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An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.


Crowdsourced Online Learning Gives Robots Human Skills
From ACM TechNews

Crowdsourced Online Learning Gives Robots Human Skills

Roboticists at Brown University and other institutions are experimenting with using crowdsourcing to teach robots more general skills.  

From ACM News

Why Bitcoin Is Not As Anonymous As Most ­sers Think

People who use Bitcoin to ensure their purchases remain anonymous may want to reconsider their reliance on the online peer-to-peer currency, say researchers who...

From ACM TechNews

Computers Understand Hand-Waving Descriptions

A new gesture-based interface developed by the Hasso Plattner Institute's Christian Holz and Microsoft Research's Andy Wilson does not require users to memorize...

Robots Use Kinect to Understand Our World
From ACM TechNews

Robots Use Kinect to Understand Our World

Cornell University researchers are teaching robots to understand the context of their surroundings so that they can pick out individual objects in a room. 

From ACM News

Welcome to the Age of the Splinternet

Openness is the Internet's great strength—and weakness. With powerful forces carving it up, is its golden age coming to an end?

From ACM News

Robots ­se Kinect to ­nderstand Our World

Picture the scene, a few years from now. "Robot, fetch me that pillow over there," you say to your ever-willing butlerbot. "Certainly sir," it replies. "What's...

From ACM News

How to Be in Two Places at the Same Time

An ambitious experiment to make a glass sphere exist in two places at once could provide the most sensitive test of quantum theory yet.

Buy Now or Wait For a Sale? Let the Computer Decide
From ACM TechNews

Buy Now or Wait For a Sale? Let the Computer Decide

Microsoft researchers have developed Prodcast, a tool that helps consumers decide whether to buy a new product now or wait for prices to fall.

Mining Social Networks to Predict Your App Choices
From ACM TechNews

Mining Social Networks to Predict Your App Choices

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab have analyzed the smartphone use of students on social networks in an attempt to determine...

Protecting Protestors With Photos That Never Existed
From ACM TechNews

Protecting Protestors With Photos That Never Existed

In a response to protestors getting arrested for taking pictures of government-instigated violence, researchers have developed a method that uses graphics processors...

Interview with Key Lulzsec Hacker
From ACM News

Interview with Key Lulzsec Hacker

It was early May when LulzSec's profile skyrocketed after a hack on the giant Sony corporation. LulzSec's name comes from Lulz, a corruption of LOL, often denoting...

Autopiloted Glider Knows Where to Fly For a Free Ride
From ACM News

Autopiloted Glider Knows Where to Fly For a Free Ride

Hawks and albatrosses soar for hours or even days without having to land. Soon robotic gliders could go one better, soaring on winds and thermals indefinitely...

From ACM TechNews

Rag-Trade Robots: From Body Scan to Bespoke Suit

The Leapfrog project, a collaboration of 35 industrial and academic partners from 11 countries, aims to develop completely automated clothing-production systems...

Cracking the Code of Machine Translation
From ACM TechNews

Cracking the Code of Machine Translation

University of Southern California scientists have developed a machine-translation technique that treats translation as a cryptographic challenge rather than a matter...

Botclouds: A Cyberattacker's Dream
From ACM TechNews

Botclouds: A Cyberattacker's Dream

Delft University researchers are studying how botclouds can be used to launch attacks, send spam, and commit fraud. 

From ACM News

Spies Can Send Messages Hidden in a Google Search

The peculiar list of search options that Google suggests as you type in a query could be hijacked to let people communicate secretly.

Gender-Spotting Tool Could Have Rumbled Fake Blogger
From ACM TechNews

Gender-Spotting Tool Could Have Rumbled Fake Blogger

A gender analysis program developed by Stevens Institute of Technology researcher Na Cheng could have determined the sex of a 40-year-old U.S. man writing online...

From ACM TechNews

Fire-Breathing Dragon Roars to Life

The first practical technique for recreating the sound of fire, based on its behavior, for virtual worlds has been devised by Jeff Chadwick and colleagues at Cornell...

From ACM TechNews

Future of Virtual Reality: What Pregnancy Feels Like

Men can gain a better understanding of what women experience during pregnancy by wearing a new device developed at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology...

The Defenders: Inside an Online Siege
From ACM News

The Defenders: Inside an Online Siege

In a quiet, windowless auditorium in Bristol, in the west of England, Lucy Robson and her team hunch over their laptops as the seconds on a giant clock above...
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