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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3-D Images, With Only One Photon Per Pixel
Lidar rangefinders, which are common tools in surveying and in autonomous-vehicle control, among other applications, gauge depth by emitting short bursts of laser...
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How to Program Unreliable Chips
As transistors get smaller, they also become less reliable.
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Big Plans For Small Spacecraft
It's hard to miss the rocket engine in Paulo Lozano's MIT office.
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Making Martian Clouds on Earth
At first glance, Mars' clouds might easily be mistaken for those on Earth: Images of the Martian sky, taken by NASA's Opportunity rover, depict gauzy, high-altitude...
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New Kind of Microscope Uses Neutrons
Researchers at MIT, working with partners at NASA, have developed a new concept for a microscope that would use neutrons—subatomic particles with no electrical...
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Bringing 'common Sense' to Text Analytics
Bringing "common sense" to artificial intelligence is one of the biggest challenges in computer science: It entails equipping computers with the shared knowledge...
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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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Views You Can se? How Online Ratings Affect Your Judgment
Are you influenced by the opinions of other people—say, in the comments sections of websites?
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Neuroscientists Plant False Memories in the Brain
The phenomenon of false memory has been well-documented: In many court cases, defendants have been found guilty based on testimony from witnesses and victims who...
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Writing Programs Using Ordinary Language
In a pair of recent papers, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have demonstrated that, for a few specific tasks, it's...
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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.
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Valuing Versatility
It's often said that we live in an age of increased specialization: physicians who treat just one ailment, scholars who study just one period, network administrators...
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Storing Data in Individual Molecules
Moore's law—the well-known doubling of computer chips' computational power every 18 months or so—has been paced by a similarly steady increase in the storage capacity...
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Proving Quantum Computers Feasible
Quantum computers are devices—still largely theoretical—that could perform certain types of computations much faster than classical computers; one way they might...
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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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Shifting Sands
Sand in an hourglass might seem simple and straightforward, but such granular materials are actually tricky to model.
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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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Sometimes the Quickest Path Is Not a Sraight Line
Sometimes the fastest pathway from point A to point B is not a straight line: for example, if you're underwater and contending with strong and shifting currents...
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