Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2018
From ACM TechNews
Google Grants €530,000 to Boost Irish Computer Science Curriculum Buzz
Google.org, the charitable arm of Google, has provided a €530,000 (US$618,801) grant to Irish NGO Camara Education to double the number of TechSpaces in Irish youth clubs.
From ACM TechNews
Report: Machines to Handle Over Half Workplace Tasks by 2025
More than half of all workplace tasks will be completed by machines by 2025, according to a World Economic Forum report.
From ACM News
JAXA Wants Telepresence Robots for In-Space Construction and Exploration
Last Monday, we covered the new, updated, and way way better guidelines for the ANA Avatar XPRIZE.
From ACM News
Gravity Isn't Leaking Into Other Space Dimensions
In our universe there is a big problem with gravity.
From ACM News
Crispr's Epic Patent Fight Changed the Course of Biology
After three bitter years and tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, the epic battle over who owns one of the most common methods for editing the DNA in any living thing is finally drawing to a close.
From ACM TechNews
Making Computer Science Accessible
The CSforAll initiative introduced an accessibility pledge to encourage companies and schools to eliminate some of the obstacles to computer science that disabled people face.
From ACM TechNews
Understanding Deep-Sea Images With AI
Researchers have developed a new standardized workflow for sustainable marine image analysis.
From ACM TechNews
Soon Your Doctor Will Be Able to Wirelessly Track Your Health—Even Through Walls
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor has created a box that, when placed in a user's home, can track his/her physiological signals, even through walls.
From ACM News
Detecting Illness by Watching You Type
Show us how you type, and artificial intelligence may be able to identify your brain disorder.
From ACM News
How to Stop Data Centers from Gobbling p the World's Electricity
Upload your latest holiday photos to Facebook, and there's a chance they'll end up stored in Prineville, Oregon, a small town where the firm has built three giant data centres and is planning two more.
From ACM News
Talking Gloves, Tactile Windows: New Tech Helps the Disabled
Hadeel Ayoub slips a black glove onto her hand before beginning the swish of sign language that is meaningless to the untrained observer. Then she pushes a button on her wrist, and a small speaker relays the message drawn in …
From ACM News
The Last of the Universe's Ordinary Matter Has Been Found
Astronomers have finally found the last of the missing universe. It's been hiding since the mid-1990s, when researchers decided to inventory all the "ordinary" matter in the cosmos—stars and planets and gas, anything made out…
From ACM TechNews
Enabling 'Internet of Photonic Things' With Miniature Sensors
Researchers have recorded environmental data using a wireless photonic sensor resonator with a whispering-gallery-mode architecture.
From ACM TechNews
String Art From the Hand of a Robot
A new computer system creates string art, an artistic technique in which hooks distributed on a frame are connected by strings back and forth until they form a perceptible image.
From ACM TechNews
Post Net Neutrality, Internet Providers Are Slowing Down Your Streaming
Researchers have found that Internet service providers are "giving a fixed amount of bandwidth...to video traffic, but they don't impose these limits on other network traffic."
From ACM TechNews
Preventing Exfiltration of Sensitive Docs by Flooding Systems With Hard-to-Detect Fakes
Researchers have proposed protecting important documents by generating so many believable fakes that attackers must either exfiltrate them all or attempt to find the real one.
From ACM TechNews
Physicists Develop New Techniques to Enhance Data Analysis for Large Hadron Collider
New machine learning techniques can significantly improve data analysis for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator.
From ACM TechNews
'Everybody Dance Now': C Berkeley Researchers Develop Technology to Alter Dance Videos
New technology can alter dance videos to make amateur dance moves seem more advanced.
From ACM News
Deep Learning: Is It Approaching a Wall?
As with all major technologies in their early phases, deep learning must overcome a number of serious challenges.
From ACM News
What’s in the Sweeping Copyright Bill Just Passed by the European Parliament
Legislation now goes to a three-way negotiation within the EU.
From ACM News
How The Weather Channel Made That Insane Storm Surge Animation
At a certain point, you think you have a good grasp of what to expect from weather graphics. A color-coded map, a five-day forecast with a sassy cloud.
From ACM TechNews
Beyond Deep Fakes
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new method of automatically transforming the content of one video into the style of another.
From ACM TechNews
Summer Computational Modeling Workshop Enriches Minority Students' Education
Students from two historically black institutions spent two weeks this summer learning digital skills from U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory scientists.
From ACM TechNews
Developers, Despair: Half Your Time Is Wasted on Bad Code
A study found 31% of developer time is wasted on routine maintenance work, draining $300 billion each year from global GDP.
From ACM TechNews
AI Helps Track Down Mysterious Cosmic Radio Bursts
Researchers used machine learning to discover 72 fast radio bursts from a mysterious source about 3 billion light years from Earth.
From ACM TechNews
Yale's Robot Hand Copies How Your Fingers Work to Improve Object Manipulation
Researchers have built a robotic gripper that can turn friction on and off to facilitate manipulating objects with one hand.
From ACM News
This Nifty Flying Robot Can Hover, Bank, and Turn as Deftly as a Fruit Fly
Flying insects like bees, dragonflies, and fruit flies can perform impressive aerodynamic feats, particularly when seeking to evade predators or the swatting motion of a human hand.
From ACM News
DARPA Wants Brain Interfaces for Able-Bodied Warfighters
Until now, the neuroscience programs at DARPA, the mad science wing of the Department of Defense, have focused on technologies for warfighters who have returned home with disabilities of the body or brain.
From ACM News
Deepfakes Are a Threat to National Security, Say Lawmakers
Deepfakes are a deep concern for Congress.
From ACM TechNews
Taking Machine Thinking Out of the Black Box
Researchers are using two main approaches to replacing black-box machine learning models with prediction methods that are more transparent.