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 TechNews
Safety Issues Loom as Humanoid Invasion Approaches
As robot technology advances, and their use puts them in closer contact with humans, safety has become a top priority for some researchers.
From ACM TechNews
Learning to Love to Hate Robots
Several studies have recently been conducted to determine how humans and robots interact and how to improve the human-robot relationship. For example, a Carnegie...
From ACM TechNews
Smart Cctv Learns to Spot Suspicious Types
An international team of computer scientists at Queen Mary, University of London are developing intelligent video-surveillance software designed to spot suspicious...
From ACM TechNews
Free-Flying Cyborg Insects Steered From a Distance
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have connected electrodes and radio antennas to the nervous systems of beetles and then were able to control...
From ACM TechNews
Robots Get Smarter By Asking For Help
Willow Garage researchers are developing robots that ask human for help when they cannot recognize objects. Willow Garage computer scientist Alan Sorokin has designed...
From ACM TechNews
Lobsters Teach Robots Magnetic Mapping Trick
Computer scientist Janne Haverinen reports that a small wheeled robot was able to use a magnetic map to determine where it was in a hospital and move along a corridor...
From ACM TechNews
'spiderbots' Talk Amongst Themselves Inside Active Volcano
A group of "spiderbots" released inside Mount St. Helens in Washington is the first network of volcano sensors capable of automatically communicating with each...
From ACM TechNews
Robots to Get Their Own Operating System
Robots are limited by the fact that they are often designed and built in isolation for specific functions, and roboticists have started to consider what aspects...
From ACM TechNews
Talking Paperclip Inspires Less Irksome Virtual Assistant
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent an estimated $150 million developing an artificially intelligent (AI) virtual assistant. DARPA's...
From ACM TechNews
Smart Machines: What's The Worst That Could Happen?
A panel of 25 artificial intelligence (AI) scientists, roboticists, and ethical and legal scholars have spent the past year discussing the risks of developing machines...
From ACM TechNews
Cyborg Crickets Could Chirp at the Smell of Survivors
Research supported by the U.S. Pentagon is attempting to turn insects into search-and-rescue systems capable of locating trapped victims in earthquake rubble and...
From ACM TechNews
Computer Learns Sign Language By Watching Tv
Software developed by researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Leeds has autonomously determined the basics of sign language by watching TV...
From ACM TechNews
Memristor Minds: The Future of Artificial Intelligence
The lack of a rigorous mathematical foundation for electronics impelled engineer Leon Chua to develop one, which led to the formulation of the memristor — a theoretical...
From ACM News
'Smart' House Texts You If There's a Problem
It may look low-tech, but a smart doll's house could one day change the way we live, its inventors claim. Part of a project called InterHome, it is designed to...
From ACM TechNews
Emotional Robots: Will We Love Them or Hate Them?
Scientists have theorized that many technologies would function better if they were aware of their users' emotional states, and progress in this field includes...
From ACM TechNews
'governor' Would Teach Military Robots the Rules of War
Georgia Institute of Technology robotics engineer Ron Arkin is researching how military robots could be programmed to act ethically and obey the rules of engagement...
From ACM TechNews
Could the Net Become Self-Aware?
The Internet is similar to the human brain in that it has a complex network of nodes for holding, processing, recalling, and transmitting information. The Web...
From ACM TechNews
Harnessing Spammers to Solve AI Problems
Some Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) security systems are already being solved by spammers, but CAPTCHA co...
From ACM News
Robotic Computer Controlled Only by Gestures
Frederic Kaplan at the Swiss Federal Institutes in Lausanne has designed and built the QB1 computer, a PC-based robot that plays music and games and is operated...
From ACM TechNews