Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2017
From ACM News
Vector Institute Is Just the Latest in Canada's AI Expansion
Canadian researchers have been behind some recent major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Now, the country is betting on becoming a big player in one of the hottest fields in technology, with help from the likes of Google…
From ACM News
Prolific Mars Orbiter Completes 50,000 Orbits
The most data-productive spacecraft yet at Mars swept past its 50,000th orbit this week, continuing to compile the most sharp-eyed global coverage ever accomplished by a camera at the Red Planet.
From ACM News
Will sing AI To Make Loans Trade One Kind Of Bias For Another?
The next loan you get may depend less on your credit score and more on what a program thinks of your online habits. Digital lenders say the process will be more fair, but others worry about unintended bias.
From ACM TechNews
Can Robots Write Meaningful News?
The new Digital Personalization of the News project will explore whether robots can enhance journalism.
From ACM TechNews
Cybersecurity Expert Studies Novel Tools to Thwart Attacks
California State University, Fullerton professor Mikhail Gofman says maintaining cybersecurity "requires constant work, commitment, and dedication."
From ACM TechNews
Bias Test to Prevent Algorithms Discriminating nfairly
Researchers are developing a framework to identify and eliminate algorithmic bias.
From ACM TechNews
Faster Page Loads
Flowtune is a new system for allocating bandwidth in datacenter networks.
From ACM TechNews
Psychologists Enlist Machine Learning to Help Diagnose Depression
Researchers are using the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Stampede supercomputer to recognize patterns in neuroimaging data predictive of mental disorders such as depression. T
From ACM Opinion
Ghost in the Sell: Hollywood's Mischievous Vision of AI
Watch enough science fiction movies and you'll probably come to the conclusion that humans are living on borrowed time.
From ACM News
A Stunning Video of Mars That Took Three Months to Stitch Together, By Hand
If you should one day find yourself in a spacecraft circling Mars, don't count on a good view.
From ACM News
For Sale: Your Private Browsing History
The US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to eliminate ISP privacy rules, following the Senate vote to take the same action last week. The legislation to kill the rules now heads to President Donald Trump for his signature…
From ACM TechNews
Machine-Learning Algorithm Watches Dance Dance Revolution, Then Creates Dances of Its Own
Dance Dance Convolution is a new system that takes as an input the raw audio files of pop songs, and produces dance routines as an output.
From ACM TechNews
A Big Leap Toward Tinier Lines
Researchers have developed a method that could make it possible to produce some of the narrowest microchip wires ever.
From ACM TechNews
Facial Recognition Software Helps Diagnose Rare Genetic Disease
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute have used facial-recognition software to diagnose a rare genetic disease in Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans.
From ACM TechNews
Stanford Researchers Adapt a Diy Robotics Kit to Give STEM Students Tools to Automate Biology Experiments
Researchers have modified a commercially available do-it-yourself kit for building and programming robots capable of transferring exact amounts of fluids between flasks, test tubes, and experimental dishes.
From ACM News
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
An out-of-the-box solution to infrastructure is drawing increasing attention.
From ACM News
This Paralyzed Man Is sing a Neuroprosthetic to Move His Arm For the First Time in Years
William Kochevar of Cleveland can slowly move his right arm and hand. No big deal—except that the 56-year-old had been paralyzed from the shoulders down since a bicycling accident ten years ago.
From ACM News
Could Ms. Pac-Man Train the Next Generation of Military Drones?
Thirty-five years ago, while Martin Amis was writing "Money," one of the novels that defined the 1980s, he admitted to a distracting dalliance with another contemporary icon.
From ACM News
Who Owns Your Face?
It takes a feast of facial imagery to teach a machine how to recognize an individual person.
From ACM TechNews
5 Burning Questions With New Ietf Chair and Cisco Fellow Alissa Cooper
New Internet Engineering Task Force chair and Cisco Fellow Alissa Cooper lauds the organization as "a very special place because of the standards work it has done in the past and how that work is affecting the growth and will…
From ACM TechNews
New Quantum Gadget Could Make Contactless Payment More Secure
Researchers have developed a prototype gadget that transmits secret quantum keys to encrypt data sent from a mobile device to a payment terminal.
From ACM TechNews
Scanners Can Be Hijacked to Perpetrate Cyberattacks
Researchers have found a typical office scanner can be infiltrated and an organization's network compromised through it..
From ACM TechNews
A Novel Hybrid av That May Change the Way People Operate Drones
U-Lion is a novel hybrid unmanned aerial vehicle that can take off and land vertically in the manner of a helicopter, yet cruise horizontally like an airplane.
From ACM TechNews
Computers Learn to Cooperate Better Than Humans
Computers have for the first time trained themselves to cooperate in games in which the goal is to achieve the best possible outcome for all players.
From ACM TechNews
Protecting Web sers' Privacy
Splinter is a new encryption system that disguises users' database queries so they reveal no private information.
From ACM Careers
I Took the AI Class Facebookers Are Literally Sprinting to Get Into
Chia-Chiunn Ho was eating lunch inside Facebook headquarters, at the Full Circle Cafe, when he saw the notice on his phone: Larry Zitnick, one of the leading figures at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, was teaching…
From ACM News
Nasa Tests Observing Capability on Hawaii's Coral Reefs
NASA pulled off a scientific double play in Hawaii this winter, using the same instruments and aircraft to study both volcanoes and coral reefs.
From ACM News
Evidence That Robots Are Winning the Race For American Jobs
Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans?
From ACM News
Can Tech Speed p Emergency Room Care?
The next frontier in digital health may be one of the most unlikely: the emergency room.
From ACM TechNews
Berkeley Lab Researchers Target Chem Code For Knights Landing
Researchers are helping computational chemists prepare to compute efficiently on next-generation exascale machines.