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 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 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 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...
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...
From ACM News
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...
From ACM TechNews
The Future Fabric of Data Analysis
A new approach to computation is required for managing big data because of the shift to a decentralized, distributed computer architecture.
From ACM News
The Future Fabric of Data Analysis
When subatomic particles smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, they create showers of new particles whose signatures are recorded by four...
From ACM News
The Mathematical Shape of Things to Come
Simon DeDeo, a research fellow in applied mathematics and complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute, had a problem.
From ACM News
A Digital Copy of the niverse, Encrypted
Even as he installed the landmark camera that would capture the first convincing evidence of dark energy in the 1990s, Tony Tyson, an experimental cosmologist now...
From ACM News
Imagining Data Without Division
Seven years ago, when David Schimel was asked to design an ambitious data project called the National Ecological Observatory Network, it was little more than a...
From ACM News
The Proof in the Quantum Pudding
In early May, news reports gushed that a quantum computation device had for the first time outperformed classical computers, solving certain problems thousands...
From ACM News
As Machines Get Smarter, Evidence They Learn Like US
The brain performs its canonical task—learning—by tweaking its myriad connections according to a secret set of rules.12