Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2014
From ACM TechNews
A Smart Wristband For Nocturnal Cyclists
The "Intelligent Blinker," a smart illuminating wristband developed by five doctoral students, could make it safer for cyclists to ride at night in big cities.
From ACM TechNews
Robots Helped Inspire Deep Learning and Might Become Its Killer App
As researchers use more and better data to train their artificial intelligence models and generate algorithms, their robots become smarter.
From ACM TechNews
How Yahoo Research Labs Studies Culture as a Formal Computational Concept
Yahoo Labs researchers aim to achieve a truly computational understanding of human society by analyzing the links that form on social networks.
From ACM Opinion
Where Tech Is Taking s: A Conversation With Intel's Genevieve Bell
Genevieve Bell grew up among Aboriginal people in Australia, taught anthropology at Stanford and for the past 16 years has worked for Intel.
From ACM News
How Times Square Works
When we stepped out onto the roof, the wind whipped me sideways, and it took me a second to get my bearings.
From ACM News
Fantasy Footballers and Coaches Rejoice—nfl Players to Wear Rfid Tags
The surveillance society, it seems, is broadening at NFL stadiums.
From ACM TechNews
.k. to Allow Driverless Cars on Public Roads in January
The United Kingdom has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads starting in January 2015, and the government has invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the new technology.
From ACM TechNews
Can Winograd Schemas Replace Turing Test For Defining Human-Level Ai?
A new proposed method of testing artificial intelligence are so-called Winograd schemas, which present an AI system with an ambiguously worded sentence and asks the system to identify the ambiguous pronouns referent.
From ACM TechNews
What 6.9 Million Clicks Tell S About How to Fix Online Education
Researchers at the MIT have analyzed data from Harvard University and MIT's shared online learning platform to gain a richer understanding of what makes massively open online courses (MOOCs) succeed and fail.
From ACM News
Nasa Validates 'impossible' Space Drive
NASA is a major player in space science, so when a team from the agency this week presents evidence that "impossible" microwave thrusters seem to work, something strange is definitely going on.
From ACM News
Finally, a Way to Teach Coding to the Touchscreen Generation
First came Generation X. Then the Millennials. And if you have kids under 10, you already know what they're going to be called: the Touchscreen Generation.
From ACM TechNews
How 'game of Thrones' Will Predict the Next Bin Laden
A research team has developed a method of statistical analysis they say can better predict the outcomes of targeted killings of terrorists by drones, and potentially avoid situations that could give rise to an even more dangerous…
From ACM TechNews
Nicta Pushes Sel4 Microkernel Beyond Drones
Researchers hope the seL4 operating system, recently released as open source code, will be employed for medical devices, industrial automation, and other uses.
From Communications of the ACM
Hello, My Name Is . . .
Facial recognition and privacy concerns.
From Communications of the ACM
Surgical Robots Deliver Care More Precisely
Computer-controlled robotic surgical systems and tumor-targeting radiation systems provide a greater level of precision in treatment than doctors alone can provide.
From Communications of the ACM
Researchers Probe Security Through Obscurity
Obfuscation protects code by making it so impenetrable that access to it won't help a hacker understand how it works.