Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2015
From ACM News
Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child
It looked like a child's playroom: toys in cubbies, a little desk for doing homework, a whimsical painting of a tree on the wall.
From ACM News
se of Personalized Cancer Drugs Runs Ahead of the Science
As the costs of genetic sequencing fall, oncologists are starting to prescribe expensive new drugs that target the genetic profiles of their patients' tumours, even when those treatments have not been approved for the particular…
From ACM News
Brain-Computer Link Enables Paralyzed California Man to Walk
A brain-to-computer technology that can translate thoughts into leg movements has enabled a man paralyzed from the waist down by a spinal cord injury to become the first such patient to walk without the use of robotics, doctors…
From ACM News
Pentagon Intrigued By Breakthrough in Cloaking Technology
An academic says he and his colleagues have demonstrated a major breakthrough in the quest for invisibility, and he has the military’s attention.
From ACM TechNews
Federal Researchers Want to ntangle Internet of Things
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has released its Draft Framework for Cyber-Physical Systems.
From ACM TechNews
Protecting Identities in a Sea of Big Data
New research projects by University of Arkansas computer scientist Xintao Wu could help ensure the identities of participants in genomic studies are shielded.
From ACM TechNews
Clumps of Gold Nanoparticals Can Evolve to Carry Out Computing
Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have found a loosely organized clump of gold nanoparticles can be made to do calculations.
From ACM TechNews
Watch a Swarm of Drones Build a Rope Bridge
A team of drones has autonomously built a rope bridge, according to researchers at ETH Zurich.
From ACM News
Rosetta Reveals Comet's Water-Ice Cycle
ESA's Rosetta spacecraft has provided evidence for a daily water-ice cycle on and near the surface of comets.
From ACM News
How Much of Your Audience Is Fake?
From ACM News
Vw Could Fool the Epa, But It Couldn't Trick Chemistry
For decades, automakers have been caught between building an engine that squeezes a lot of energy out of the fuel it burns and one that has low emissions.
From ACM News
Supercomputing's Super Energy Needs, and What to Do About Them
The power it takes to drive petaflop machines could supply a small city with electricity.
From ACM TechNews
Do Moocs Help?
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) from Coursera can yield tangible benefits to learners, according to a new longitudinal study of open online learning outcomes published in Harvard Business Review.
From ACM TechNews
Forget the Turing Test — There Are Better Ways of Judging AI
Despite the media furor over reports last year that a chatbot had "passed" the Turing test, most artificial intelligence (AI) researchers no longer view the test, first outlined by Alan Turing more than half a century ago, as…
From ACM TechNews
Instead of Robots Taking Jobs, AI May Help Humans Do Their Jobs Better
Oregon State University professor Tom Dietterich sees vast potential for collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence (AI), contrary to popular assumptions that AI will replace people in jobs.
From ACM TechNews
Not Even the People Who Write Algorithms Really Know How They Work
Not only are the algorithms that determine what people see on the Web — search results, status updates, or product recommendations — inscrutable to users, the engineers who develop the underlying software also do not know…
From ACM TechNews
Inside sc's Crazy Experimental Vr Lab
The technologies and techniques developed at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, launched in 1999 with a $45-million grant from the U.S. Army, have made a significant impact in several…
From ACM TechNews
What Will Personal Computers Look Like in 20 Years' Time?
Experts offer their views of how personal computers will evolve over the next two decades.
From ACM News
Mental Health Apps Listen and Guide
Developments in portable devices and affective computing could help detect mental health issues earlier.
From ACM News
A Tricky Path to Quantum-Safe Encryption
August 11, the National Security Agency updated an obscure page on its website with an announcement that it plans to shift the encryption of government and military data away from current cryptographic schemes to new ones, yet…
From ACM News
King Man + Woman = Queen: The Marvelous Mathematics of Computational Linguistics
Computational linguistics has dramatically changed the way researchers study and understand language.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers at Western niversity Hope to se Artificial Intelligence to Improve Breast Cancer Patient Outcomes
Researchers at the University of Western Ontario believe artificial intelligence can help remove the guesswork from breast cancer treatment.
From ACM TechNews
Designing Electric and Magnetic Order For Low-Energy Computing
Researchers at the University of Liverpool say they have developed a new material that combines both electrical and magnetic order at room temperature.
From ACM TechNews
Nano-Trapped Molecules Are Potential Path to Quantum Devices
Researchers have determined how physicists could exploit a molecule's energy to advance computers and storage devices.
From ACM News
Forget the Turing Test—there Are Better Ways of Judging AI
Last Saturday I took part in a battle of wits at Bletchley Park, the stately home that housed the U.K.’s codebreakers during the second world war.
From ACM News
Software Is Smart Enough For Sat, but Still Far From Intelligent
An artificial intelligence software program capable of seeing and reading has for the first time answered geometry questions from the SAT at the level of an average 11th grader.
From ACM News
Virtual Reality Gets Real
In 1965, Ivan Sutherland, a computer-graphics pioneer, addressed an international meeting of techies on the subject of virtual reality.
From ACM News
France Is Now Censoring Your Google Search Results, Wherever You Are
The French now have the "right to be forgotten" worldwide.
From ACM TechNews
Women Leaders Cite Two Major Reasons For Issues Facing Women in Tech
During its recent 2015 Dreamforce conference, Salesforce launched its first Women's Leadership Summit.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Develop Simple Way to Ward Off Trojan Attacks on Quantum Cryptographic Systems
Quantum key distribution is an emerging area of study in the effort to create secure computer messaging systems.