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
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.
From ACM News
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.
From ACM News
Machine Learning’s ‘Amazing’ Ability to Predict Chaos
In new computer experiments, artificial-intelligence algorithms can tell the future of chaotic systems.
From ACM TechNews
Smart Swarms Seek New Ways to Cooperate
Researchers are developing cooperative swarms of tiny robots called smarticles that can collectively perform complex behaviors.
From ACM News
Quantum Algorithms Struggle Against Old Foe: Clever Computers
The quest for "quantum supremacy" – unambiguous proof that a quantum computer does something faster than an ordinary computer – has paradoxically led to a boom...
From ACM News
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.
From ACM News
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.
From ACM News
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...
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 News
Complexity Theory Problem Strikes Back
The legendary graph isomorphism problem may be harder than a 2015 result seemed to suggest.
From ACM News
Hacker-Proof Code Confirmed
Computer scientists can prove certain programs to be error-free with the same certainty that mathematicians prove theorems.
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