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 Opinion
What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?
Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology...
From ACM News
Meet Terrapattern, Google Earth's Missing Search Engine
"Why don't you click on the tennis court?" Golan Levin, an associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested.
From ACM News
What the New Science of Touch Says About Ourselves
On a bitter, soul-shivering, damp, biting gray February day in Cleveland—that is to say, on a February day in Cleveland—a handless man is handling a nonexistent...
From ACM News
The Search for Our Missing Colors
Each year, a group of experts at Pantone, the company best known for its exacting color-matching system, chooses and promotes a Color of the Year that aims to set...
From ACM News
Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100
Twelve years ago, Robert McEliece, a mathematician and engineer at Caltech, won the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest honor in the field of information theory...
From ACM Careers
Say What You See, Facebook
When Matt King signed up for Facebook, in 2009, he had been completely blind for nearly twenty years.
From ACM News
A New Look at Ancient Mars
Among Earth/s planetary neighbors, Mars has been the one on which humanity has most often, and most variously, projected its hopes and fears.
From ACM News
Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them
Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided.
From ACM News
The Doomsday Invention
Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment...
From ACM News
The Gene Hackers
At thirty-four, Feng Zhang is the youngest member of the core faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T.
From ACM News
Hawaii's Deepest Secret
Earth's concentric layers scale remarkably well to those of a peach.
From ACM Opinion
Project Exodus
On March 27th, an American astronaut named Scott Kelly blasted off from Earth and, six hours later, clambered onto the International Space Station.
From ACM News
What a Dinosaur's Mating Scream Sounds Like
Two years ago, Sean Murray, a video-game developer from the town of Guildford, outside London, announced an ambitious game that he had been working on in secrecy...
From ACM News
What Are the Colors of Alien Life?
Just before it became the first man-made vessel to leave the solar system, in 1990, Voyager 1 took a portrait of Earth, some four billion miles away.
From ACM Opinion
Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust
Shortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of "The Second Machine Age," a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik...
From ACM News
What Your Tweets Say About You
How much can your tweets reveal about you? Judging by the last nine hundred and seventy-two words that I used on Twitter, I'm about average when it comes to feeling...
From ACM Opinion
Why Everyone Was Wrong About Net Neutrality
Today, the Federal Communications Commission, by a vote of three to two, enacted its strongest-ever rules on net neutrality, preserving an open Internet by prohibiting...
From ACM News
This Is Your Avatar Speaking
Last year, in a lab at the University of Barcelona, an anonymous woman was fitted with headphones, a microphone, a head-mounted virtual-reality display, a motion...
From ACM Opinion
The Shape of Things to Come
In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has...
From ACM Opinion