Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2016
From ACM News
Google, Facebook, Amazon Join Forces on Future of AI
The world's biggest technology companies are joining forces to consider the future of artificial intelligence.
From ACM News
Computer Science, Math Laureates Convene in Heidelberg
Recipients of the Abel Prize, the Fields Medal, the Nevanlinna Prize, and the ACM A.M. Turing Award met with 200 young researchers from over 50 nations.
From ACM News
Hackers Infect Army of Cameras, Dvrs For Massive Internet Attacks
Attackers used an army of hijacked security cameras and video recorders to launch several massive internet attacks last week, prompting fresh concern about the vulnerability of millions of "smart" devices in homes and businesses…
From ACM TechNews
Quantum Computing Breakthrough: Israeli Scientists Invent Cannon For Entangled Photon Clusters
Scientists from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have created a device that can produce large clusters of entangled photons on demand.
From ACM TechNews
Building a Sustainable, Intelligent, and Power-Efficient Cloud
The European Union-funded CLOUDLIGHTNING project seeks to construct a more efficient, heterogeneous, and user-centric cloud.
From ACM TechNews
Iarpa to Develop Early-Warning System For Cyberattacks
The U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has launched a multi-year initiative to create technologies that could provide early warning of cyberattacks.
From ACM TechNews
Removing Gender Bias From Algorithms
Machine-learning systems taught interesting patterns from data and documents fed into them could also pick up gender stereotypes from those sources.
From ACM TechNews
New Take on an Ancient Method Improves Way to Find Prime Numbers
Mathematician Harald Helfgott at Germany's University of Gottingen has proposed a way to improve an ancient method for finding prime numbers.
From ACM News
Deep Learning Boosts Google Translate Tool
Google's online translation service, Google Translate, will soon be using a new algorithm that is entirely based on deep learning, the company announced on 27 September.
From ACM News
Mission Complete: Rosetta's Journey Ends in Daring Descent to Comet
ESA's historic Rosetta mission has concluded as planned, with the controlled impact onto the comet it had been investigating for more than two years.
From ACM News
Will Driverless-Car Makers Learn to Share?
Last Monday, the Obama Administration released a hundred-and-twelve-page policy tome, "Federal Automated Vehicles Policy," which, despite its sleep-inducing title, found an eager readership.
From ACM News
Can Electronics Replace Opioids?
Sophisticated algorithms allow electrical nerve stimulation products to quell pain, in some cases, better than drugs.
From ACM TechNews
Tracking Honey Bees With Big Data
Researchers at Grand Valley State University are using technology to study the nationwide decline of the honeybee population.
From ACM TechNews
New 'artificial Synapses' Pave Way For Brain-Like Computers
Researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed electronic components that could lead to significant advances in brain-inspired computing.
From ACM TechNews
Computer Engineers Boost App Speeds By More Than 9%
North Carolina State University researchers have developed a new method to boost the speed of computer applications by more than 9%.
From ACM TechNews
Google's Internet-Beaming Balloon Gets a New Pilot: AI
Google's Project Loon plans to use balloons to beam the Internet from the stratosphere down to people on Earth where access is otherwise unavailable.
From ACM News
Computer Researcher to Congress: 'it's Possible' For Hackers to Alter Election
Hackers could influence the outcomes of November’s elections, a computer science professor who has demonstrated security weaknesses in voting machines told lawmakers on Wednesday.
From ACM News
Catching Dust
The ancient Egyptians believed that the universe emerged from an ocean called Nun, boundless and inert.
From ACM News
Farewell Rosetta: Esa Mission to End on Comet Surface
The European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta mission will come to a dramatic end on Friday,
From ACM News
2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet Now Official Standards
New Ethernet standards are now finalized, making existing cabling as much as five time faster.
From ACM News
Selfie With a View on 'cybernetics and Systems Analysis'
Dmitry Zaitsev sacrifices his ego to expose computer science achievements in Ukraine.
From ACM News
Programmable Chips Turning Azure Into a Supercomputing Powerhouse
Microsoft is embarking on a major upgrade of its Azure systems.
From ACM News
Google's New Service Translates Languages Almost as Well as Humans Can
Google's latest advance in machine learning could make the world a little smaller.
From ACM TechNews
Why Human Brains Hold the Key to Smarter Artificial Intelligence
The European Union-funded INSIGHT project has gained a new understanding of how people solve problems, which one day could lead to smarter robots.
From ACM TechNews
Quantum Computing a Step Closer to Reality
Australian National University researchers say they have taken another step toward creating quantum computers by stopping light in a new experiment.
From ACM TechNews
Eavesdropping Prohibited
Researchers want to automate encryption so software developers can correctly integrate cryptographic protocols into applications that communicate over the Internet.
From ACM TechNews
Teaching Computers to Identify Odors
Harvard University researchers have developed a machine-learning algorithm to train a computer to recognize the neural patterns associated with various scents.
From ACM TechNews
Students' Web App Seeks to Simplify, Modernize Voter Registration
Votemate is a new Web application that could make it easier for people to confirm they are registered to vote.
From ACM News
Comet Crash: A Guide to Rosetta's Big Finale
The Rosetta comet orbiter will meet a sticky end on 30 September, but not before a finale that should see it gather the most detailed images yet of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko—or indeed of any comet.
From ACM News
S Sharpens Surveillance of Crippling Solar Storms
In the fight to protect Earth from solar storms, the battle lines are drawn in space at a point 1.6 million kilometres away.