Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2012
From ACM News
Your E-Book Is Reading You
It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an hour.
From ACM News
Researchers se Spoofing to 'hack' Into a Flying Drone
American researchers took control of a flying drone by hacking into its GPS system—acting on a $1,000 (£640) dare from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
From ACM News
A Robot Takes Stock
The short figure creeping around the Carnegie Mellon University campus store in a hooded sweatshirt recently isn't some shoplifter, but a robot taking inventory.
From ACM TechNews
Communication Scheme Makes Popular Applications 'gracefully Mobile'
MIT researchers have developed the mobile shell remote-login program, which addresses the lack of mobility of the popular SSH program.
From ACM TechNews
Interactive Map Like Gps For Roman Empire
Stanford University researchers have developed an interactive map of the Roman Empire called ORBIS that features roads, rivers, and sea routes.
From ACM TechNews
Super Wi-Fi Network Eyed For Rural College Towns
AIR.U, a consortium of higher education associations, public interest groups, and technology companies, has launched an effort to bring more super Wi-Fi broadband service to university towns in rural areas.
From ACM TechNews
Period of Transition: Stanford Computer Science Rethinks Core Curriculum
Stanford University's computer science faculty embarked on an initiative to reinvent its core curriculum about five years ago.
From ACM TechNews
Europeans Develop Open Source Software For Biosciences
Life sciences researchers for the first time will be able to examine the spread of cancer cells in a three-dimensional environment and determine how effectively viruses and targeted drugs enter cells.
From ACM News
A Look Inside Leap Motion, the 3D Gesture Control That's Like Kinect on Steroids
Leap Motion's not the household name Kinect is, but it should be; the company's motion-tracking system is more powerful, more accurate, smaller, cheaper, and just more impressive.
From ACM News
Official: West Concerned About Iranian, Islamic Video Games Production
Production of computer and video games with Iranian and Islamic contents has become a source of concern for the western states, a senior Iranian cultural official said Sunday.
From ACM News
'leap Second' Lengthens Weekend
The world is about to get a well-earned long weekend but don't make big plans because it will only last an extra second. A so-called "leap second" will be added to the world's atomic clocks as they undergo a rare adjustment to…
From ACM News
Minitel: The Rise and Fall of the France-Wide Web
Many years ago, long before the birth of the Web, there was a time when France was the happening-est place in the digital universe.
From ACM News
How Google Is Teaching Computers to See
Google is attempting to teach computers to recognize human faces without telling the computing algorithms which faces are human.
From ACM TechNews
Penn Researchers
University of Pennsylvania researchers have developed a method for creating phase change materials, which could lead to more efficient and faster memory storage devices.
From ACM TechNews
Computer Scientists Break Security Token Key in Record Time
A group of computer scientists dubbed Team Prosecco says it has found a way to extract a security key from a widely used RSA electronic token in 13 minutes.
From ACM TechNews
Design Reduces Nanowire Transistor Footprint
A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics researchers have integrated two transistors onto a single vertical silicon nanowire, which they say could further push the areal density limit of nanowire transistors.
From ACM TechNews
Building an Army of Ones and Zeros and the Troops Who Know How to Wield Them
Intrinsic to the U.S. Pentagon's development of cyberarsenals is the challenge of staffing the Cyber Command.
From ACM TechNews
What If There Were No More Disasters?
Texas A&M University professor Robin Murphy recently released "Computing for Disasters: A Report from the Community Workshop," which details the role of computing in disaster management, including preparedness, prevention, response…
From ACM News
Voice Algorithms Spot Parkinson's Disease
Parkinson's is a devastating disease for those living with the condition, and currently there is no cure. Diagnosis can also be slow, as there are no blood tests to detect it.
From ACM News
It's Not an Entertainment Gadget, It's Google's Bid to Control the Future
Joe Britt hands me his latest creation, a black ball with glittering LED lights around the middle, and implores me to examine it.
From ACM News
Blade Runner: Which Predictions Have Come True?
Based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner—the tale of a hunt for four dangerous "replicant" humans—is a classic envisioning of a dystopian future, set in 2019 Los Angeles.
From ACM TechNews
You Are Where You E-Mail: Global Migration Trends Discovered in Email Data
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Yahoo! Research recently completed a large migration database based on the global flow of millions of emails.
From ACM TechNews
Graph500 Adds New Measurement of Supercomputing Performance
The Graph500 executive committee recently announced new specifications for a more representative way to rate large-scale data analytics in high-performance computing.
From ACM TechNews
Computer Science Tackles 30-Year-Old Economics Problem
MIT researchers have developed an algorithm for finding an almost perfect approximation of the optimal design of a multi-item auction.
From ACM TechNews
Bot With Boyish Personality Wins Biggest Turing Test
The chatbot Eugene Goostman fooled Turing test judges 29 percent of the time into thinking it was human to take first place in the recent contest in the United Kingdom.
From ACM TechNews
An Online Encyclopedia That Writes Itself
DARPA recently collaborated with Raytheon BBN researchers to develop a system that can follow global news events and provide intelligence analysts with useful summaries in close to real time.
From ACM Opinion
You Will Want Google Goggles
At first glance, Thad Starner does not look out of place at Google. A pioneering researcher in the field of wearable computing, Starner is a big, charming man with unruly hair. But everyone who meets him does a double take, because…
From ACM News
How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000
Inside Google’s secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain.
From ACM Opinion
The Man Who Keeps Facebook Humming
Jay Parikh is happy to never get a call from Mark Zuckerberg. Why? It means he's doing his job well. As the vice president of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, Parikh is charged with the enormous task of keeping the machines…
From ACM TechNews
The Lolo Jones Project, Combining Speed and Technology
Researchers at Louisiana State University and Red Bull are working on Project X, which involves using computer-vision technology and high-speed motion-capture cameras to analyze athletes' movements to improve their performance…