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.
From ACM News
Engineers Design Artificial Synapse For 'brain-on-a-Chip' Hardware
When it comes to processing power, the human brain just can't be beat.
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Robotic Consensus
Planning algorithms for teams of robots fall into two categories: centralized algorithms, in which a single computer makes decisions for the whole team, and decentralized...
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Object Recognition For Robots
John Leonard's group in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering specializes in SLAM, or simultaneous localization and mapping, the technique whereby mobile...
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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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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...
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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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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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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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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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Marvin Minsky Honored For Lifetime Achievements in Artificial Intelligence
MIT Media Lab professor emeritus Marvin Minsky, 86, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, has won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award...
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Artificial-Intelligence Research Revives Its Old Ambitions
The birth of artificial-intelligence research as an autonomous discipline is generally thought to have been the monthlong Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial...
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Teaching Robots Lateral Thinking
Many commercial robotic arms perform what roboticists call "pick and place" tasks: The arm picks up an object in one location and places it in another.
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The Robotic Equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife
The device doesn't look like much: a caterpillar-sized assembly of metal rings and strips resembling something you might find buried in a home-workshop drawer.
From ACM Opinion
3 Questions: A Web For Everyone
During the opening ceremonies of this summer’s Olympic games in London, a musical performance culminated with a stage-set house rising into the rafters to reveal...
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The Robot Revolution Is Just Beginning
When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s initially on automobile assembly lines—computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were...
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Self-Sculpting Sand
Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool.
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Guiding Robot Planes with Hand Gestures
Aircraft-carrier crew use a set of standard hand gestures to guide planes on the carrier deck. But as robot planes are increasingly used for routine air missions...
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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...12