Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2015
From ACM News
Human Weakness in Cybersecurity
The Joint Chiefs of Staff unclassified email system is now back online, after having been down for more than two weeks, following a breach that some officials have blamed on the Russians.
From ACM TechNews
Testing Trust in Autonomous Vehicles By Fooling Human Passengers
A team at Stanford University's Center for Design Research has developed the Real Road Autonomous Driving Simulation that fools human participants into thinking they are in an autonomous car when they are not.
From ACM TechNews
For 40 Years, Computer Scientists Looked For a Solution That Doesn't Exist
Creating a faster method for performing the "edit distance" calculation — a challenge computer scientists have worked on for four decades — was demonstrated as futile by MIT researchers at the recent Symposium on the Theory…
From ACM TechNews
France and Spain Team Up to Jumpstart Europe's Exascale Computing Ambitions
France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission and Spain's Barcelona Supercomputing Center have announced a high-performance computing partnership to further the European push toward exascale computing.
From ACM TechNews
Depth-Sensing Camera Gleans 3-D Info in Bright Sunlight and Darkness
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Toronto have created a mathematical model to help address a major problem of depth-sensing cameras: their inability to work in bright light, especially sunlight.…
From ACM News
3D-Printed Device Helps Computers Solve Cocktail-Party Problem
Artificial-intelligence researchers have long struggled to make computers perform a task that is simple for humans: picking out one person’s speech when multiple people nearby are talking simultaneously.
From ACM TechNews
A Quicker Way to Pair Smartphones: Shake Them
Tampere University of Technology researchers say they have developed a fast and easy way to pair two smartphones to swap photos, documents, or other data. The approach calls for holding both devices in one hand and shaking them…
From ACM TechNews
Scientist Fêted for 'Game-Changing' Research on Wireless Networks
UC Irvine professor Syed Jafar recently won the 2015 Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists for his work on network information theory. Jafar's work could help military wireless networks become larger, faster, and able…
From ACM Opinion
With Google as Alphabet, a Bid to Dream Big Beyond Search
Shortly after its founding, Google posted a document on its site called "Ten things we know to be true," an effort to distill its unusual corporate culture into a succinct list of prescriptions—the 10 commandments of Googliness…
From ACM News
Web's Random Numbers Are Too Weak, Researchers Warn
A study found shortcomings in the generation of the random numbers used to scramble or encrypt data.
From ACM News
Cruise Over Ceres in New Video
Striking 3-D detail highlights a towering mountain, the brightest spots and other features on dwarf planet Ceres in a new video from NASA's Dawn mission.
From ACM TechNews
3-D Cursors Sculpt at Siggraph
University of Montreal researchers demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2015 a system that uses a tablet to control a three-dimensional cursor that can be used to draw and manipulate objects in 3-D simulations.
From ACM TechNews
Algorithm Aims to Combat Science's Reproducibility Problem
University of Pennsylvania researchers are developing data-mining tools designed to make it easier to know which information is relevant, and when a correlation that seems to have predictive value actually does not because it…
From ACM News
Cyberattacks as Significant as Traditional Threats, Says Battleship Manufacturer
Warfare is increasingly being fought from behind computer screens rather than on the battlefield, forcing weapons manufacturers to consider the myriad of threats posed by cyberattacks. Now, the prospective manufacturer of the…
From ACM News
How the Rubber-Duck Comet Got Its Shape
A year after the Rosetta space mission went into orbit around a comet shaped like a rubber duck, scientists say that they have worked out how the dusty iceball got its shape—although they haven't ironed out every detail.
From ACM News
Google's $6 Billion Miscalculation on the Eu
As the global elite gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2014, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and four other executives from the Internet search giant were meeting in a conference room at the newly…
From ACM News
Supercomputer Race Heats Up as China Bans Exports of High-Performance Machines
China is curbing exports of its high-performance machines in an apparent attempt to stay one step ahead of the U.S. in a race for the world's fastest supercomputer.
From ACM News
Extreme Access Flyer to Take Planetary Exploration Airborne
Swamp Works engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida are inventing a flying robotic vehicle that can gather samples on other worlds in places inaccessible to rovers.
From ACM TechNews
MIT Camera Culture Group Develops the 'eyeselfie' to Help Monitor Eye Health
eyeSelfie is a low-cost handheld device for taking images of one's own retina, optic nerve, and the vasculature at the back of the eye.
From ACM TechNews
Teach Your Robot to Do the Dishes
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a robot that can help people wash their dishes.
From ACM TechNews
Code 'transplant" Could Revolutionize Programming
A new software tool is capable of automatically isolating the code of a feature in one program and "transplanting" it into another program.
From ACM TechNews
Children Beating p Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System
An experiment to see how mall patrons react to a social robot surprisingly found children were hostile toward the robot.
From ACM TechNews
A Supercomputer in the Palm of Your Hand
Researchers are investigating the possibility of using smartphone processors as energy-efficient alternatives to current supercomputer components.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Ftc Is Showing p at Hackers' Biggest Conferences
The Federal Trade Commission, the de facto federal watchdog for consumers' privacy and data security, knows it needs help.
From ACM News
This Hacker's Tiny Device nlocks Cars and Opens Garages
The next time you press your wireless key fob to unlock your car, if you find that it doesn’t beep until the second try, the issue may not be a technical glitch.
From ACM News
Teaching Machines to nderstand S
The first time Yann LeCun revolutionized artificial intelligence, it was a false dawn.
From ACM News
Apple and Google Know What You Want Before You Do
Apple Inc. and Google Inc. are racing to anticipate the needs of their users.
From ACM News
Anticipating Computational Fashion
Wearable technologies are poised to move beyond the wrist.
From ACM News
Giving Robots a More Nimble Grasp
Most robots on a factory floor are fairly ham-handed: Equipped with large pincers or claws, they are designed to perform simple maneuvers, such as grabbing an object, and placing it somewhere else in an assembly line.
From ACM News
New Online Exploring Tools Bring NASA's Journey to Mars to New Generation
On the three-year anniversary of the Mars landing of NASA's Curiosity rover, NASA is unveiling two new online tools that open the mysterious terrain of the Red Planet to a new generation of explorers, inviting the public to help…