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
Long-Range Iris Scanning Is Here
An officer pulls someone over on the side of the highway.
From ACM News
.s. Supreme Court: Gps Trackers Are a Form of Search and Seizure
If the government puts a GPS tracker on you, your car, or any of your personal effects, it counts as a search—and is therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment...
From ACM News
The Attention Machine
Human attention isn't stable, ever, and it costs us: lives lost when drivers space out, billions of dollars wasted on inefficient work, and mental disorders that...
From ACM Careers
The Anti-Plagiarism Machine
Every day, researchers add hundreds of new papers to ArXiv, the massive public database of scientific writing and research.
From ACM News
How to Fool a Computer With Optical Illusions
Computers, like people, understand what they see in the world based on what they've seen before.
From ACM News
The Quiet Rise of the Satellite Spy Agency
As far as intelligence agencies go, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has remained relatively low profile—attracting neither the intrigue of, say, the...
From ACM Careers
How Two Men nlocked Modern Encryption
In September of 1974, when he was 30 years old, Whitfield Diffie was obsessed with cryptography.
From ACM News
Listening In: The Navy Is Tracking Ocean Sounds Collected By Scientists
In a retired shore station for transpacific communications cables on the western coast of Vancouver Island sits a military computer in a padlocked cage.
From ACM Opinion
How to Invent a Person Online
On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio.
From ACM Opinion
Should .s. Hackers Fix Cybersecurity Holes or Exploit Them?
There's a debate going on about whether the U.S. government—specifically, the NSA and United States Cyber Command—should stockpile Internet vulnerabilities or disclose...
From ACM TechNews
Computers See Your Face as a Child. Will They Recognize You as an Adult?
Questions have emerged about whether facial recognition technology could recognize an adult based on images of that person as a child.
From ACM News
Everything We Know About How the Nsa Tracks People's Physical Location
Glenn Greenwald is back reporting about the NSA, now with Pierre Omidyar's news organization FirstLook and its introductory publication, The Intercept.
From ACM Opinion
Stanford Researchers: It Is Trivially Easy to Match Metadata to Real People
In defending the NSA's telephony metadata collection efforts, government officials have repeatedly resorted to one seemingly significant detail: This is just metadata—numbers...
From ACM News
Intense Smog Is Making Beijing's Massive Surveillance Network Practically Useless
Beijing's surveillance network, one of the most extensive and invasive in the world, has been compromised by an unexpected foe: smog.
From ACM News
Of Course Gas Stations Will se Facial Recognition Tech to Serve 'Relevant' Ads
Say you're at a gas station. Say you're buying some supplies—bottled water, coffee, maybe some M&Ms—before you head back to your car.
From ACM News
How Scholars Hack the World of Academic Publishing Now
If you want to understand the modern academy, it wouldn't hurt to start at "impact factor."
From ACM News
Among the Nsa's Own Tips For Securing Computers: Remove the Webcam
Seems like everything gets hacked these days. Baby monitors. White House employees' personal email. Toilets.
From ACM Opinion
Could the Government Get a Search Warrant For Your Thoughts?
We don't have a mind reading machine.
From ACM News
The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping
In the early 1970s, the U.S. government learned that an undersea cable ran parallel to the Kuril Islands off the eastern coast of Russia, providing a vital communications...
From ACM News