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An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.


The MIT Roots of Google
From ACM News

The MIT Roots of Google

Google’s App Inventor, which lets people with no previous programming experience build applications for mobile phones, draws on decades of MIT research.

Shape-Shifting Robots
From ACM News

Shape-Shifting Robots

Self-folding sheets of a plastic-like material point the way to robots that can assume any conceivable 3D structure.

­nraveling the Matrix
From ACM TechNews

­nraveling the Matrix

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gilbert Strang has developed a way to split certain types of matrices into simpler ones, which could help produce...

Computer Automatically Deciphers Ancient Language
From ACM News

Computer Automatically Deciphers Ancient Language

A new system that took a couple hours to decipher much of the ancient language Ugaritic could help improve online translation software.

An Internet 100 Times As Fast
From ACM News

An Internet 100 Times As Fast

A new network design that avoids the need to convert optical signals into electrical ones could boost capacity while reducing power consumption.

Toward the Semantic Web
From ACM TechNews

Toward the Semantic Web

The World Wide Web Consortium recently published the Rule Interchange Format, a new standard that should help bring the idea of the Semantic Web closer to reality...

From ACM TechNews

How the Brain Recognizes Objects

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's McGovern Institute of Brain Research have devised a computational model describing how the primate brain...

Machines That Learn Better
From ACM News

Machines That Learn Better

New mathematics will make it much easier to build machine-learning systems that tackle a wider range of problems.

When Good Enough is Better
From ACM TechNews

When Good Enough is Better

MIT researchers have developed a system that automatically finds parts of computer code where accuracy can be traded for significant increases in speed. 

Seeing the Forest For the Trees
From ACM TechNews

Seeing the Forest For the Trees

New object recognition systems that deconstruct images into ever smaller elements, using methods developed at MIT and UCLA, should be much more efficient than previous...

Mastering Multicore
From ACM TechNews

Mastering Multicore

MIT researchers have developed software that makes computer simulations of physical systems run more efficiently on multicore chips. 

Computing, Sudoku-Style
From ACM News

Computing, Sudoku-Style

Though still in its infancy, the work of Alexey Radul as a postdoc at MIT could someday have consequences for artificial-intelligence research, parallel computing...

Robotic Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Regain Function
From ACM News

Robotic Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Regain Function

Stroke patients who received robot-assisted therapy were able to regain some ability to use their arms, even if the stroke had occurred years earlier, according...

Tv Outside the Box
From ACM TechNews

Tv Outside the Box

MIT researchers have developed Surround Vision, a system that works with Internet-connected handheld devices to enable TV viewers to see what is happening off screen...

In Profile: Missy Cummings
From ACM TechNews

In Profile: Missy Cummings

Professor Mary (Missy) Cummings, director of MIT's Humans and Automation Laboratory, wants to make it easier for humans to supervise automatic control systems,...

A Grand Unified Theory of AI
From ACM TechNews

A Grand Unified Theory of AI

MIT research scientist Noah Goodman has developed Church, a programming language that combines a rules-based artificial intelligence system with probabilistic inference...

A System That's Worth Its Salt
From ACM TechNews

A System That's Worth Its Salt

Researchers at MIT and in Korea have developed an approach to water desalination that could lead to small, portable units powered by solar cells or batteries that...

Web Sites That Can Take a Punch
From ACM TechNews

Web Sites That Can Take a Punch

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a system to keep Web servers running even when they are under attack from cybercriminals. 

From ACM TechNews

Context Is Ev . . . Well, Something, Anyway

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a way to improve object recognition systems by using information about their context. 

Sketch-Interpreting Software
From ACM News

Sketch-Interpreting Software

A new system that lets people enter data into a tablet computer simply by drawing diagrams on the screen could lead to interactive whiteboards.
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