Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2017
From ACM TechNews
How AI Is Creating Building Blocks to Reshape Music and Art
Innovators are using deep neural networks to train machines to produce artwork by analyzing massive datasets. Google researcher Douglas Eck envisions artificial intelligence as a tool that artists can use to explore new modes…
From ACM TechNews
Wsu Researchers Receive $2.3m to Improve .s. Power Grid Design
Researchers at Washington State University recently received a $2.3-million U.S. Department of Energy grant to more efficiently distribute power and better manage outages for the U.S. power grid.
From ACM TechNews
Scientists Automate Key Step in Forensic Fingerprint Analysis
Researchers at Michigan State University and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology have developed an algorithm that automates the fingerprint-analysis process.
From ACM TechNews
How Secure Are Your Messages?
Researchers at Brigham Young University have found most users of Facebook Messenger, What'sApp, and the Viber messaging apps leave themselves open to fraud or other hacks because they are unaware of or are not using the right…
From ACM News
China Launches Brain-Imaging Factory
Neuroscientists who painstakingly map the twists and turns of neural circuitry through the brain are about to see their field expand to an industrial scale.
From ACM News
The Imperfect Crime: How the Wannacry Hackers Could Get Nabbed
When hackers unleashed the WannaCry "ransomware" in mid-May, not only did they wreak havoc on European hospitals, telecoms and railways, they also made off with a profit.
From ACM TechNews
How Do You Fix a School-Bus Problem? Call MIT
A team of researchers has developed an algorithm to plot more efficient public-school bus routes.
From ACM TechNews
A Researcher Disguised Himself as a Car Seat to Teach Driverless Cars How to Communicate With Humans
Researchers costumed themselves as car seats to give the appearance no one is driving during autonomous vehicle experiments.
From ACM TechNews
First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News
Researchers say they have proof that social bots are the key to the online proliferation of fake news.
From ACM TechNews
I'm a Woman in Computer Science. Let Me Ladysplain the Google Memo to You.
A main reason the Google "manifesto" has been met with so much support is its quasi-professional tone, writes Cynthia Lee of Stanford University.
From ACM TechNews
This Robot Lab Has No Idea What Its Robots Are Doing
The Georgia Institute of Technology's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines supports the Robotarium, an arena where scientists can run experiments on remote-controlled machines.
From ACM Careers
China's Plan For World Domination in AI Isn't So Crazy After All
Xu Li's software scans more faces than maybe any on earth. He has the Chinese police to thank.
From ACM News
Cassini Prepares to Say Goodbye to a True Titan
Mere weeks away from its dramatic, mission-ending plunge into Saturn, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has a hectic schedule, orbiting the planet every week in its Grand Finale.
From ACM News
Teaching A.i. Systems to Behave Themselves
At OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, machines are teaching themselves to behave like humans. But sometimes, this goes wrong.
From ACM TechNews
AI Artist Conjures p Convincing Fake Worlds From Memories
Researchers have developed a neural network capable of creating realistic photos based on real-world images.
From ACM TechNews
Mapping the Brain, Neuron By Neuron
Researchers worked with an international team of neuroscientists to create a complete map of the learning and memory center of the fruit fly larva brain
From ACM TechNews
Computer 'anthropologists' Study Global Fashion
Researchers are using deep-learning methods to analyze billions of photos uploaded to photo-sharing services and social media platforms.
From ACM News
Inside the Increasingly Complex Algorithms That Get Packages to Your Door
If you had to hand-deliver 50 packages, how would you go about planning the best route?
From ACM News
Your Virtual Robot Assistant
With its "unique capabilities," virtual "James" is designed to interact with people regarding the delivery of a service.
From ACM News
25 Years of Global Sea Level Data, and Counting
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of a revolutionary ocean research vessel—a space "ship."
From ACM News
How A.i. Is Creating Building Blocks to Reshape Music and Art
In the mid-1990s, Douglas Eck worked as a database programmer in Albuquerque while moonlighting as a musician.
From ACM TechNews
New Research Could Show How Legendary Musicians Would Play Modern Music
Researchers are developing a system that could be used to show how musicians from any era would have played a piece of music from any other era.
From ACM TechNews
Deepmind AI Teaches Itself About the World By Watching Videos
Researchers at Google's DeepMind unit have developed an artificial intelligence system that teaches itself to recognize visual and audio concepts by watching video clips.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers 'count Cars'--Literally--to Manage Traffic
OverFeat Framework is a new automated car-counting system.
From ACM TechNews
A True Random-Number Generator Built From Carbon Nanotubes
Researchers say they have built a true random number generator from a static random-access memory cell printed with a specialized carbon nanotube ink.
From ACM TechNews
Instagram Posts Can Reveal Depression Better Than Anything Patients Tell Their Doctors
Researchers at the University of Vermont and Harvard University say algorithmic analysis of Instagram posts could diagnose depression more effectively than physicians.
From ACM News
Artificial Intelligence Identifies Plant Species For Science
Computer algorithms trained on the images of thousands of preserved plants have learned to automatically identify species that have been pressed, dried and mounted on herbarium sheets, researchers report.
From ACM News
Biohackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of Dna
When biologists synthesize DNA, they take pains not to create or spread a dangerous stretch of genetic code that could be used to create a toxin or, worse, an infectious disease. But one group of bio-hackers has demonstrated …
From ACM News
First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News
Fake news and the way it spreads on social media is emerging as one of the great threats to modern society.
From ACM News
Cassini to Begin Final Five Orbits Around Saturn
NASA's Cassini spacecraft will enter new territory in its final mission phase, the Grand Finale, as it prepares to embark on a set of ultra-close passes through Saturn's upper atmosphere with its final five orbits around the …