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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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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Complexity Theory Problem Strikes Back
The legendary graph isomorphism problem may be harder than a 2015 result seemed to suggest.
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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.
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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.
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A Magical Answer to an 80-Year-Old Puzzle
Can you devise a series of steps to avoid hazards two paces to either side of you, even if you are forced to take every second, third or Nth step in your series...
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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.
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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...
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A Tricky Path to Quantum-Safe Encryption
In the drive to safeguard data from future quantum computers, cryptographers have stumbled upon a thin red line between security and efficiency.
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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.
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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.
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The New Laws of Explosive Networks
Last week, United Airlines grounded nearly 5,000 flights when its computer system crashed.
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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.
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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...
From ACM Opinion
Early-niverse Explorer Looks For Answers
On March 17, a panel of four astrophysicists held a press conference at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., to announce that they...
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Forging a Qubit to Rule Them All
Peering into his cabinet of curiosities on a recent spring day, Bob Willett, a scientist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., nimbly plucked a tiny black crystal...
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A Fundamental Theory to Model the Mind
In 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak proclaimed to a group of neuroscientists that it had taken him only 10 minutes to determine where the field had gone wrong...
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Perfecting the Art of Sensible Nonsense
As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996, Amit Sahai was fascinated by the strange notion of a "zero-knowledge" proof, a type...
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