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
Best-Ever Algorithm Found For Huge Streams of Data
Researchers have created a near-perfect streaming algorithm that operates by recalling only enough of what it has seen to relate what it has observed most often...
From ACM TechNews
A Brain Built From Atomic Switches Can Learn
Researchers are constructing a device "inspired by the brain to generate the properties that enable the brain to do what it does."
From ACM News
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...
From ACM News
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...
From ACM News
Discoveries Fuel Fight Over Universe's First Light
Not long after the Big Bang, all went dark.
From ACM TechNews
Computing's Search For Quantum Questions
Scientists are plotting out benchmark problems, classes of problems that are specifically appropriate to hybrid quantum computers.
From ACM News
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.
From ACM News
Scientists Debate Signatures of Alien Life
Huddled in a coffee shop one drizzly Seattle morning six years ago, the astrobiologist Shawn Domagal-Goldman stared blankly at his laptop screen, paralyzed.
From ACM TechNews
Landmark Algorithm Breaks 30-Year Impasse
Computer scientists are calling a new algorithm a breakthrough in mapping how hard computational problems are to solve.
From ACM News
‘outsiders’ Crack 50-Year-Old Math Problem
Three computer scientists have solved a problem central to a dozen far-flung mathematical fields.
From ACM News
A New Map Traces the Limits of Computation
At first glance, the big news coming out of this summer's conference on the theory of computing appeared to be something of a letdown.
From ACM News
A Tricky Path to Quantum-Safe Encryption
August 11, the National Security Agency updated an obscure page on its website with an announcement that it plans to shift the encryption of government and military...
From ACM News
A Surprise Source of Life's Code
Genes, like people, have families—lineages that stretch back through time, all the way to a founding member.
From ACM News
New Letters Added to the Genetic Alphabet
DNA stores our genetic code in an elegant double helix. But some argue that this elegance is overrated.
From ACM News
The New Laws of Explosive Networks
Last week, United Airlines grounded nearly 5,000 flights when its computer system crashed.
From ACM News
Networks Reveal the Connections of Disease
Stefan Thurner is a physicist, not a biologist. But not long ago, the Austrian national health insurance clearinghouse asked Thurner and his colleagues at the Medical...
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Computing Without Qubits
For more than 20 years, Ivan H. Deutsch has struggled to design the guts of a working quantum computer.
From ACM News
A Common Logic to Seeing Cats and Cosmos
When in 2012 a computer learned to recognize cats in YouTube videos and just last month another correctly captioned a photo of "a group of young people playing...12