Communications of the ACM
A Healthy Dose of AI
Building artificial intelligence into medical devices can speed diagnoses and potentially improve treatments and outcomes.
From ACM NewsAn edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.
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Need a New Material? New Tool Can Help
Thanks to a new online toolkit developed at MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, any researcher who needs to find a material with specific properties—whether...
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Putting the 'art' in Artificial Intelligence
Like many kids, Antonio Torralba began playing around with computers when he was 13 years old. Unlike many of his friends, though, he was not playing video games...
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Important Step Toward Computing with Light
There has been enormous progress in recent years toward the development of photonic chips—devices that use light beams instead of electrons to carry out their...
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Tiny Stamps for Tiny Sensors
Advances in microchip technology may someday enable clinicians to perform tests for hundreds of diseases—sifting out specific molecules, such as early stage cancer...
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Seeing Through Walls
Researchers at MIT's Lincoln Lab have developed new radar technology that provides real-time video of what’s going on behind solid walls.
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An Oracle for Object-Oriented Programmers
MIT researchers have developed Matchmaker, a system that automatically determines how objects in a large software project interact so it can inform new objects...
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Smarter Robot Arms
A combination of two algorithms developed at MIT allows autonomous robots to execute tasks much more efficiently—and move more predictably.
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Printing Off the Paper
Imagine being able to "print" an entire house. Or a four-course dinner. Or a complete mechanical device such as a cuckoo clock, fully assembled and ready to run...
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In Plane View
An airplane’s digital flight-data recorder, or "black box," holds massive amounts of data, documenting the performance of engines, cockpit controls, hydraulic...
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Milestone For MIT Press's Bestseller
On Thursday, Aug. 4, the MIT Press held a party in MIT's Stata Center to celebrate the sale of the 500,000th copy of the textbook Introduction to Algorithms....
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A New Planning Tool Helps Direct Traffic on Aircraft Carriers
On the deck of an aircraft carrier, where up to 60 aircraft are crammed into 4.5 acres (1.8 hectares), real estate is at a premium. While aircraft directors wave...
From ACM TechNews
Computer Learns Language By Playing Games
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Regina Marzilay has adapted a system she developed to generate scripts for installing software on a Windows computer...
From ACM TechNews
Improving Recommendation Systems
MIT professor Devavrat Shah thinks that the most common approach to recommendation systems is fundamentally flawed; he says recommendation systems should ask users...
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Safer Skies
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has mandated that by 2020, all commercial aircraft—and small aircraft flying near most airports—must be equipped with...
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Protecting Medical Implants from Attack
Millions of Americans have implantable medical devices, from pacemakers and defibrillators to brain stimulators and drug pumps; worldwide, 300,000 more people...
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Streamlined Rules For Robots
With the explosion of the Internet and the commoditization of autonomous robots (such as the Roomba) and small sensors (such as the ones in most cell phones),...
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Long Live the Qubit!
A quantum computer is a device—still largely theoretical—that could perform some types of calculations much more rapidly than classical computers. While a bit...
From ACM TechNews
Finding an Edge
MIT researchers Jason Chang and John Fisher have developed an algorithm that can determine object boundaries in digital images with at least 50,000 times greater...
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