Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2018
From ACM TechNews
O Internet Architect Honored With International Award
The Internet Society presented Steven Huter with the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award in recognition of his years of work helping to bring the Internet to more than 120 countries.
From ACM TechNews
Toolkit for Building a Smart City Plan
The Smart Cities Council has rolled out a Web-based portal to help cities gather and organize the data they require for smart city project planning.
From ACM TechNews
The Pentagon Wants to Bring Mind-Controlled Tech to Troops
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is selecting research teams to develop a neural interface to allow soldiers to link their brains to military systems.
From ACM TechNews
Toward a Secure Electrical Grid
University of California, Santa Barbara researchers have proposed a new method for protecting the electrical grid from a cyberattack.
From ACM TechNews
sing Machine Learning for Music Knowledge Discovery
Researchers collaborated on the use of machine learning algorithms to gain new insights about the history of music.
From ACM Opinion
How .S. Intelligence Agencies Can Find Out What Trump Told Putin
President Donald Trump's insistence on holding a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin hobbled U.S. intelligence agencies that would usually get an intimate look at such a sit-down, but American spies still…
From ACM News
Python has Brought Computer Programming to a Vast New Audience
And its inventor has just stepped down.
From ACM Careers
Big Tech is Throwing Money and Talent at Home Robots
Science fiction writers and technologists have been predicting the arrival of robot butlers for the better part of a century. So far domestic robots have been relatively pedestrian: robot dogs, vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers.
From ACM News
Not Quite Quantum Computing
Fujitsu says its "Quantum-Inspired" Digital Annealing is capable of tackling combinatorial optimization problems.
From ACM Opinion
"I Was Devastated": Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets
"For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it," Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the…
From ACM TechNews
Eagle-Eyed Machine Learning Algorithm Outdoes Human Experts
Researchers have taught computers to spot microscopic radiation damage to materials to be used in nuclear reactors.
From ACM TechNews
Faster Photons Could Enable Total Data Security
Scientists have generated rapid single-photon light pulses, each of which representing a bit of binary code.
From ACM TechNews
Looking Toward the Sky, Trojans Trace UFO Sightings
Researchers analyzed thousands of documented UFO sightings to determine the degree to which factors such as movie releases and weather events shaped sighting patterns.
From ACM News
This Bomb-Simulating S Supercomputer Broke a World Record
Brad Settlemyer had a supercomputing solution in search of a problem.
From ACM News
Private Messaging Apps Increasingly sed for Public Business
One app promotes itself as a way to discuss sensitive negotiations and human resources problems without leaving a digital record.
From ACM News
Welcome to the Airport of the Future, Where Your Face Is Your Passport
Australia is a bloody long way from the rest of the world.
From ACM TechNews
First Machine Learning Method Capable of Accurate Extrapolation
Researchers have developed a machine learning method that uses observations to accurately extrapolate all possible conditions shaped by the same physical dynamics.
From ACM TechNews
Don't Squish the Jellyfish. Capture It With a Folding Robotic Claw.
Researchers have developed a rotary actuated dodecahedron sampler, a device for studying soft sea creatures such as jellyfish or squid in their natural habitats.
From ACM TechNews
IBM Watson Health Extends Partnership With .S. to Help Vets With Cancer
IBM Watson Health has extended its collaboration with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to help treat veterans with cancer using artificial intelligence.
From ACM TechNews
Autonomous and Cooperating: The Dawn of the Drone Swarm
The Hungarian Academy of Science has demonstrated a method of inducing real-world self-organizing flocking behavior in robot drones.
From ACM TechNews
Alphabet to Deploy Balloon Internet in Kenya With Telkom in 2019
Alphabet subsidiary Loon plans to deploy a system of balloons to provide high-speed Internet access to rural and suburban populations in Kenya next year.
From ACM TechNews
Decade of Research Shows Little Improvement in Password Guidance
Most of the top 10 English-speaking websites online offer little or no advice on creating passwords that are less likely to be hacked.
From ACM News
A Record-Breaking Microscope
In a paper Nature, Jiang et al.1 report the highest-magnification image ever obtained using a transmission electron microscope.
From ACM News
How a Flock of Drones Developed Collective Intelligence
The drones rise all at once, 30 strong, the domes of light on their undercarriages glowing 30 different hues—like luminescent candy sprinkles against the gray, dusky sky.
From ACM News
'Storm Chasers' on Mars Searching for Dusty Secrets
Storm chasing takes luck and patience on Earth—and even more so on Mars.
From ACM TechNews
Girl Scouts Look Toward the Future With 30 New Science, Tech, and Environment Badges
The Girl Scouts announced 30 new badges that will help equip girls with the leadership skills needed to deal with "key 21st century issues."
From ACM TechNews
Liquid Animations So Realistic You Can Almost Taste Them
Researchers at the University of Waterloo Cheriton School of Computer Science in Canada have developed a method of precisely animating high-viscosity liquid.
From ACM TechNews
of T Researchers Tackle Voter Distribution and Gerrymandering in the .S.
As Democrats increasingly live in U.S. cities while Republicans live in more rural areas, researchers analyzed the impact of this phenomenon on the ability to gerrymander.
From ACM TechNews
Study Suggests Buried Internet Infrastructure at Risk as Sea Levels Rise
A recent study found that rising sea levels could submerge buried fiber-optic cable essential for Internet operations in coastal U.S. regions within 15 years.
From ACM TechNews
Can Graphical Passwords Keep s Secure Online?
Researchers from the Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China have developed an authentication method that uses semantically linked images.