinctive layer on the mountain's slope.


From ACM News

Lights, Camera, Crispr: Biologists ­se Gene Editing to Store Movies in Dna

Lights, Camera, Crispr: Biologists ­se Gene Editing to Store Movies in Dna

Internet users have a variety of format options in which to store their movies, and biologists have now joined the party.


From ACM News

Rare Enigma Machine Fetches 45,000 Euros at Auction

Rare Enigma Machine Fetches 45,000 Euros at Auction

A rare Enigma machine used by Nazi Germany during World War II was sold at auction Tuesday for 45,000 euros ($51,500). 


From ACM News

President of Harvey Mudd College Criticizes Silicon Valley's 'bro Culture'

President of Harvey Mudd College Criticizes Silicon Valley's 'bro Culture'

The president of Harvey Mudd University, Maria Klawe, has criticized the culture in some of Silicon Valley's tech companies.


From ACM TechNews

­w's Lip-Syncing Obama Demonstrates New Technique to Turn Audio Clips Into Realistic Video

­w's Lip-Syncing Obama Demonstrates New Technique to Turn Audio Clips Into Realistic Video

University of Washington researchers have developed a system that can take audio clips from one speech and sync them with video clips from another.


From ACM TechNews

Why Do Some Neighborhoods Improve?

Why Do Some Neighborhoods Improve?

Researchers have used a computer vision system to quantify the physical improvement or deterioration of neighborhoods in five U.S. cities.


From ACM TechNews

A Computer That Reads Body Language

A Computer That Reads Body Language

Researchers have developed a computer capable of understanding body poses and movements of multiple people from video in real time.


From ACM TechNews

Neural Network Poetry Is So Bad We Think It's Written By Humans

Neural Network Poetry Is So Bad We Think It's Written By Humans

A neural network trained on poetry has attempted to write its own lines; ts best efforts can convince people they are reading the words of a human poet.


From ACM TechNews

11,000 Girls Compete in International Mobile App Challenge

11,000 Girls Compete in International Mobile App Challenge

Girls ages 10-18 from around the world are competing in the Technovation Challenge, a global effort to learn and apply technology to try to solve problems in their communities.