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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Galactic Beacons Get Snuffed Out in a Cosmic Eyeblink
Stephanie LaMassa did a double take. She was staring at two images on her computer screen, both of the same object—except they looked nothing alike.
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Astronomers Creep p to the Edge of the Milky Way's Black Hole
For the first time, scientists have spotted something wobbling around the black hole at the core of our galaxy.
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'Quantum Atmospheres' May Reveal Secrets of Matter
Over the past several years, some materials have proved to be a playground for physicists.
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New AI Strategy Mimics How Brains Learn to Smell
Today's artificial intelligence systems, including the artificial neural networks broadly inspired by the neurons and connections of the nervous system, perform...
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Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room
Score one for the human brain. In a new study, computer scientists found that artificial intelligence systems fail a vision test a child could accompli
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The Last of the Universe's Ordinary Matter Has Been Found
Astronomers have finally found the last of the missing universe. It's been hiding since the mid-1990s, when researchers decided to inventory all the "ordinary" matter...
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The New Science of Seeing Around Corners
While vacationing on the coast of Spain in 2012, the computer vision scientist Antonio Torralba noticed stray shadows on the wall of his hotel room that didn't...
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Mathematicians Tame Turbulence in Flattened Fluids
Turbulence, the splintering of smooth streams of fluid into chaotic vortices, doesn't just make for bumpy plane rides. It also throws a wrench into the very mathematics...
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Finally, a Problem That Only Quantum Computers Will Ever Be Able to Solve
Early on in the study of quantum computers, computer scientists posed a question whose answer, they knew, would reveal something deep about the power of these futuristic...
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The niverse Is Not a Simulation, but We Can Now Simulate It
In the early 2000s, a small community of coder-cosmologists set out to simulate the 14-billion-year history of the universe on a supercomputer.
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Evidence Found for a New Fundamental Particle
Physicists are both thrilled and baffled by a new report from a neutrino experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago.
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A New World's Extraordinary Orbit Points to Planet Nine
In early 2016, two planetary scientists declared that a ghost planet is hiding in the depths of the solar system, well beyond the orbit of Pluto.
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Machine Learning's 'Amazing' Ability to Predict Chaos
Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the "butterfly effect" makes long-term prediction impossible.
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The Era of Quantum Computing Is Here. Outlook: Cloudy
After decades of heavy slog with no promise of success, quantum computing is suddenly buzzing with almost feverish excitement and activity.
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Mathematicians Find Wrinkle in Famed Fluid Equations
The Navier-Stokes equations capture in a few succinct terms one of the most ubiquitous features of the physical world: the flow of fluids.
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Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes
In 1985, when Carl Sagan was writing the novel Contact, he needed to quickly transport his protagonist Dr. Ellie Arroway from Earth to the star Vega. He had her...
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New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Learning
A new idea called the "information bottleneck" is helping to explain the puzzling success of today's artificial-intelligence algorithms—and might also explain how...
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For Astronomers, a Neutron Star Merger Could Eclipse the Eclipse
Late last week, as some staff astronomers embarked on trips to see Monday's solar eclipse, two of NASA's space-based observatories—Hubble and Chandra X-ray—and...
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Discoveries Fuel Fight Over Universe's First Light
Not long after the Big Bang, all went dark.
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Mapping the Brain to Build Better Machines
Take a three year-old to the zoo, and she intuitively knows that the long-necked creature nibbling leaves is the same thing as the giraffe in her picture book.12