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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Vision System For Household Robots
For household robots ever to be practical, they'll need to be able to recognize the objects they're supposed to manipulate.
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Detecting Gases Wirelessly and Cheaply
MIT chemists have devised a new way to wirelessly detect hazardous gases and environmental pollutants, using a simple sensor that can be read by a smartphone.
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Solid Nanoparticles Can Deform Like a Liquid
A surprising phenomenon has been found in metal nanoparticles: They appear, from the outside, to be liquid droplets, wobbling and readily changing shape, while...
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Where to Grab Space Debris
Objects in space tend to spin—and spin in a way that's totally different from the way they spin on earth.
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Origami Robot Folds Itself p, Crawls Away
For years, a team of researchers at MIT and Harvard University has been working on origami robots—reconfigurable robots that would be able to fold themselves into...
From ACM Opinion
Harnessing the Speed of Light
The fields of data communication, fabrication, and ultrasound imaging share a common challenge when it comes to improving speed and efficiency: light's diffraction...
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Researchers nveil Experimental 36-Core Chip
The more cores—or processing units—a computer chip has, the bigger the problem of communication between cores becomes.
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Think Fast, Robot
One of the reasons we don't yet have self-driving cars and mini-helicopters delivering online purchases is that autonomous vehicles tend not to perform well under...
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Bake Your Own Robot
Printable robots—those that can be assembled from parts produced by 3-D printers—have long been a topic of research in the lab of Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna...
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Terahertz Imaging on the Cheap
Terahertz imaging, which is already familiar from airport security checkpoints, has a number of other promising applications—from explosives detection to collision...
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Computer System Automatically Solves Word Problems
Researchers in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working with colleagues at the University of Washington, have developed a new computer...
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Excitons Observed in Action for the First Time
A quasiparticle called an exciton—responsible for the transfer of energy within devices such as solar cells, LEDs, and semiconductor circuits—has been understood...
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New 'switch' Could Power Quantum Computing
Using a laser to place individual rubidium atoms near the surface of a lattice of light, scientists at MIT and Harvard University have developed a new method for...
From ACM Opinion
The Complexonaut
When he was in elementary school, Scott Aaronson, like many mathematically precocious kids of his generation, dreamed of making his own video games.
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Orienteering For Robots
Suppose you're trying to navigate an unfamiliar section of a big city, and you’re using a particular cluster of skyscrapers as a reference point.
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Soft Robotic Fish Moves Like the Real Thing
Soft robots—which don’t just have soft exteriors but are also powered by fluid flowing through flexible channels—have become a sufficiently popular research topic...
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Self-Completing Programs
Since he was a graduate student, Armando Solar-Lezama, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been working...
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Smarter Caching
Computer chips keep getting faster because transistors keep getting smaller.
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Herding Robots
Writing a program to control a single autonomous robot navigating an uncertain environment with an erratic communication link is hard enough; write one for multiple...
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