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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Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking
Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal the limits of algorithms.
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Complexity Theory's 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge
How hard is it to prove that problems are hard to solve? Meta-complexity theorists have been asking questions like this for decades. A string of recent results...
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How Randomness Improves Algorithms
Unpredictability can help computer scientists solve otherwise intractable problems.
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Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning
"Liquid" neural nets, based on a worm's nervous system, can transform their underlying algorithms on the fly, giving them unprecedented speed and adaptability. ...
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Finally, a Fast Algorithm for Shortest Paths on Negative Graphs
Researchers can now find the shortest route through a network nearly as fast as theoretically possible, even when some steps can cancel out others.
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Self-Taught AI Shows Similarities to How the Brain Works
Self-supervised learning allows a neural network to figure out for itself what matters. The process might be what makes our own brains so successful.
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By Exploring Virtual Worlds, AI Learns in New Ways
Intelligent beings learn by interacting with the world. Artificial intelligence researchers have adopted a similar strategy to teach their virtual agents new skills...
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What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
It's simple enough for AI to seem to comprehend data, but devising a true test of a machine's knowledge has proved difficult.
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A New Link to an Old Model Could Crack the Mystery of Deep Learning
To help them explain the shocking success of deep neural networks, researchers are turning to older but better-understood models of machine learning.
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A New Approach to Understanding How Machines Think
Been Kim is developing a "translator for humans" so that we can understand when artificial intelligence breaks down.
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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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A Poet of Computation Who ncovers Distant Truths
The theoretical computer scientist Constantinos Daskalakis has won the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for explicating core questions in game theory and machine learning....
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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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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
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."
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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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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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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