acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

News


bg-corner

An 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

Cooperative Robots That Learn = Less Work For Human Handlers

Learning a language can be difficult for some, but for babies it seems quite easy. With support from the National Science Foundation, linguist Jeffrey Heinz and...

Remembering Alan Turing on His 99th Birthday
From ACM News

Remembering Alan Turing on His 99th Birthday

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, a noted polymath and cryptanalyst who is regarded by many as being the grandfather of modern computing...

Kilobots Are Cheap Enough to Swarm in the Thousands
From ACM News

Kilobots Are Cheap Enough to Swarm in the Thousands

Kilobots are fairly simple little robots about the size of a quarter that can move around on vibrating legs, blink their lights, and communicate with each other...

Automotive Autonomy
From Communications of the ACM

Automotive Autonomy

Self-driving cars are inching closer to the assembly line, thanks to promising new projects from Google and the European Union.

Weighing Watson's Impact
From Communications of the ACM

Weighing Watson's Impact

Does IBM's Watson represent a distinct breakthrough in machine learning and natural language processing or is the 2,880-core wunderkind merely a solid feat of engineering...

War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs
From ACM News

War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs

Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air...

From ACM News

Google Voice Search Offers Natural User Input

Google Voice Search for desktop computers isn't much more than the company porting a technology that's been on mobile phones for a while to PCs. But don't write...

A Test For Consciousness
From ACM News

A Test For Consciousness

How will we know when we've built a sentient computer? By making it solve a simple puzzle.

How Robots Will Beat Humans at Billiards
From ACM News

How Robots Will Beat Humans at Billiards

Once a year, at the International Computer Olympiad, teams pit their AI software against others' in a variety of nerd-appropriate sports: chess, go, backgammon...

Streamlined Rules For Robots
From ACM News

Streamlined Rules For Robots

With the explosion of the Internet and the commoditization of autonomous robots (such as the Roomba) and small sensors (such as the ones in most cell phones),...

Nist Contests in China Put Next-Gen Robot Technologies to the Test
From ACM TechNews

Nist Contests in China Put Next-Gen Robot Technologies to the Test

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology recently hosted three of the four robotics competitions at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics...

Watson's Lead Developer: 'deep Analysis, Speed, and Results'
From ACM News

Watson's Lead Developer: 'deep Analysis, Speed, and Results'

David Ferrucci’s official title is "IBM Fellow and Leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center." But to the...

Why Talking Is So Much Tougher Than Math
From ACM TechNews

Why Talking Is So Much Tougher Than Math

In a recent interview, University of Toronto artificial intelligence professor Geoffrey Hinton discussed AI's future, including the technology's future opportunities...

Finding an Edge
From ACM TechNews

Finding an Edge

MIT researchers Jason Chang and John Fisher have developed an algorithm that can determine object boundaries in digital images with at least 50,000 times greater...

Parting Shots from a Mars Rover
From ACM News

Parting Shots from a Mars Rover

NASA is no longer sending commands to the Spirit rover on Mars, but the long-silent robot still has a few more chances to phone home. Not that anyone is expecting...

Honing Household Helpers
From ACM News

Honing Household Helpers

Imagine a robot able to retrieve a pile of laundry from the back of a cluttered closet, deliver it to a washing machine, start the cycle and then zip off to the...

From ACM News

DARPA Challenge Offers Public $100,000 For Small ­nmanned Aircraft

If you think you can build the next generation of unmanned flying aircraft, the scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency want to hear from...

Unlimited Possibilities
From Communications of the ACM

Unlimited Possibilities

M. Frans Kaashoek discusses systems work, "undo computing," and what he learned from Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

The Promise of Flexible Displays
From Communications of the ACM

The Promise of Flexible Displays

New screen materials could lead to portable devices that are anything but rectangular, flat, and unbendable.

Beauty and Elegance
From Communications of the ACM

Beauty and Elegance

Leslie Valiant talks about machine learning; parallel computing, and his quest for simplicity.
Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account