Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2013
From ACM News
New System ses Low-Power Wi-Fi Signal to Track Moving Humans—even Behind Walls
The comic-book hero Superman uses his X-ray vision to spot bad guys lurking behind walls and other objects.
From ACM News
The Seventy-Billion-Mile Telescope
When I was a teen-ager, I spent many nights gazing through a telescope at an amateur observatory in Cranford, New Jersey. Saturn, to the naked eye, is a shining white dot.
From ACM News
Siri's Creators Demonstrate an Assistant That Takes the Initiative
In a small, dark, room off a long hallway within a sprawling complex of buildings in Silicon Valley, an array of massive flat-panel displays and video cameras track Grit Denker’s every move.
From ACM News
The Internet of Things: Open Garden
When the Large Hadron Collider went online in 2009, most scientists saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to conduct experiments involving the building blocks of the physical world.
From ACM News
Nasa's Voyager 1 Explores Final Frontier of Our 'solar Bubble'
Data from Voyager 1, now more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun, suggest the spacecraft is closer to becoming the first human-made object to reach interstellar space.
From ACM TechNews
The Quest For Seamless, High-Quality Virtual Reality
New virtual-reality peripherals are garnering attention as they enable users to feel truly present in a VR environment by addressing the challenge of movement.
From ACM TechNews
Coding Camps For Kids Rise in Popularity
Coding camps for children are becoming increasingly popular amid an expanding initiative to inspire more youths to seek computer science degrees.
From ACM TechNews
Remotely Controlled Roaches Could Search For Survivors
Researchers hope to guide cockroaches through collapsed buildings to search for survivors.
From ACM TechNews
Robo-Pets May Contribute to Quality of Life For Those With Dementia
Therapeutic robot companions improve anxiety and the quality of life for people with mid- to late-stage dementia, according to a pilot study.
From ACM TechNews
Carnegie Mellon Researchers Identify Emotions Based on Brain Activity
Researchers have developed a method to identify which emotion a person is experiencing based on brain activity.
From ACM News
Researcher Dreams p Machines That Learn Without Humans
Yoshua Bengio recently had a vision—a vision of how to build computers that learn like people do.
From ACM News
The Race to a $100 Genome
Mark Costa has a higher-than-average risk of stomach cancer, a lower-than-average risk for Alzheimer's, and he metabolizes caffeine very slowly.
From ACM News
Overprotection May Be Hampering Hunt For Mars Life
There are aliens on Mars—and they came from Earth.
From ACM TechNews
Team Creates Techniques For High-Quality, High-Resolution Stereo Panoramas
New methods promise to correct the problems of steroscopic panoramas, yielding high-quality panoramas at megapixel resolutions.
From ACM TechNews
Mozilla Lab Wants Scientists to Step Out of Analog Age
Mozilla is creating a science lab that will enable researchers to explore ways to make research faster, more agile, and collaborative.
From ACM TechNews
White House Should Develop Cyberspace Deterrence Policy, Says Sasc
President Barack Obama should formulate a deterrence policy for cyberspace, says the Senate Armed Services Committee in a legislative report.
From ACM TechNews
'password Fatigue' Haunts Internet Masses
Passwords have proliferated so broadly that it is a daily struggle for users to cope with dozens of them, a syndrome known as password fatigue.
From ACM News
Father's Genetic Quest Pays Off
Hugh Rienhoff says that his nine-year-old daughter, Bea, is "a fire cracker", "a tomboy" and "a very sassy, impudent girl". But in a forthcoming research paper, he uses rather different terms, describing her hypertelorism (wide…
From ACM News
Cfp Conferees Debate Government Surveillance, Cyber-Offensives, Copyright Reform
Coverage of the 23rd Annual Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference, titled "Our Computers, Our Freedom: Can You Trust Anyone in the Digital Age?"
From ACM News
Submarine Internet Cables Are a Gift For Spooks
It's a golden age for spying. The subsea fibre-optic cables that carry telephone and Internet traffic are a technological marvel—and a gift to intelligence agencies.
From ACM News
The Watchers
Looking down from 500 miles above Earth's surface, you could watch the FedEx Custom Critical Delivery truck move across the country along 3,140 miles of highway in 47 and a half hours of nonstop driving.
From ACM TechNews
Rosphere: a Spherical Robot For Exploration Missions
The ROSPHERE spherical robot has no wheels or legs, but is able to scroll by itself to conduct missions in wild environments, and is inherently stable.
From ACM TechNews
Intel Links Many Screens Into a Giant, Wireless Display
The Display as a Service (DaaS) wireless technology enables a single screen image to be shown on a wall of displays all working as parts of a large display.
From ACM TechNews
New Algorithm Finds Best Routes For One-Way Car Sharing
A newly developed vehicle-routing algorithm is designed to help rebalance one-way vehicle-sharing systems.
From ACM TechNews
How to Fit 1,000 Terabytes on a Dvd
Researchers have developed a technique that increases the data capacity of a single DVD from 4.7 gigabytes to one petabyte.
From ACM TechNews
Gauging the Risk of Fraud From Social Media
A researcher is working to enable more accurate predictions of a person's risk of fraudulent behavior by linking social media data with government data.
From ACM TechNews
New Stanford Software Helps Identify Cost-Effective Ways to Invest in Clean Water
The new Resource Investment Optimization System (RIOS) is an open source program designed to help identify cost-effective investments for clean and reliable water.
From ACM News
Privacy Paradox: Americans Happy to Share Personal Data With Big Business
It's official: Americans may freak out when government collects their data to track terrorists, but they would happily have banks use it to catch some jerk trying to hack into their accounts.
From ACM News
Mathematicians Think Like Machines For Perfect Proofs
From ACM News
Spark: Open Source Superstar Rewrites Future of Big Data
Ram Sriharsha works in the engine room powering one of Silicon Valley's most influential companies. He’s an engineer at Yahoo.