Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2015
From ACM News
Rewrite of Onboard Memory Planned For Nasa Mars Orbiter
Tables stored in flash memory aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) tell locations of Earth and the sun for the past 10 years, but not their locations next year.
From ACM News
Tor Just Launched the Easiest App Yet For Anonymous, Encrypted Im
The anonymity network Tor has long been the paranoid standard for privacy online, and the Tor Browser that runs on it remains the best way to use the web while revealing the least identifying data.
From ACM TechNews
Dog Robot Copes with Rough Terrain
Researchers have designed and built a new robot "dog" that can traverse rough terrain either autonomously or while controlled by a remote operator.
From ACM TechNews
New Traffic App and Disaster Prevention Technology Road Tested
A new app that enables smartphone users to provide feedback on traffic accidents is now available for download.
From ACM TechNews
Dartmouth Study Illustrates How Game Design Can Reduce Stereotypes and Social Biases
A new Dartmouth College study highlights how games can have beneficial societal effects.
From ACM TechNews
How Sensorimotor Intelligence May Develop
The emergence of self-directed behavior in robots can be grounded in the synaptic plasticity of their nervous systems, according to a new study.
From ACM Opinion
Apple's Deep Learning Curve
In the world of artificial intelligence, one of the year's biggest coming-out parties is the Neural Information Processing Systems conference.
From ACM TechNews
Facebook's AI Can Caption Photos For the Blind on Its Own
Facebook's Accessibility Team says it is developing an artificial intelligence tool to automatically describe photos posted on the social network to blind users.
From ACM News
Smart Glasses Translate Video Into Sound to Help the Blind See
Blind people have long relied on sound as a substitution for sight, and some even use echolocation to navigate around objects. But it turns out that sound can be specifically designed to convey visual information.
From ACM News
Now You Can se Emojis to Search For Cute Cat Videos
In a move that makes it possible to seamlessly combine your love of emojis with adorable animal videos, a group of researchers has built a prototype of a search engine that uses the tiny icons to search videos.
From ACM News
Leap Second Heads Into Fierce Debate
When Earth's rotation gets far enough out of sync with the drumbeat of atomic time, a leap second is added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and the world’s clocks count off 59, then 60, then 00 seconds.
From ACM News
Designing Interactive Memory Joggers
Texts, photos, and videos are the fodder of memories, which require appropriate cues to materialize those memories from custom-designed hardware, says one researcher.
From ACM News
Rosetta Sniffs Oxygen Around Comet 67p
Scientists have detected molecules of oxygen in the hazy halo of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko—an unexpected discovery that may challenge theories about the formation of the Solar System.
From ACM TechNews
IBM Says Carbon, Oxygen Essential to Advancing Resistive Memory
Researchers at IBM Zurich believe they have overcome some of the key challenges that have stood in the way of building memory technology using carbon.
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft Project Oxford Natural-Language Machine-Learning Beta Debuts
Microsoft Research's Project Oxford is now offering a public beta version of its Language Understanding Intelligent Service.
From ACM TechNews
Nanoquakes Probe New 2-Dimensional Material
New research could lead to a post-graphene era of new materials for electronic applications.
From ACM News
A Quick Guide to the Cybersecurity Bill Passed By the .s. Senate
After more than a year of bickering, stalling and revising, the Senate passed its most significant cybersecurity bill to date 74–21.
From ACM TechNews
One Click Away From the Perfect Outfit
A new iOS smartphone app uses adaptive algorithms to redirect users to online shops selling products they like.
From ACM News
Researchers Put Words In Your Mouth—virtually
In the 1997 action movie Face/Off, an FBI agent must undergo face-transplant surgery and assume the identity of a ruthless terrorist to foil a plot.
From ACM News
Cassini Seeks Insights to Life in Plumes of Enceladus, Saturn’s Icy Moon
Where there is water, is there life?
From ACM News
European Parliament Votes Against Net Neutrality Amendments
The European Parliament has voted against a set of rules intended to safeguard "net neutrality" in the EU.
From ACM News
MIT ses Wireless Signals to Identify People Through Walls
MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab is developing a device that uses wireless signals to identify human figures through walls.
From ACM Careers
Behind the Scenes of the Internet's First Football Game
At 5:05 AM Sunday, long before the rest of Sunnyvale, California, will wake up, Yahoo's control room is packed.
From ACM TechNews
c3m Researches Simulator of Human Behavior
Researchers at the Charles III University of Madrid in Spain are investigating how to build a system that recreates human behavior.
From ACM TechNews
The Computer System That Won Jeopardy Could Soon Help Nasa With Research
U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers want to use IBM's Watson to help improve their awareness of scientific and technical literature.
From ACM TechNews
Coding Bootcamp Grads Boost Their Salaries By 40 Percent on Average
Graduates of coding bootcamps found completing the programs helped boost their salaries by an average of 38 percent or $18,000, according to the Course Report.
From ACM TechNews
Manipulating Faces From Afar in Real Time
Computer scientists say they have created a process dubbed "live facial re-enactment" that can instantaneously transfer facial expressions.
From ACM TechNews
A Basis For All Cryptography
The inability to practically apply indistinguishability obfuscation to deliver secure cryptography may be mitigated with an efficient method for functional encryption.
From ACM TechNews
Three Scenarios For the Evolution of Exascale Computing
Sandia National Labs' Erik DeBenedictis outlines three scenarios for evolving supercomputers to the 1- to 50-exaflop range.
From ACM News
Relearning to Speak
New systems can help you not only learn to understand a second language, but how to pronounce it correctly.