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An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.


End of the Checkout Line: The Looming Crisis For American Cashiers
From ACM Careers

End of the Checkout Line: The Looming Crisis For American Cashiers

The day before a fully automated grocery store opened its doors in 1939, the inventor Clarence Saunders took out a full page advertisement in the Memphis Press-Scimitar...

Tracing the Sources of Today's Russian cyberthreat
From ACM Opinion

Tracing the Sources of Today's Russian cyberthreat

Beyond carrying all of our phone, text and internet communications, cyberspace is an active battleground, with cybercriminals, government agents and even military...

Google's New AI Learns By Baking Tasty Machine Learning Cookies
From ACM TechNews

Google's New AI Learns By Baking Tasty Machine Learning Cookies

Google Vizier is an artificial intelligence system that automatically tunes other artificial intelligence programs.

AI Programs Are Learning to Exclude Some African-American Voices
From ACM TechNews

AI Programs Are Learning to Exclude Some African-American Voices

Researchers warn some artificial intelligence programs are inheriting biases against certain dialects, which could lead to automatic discrimination as language-based...

Smart Computers
From ACM TechNews

Smart Computers

Researchers at the University of Freiburg's excellence cluster BrainLinks-BrainTools in Germany are showing how ideas from computer science could revolutionize...

Inside the Fighter Jet of the Future Where AI Is the Pilot 
From ACM News

Inside the Fighter Jet of the Future Where AI Is the Pilot 

I'm in the cockpit of a Typhoon fighter jet. It's an overwhelming sea of buttons, twiddly knobs and square screens displaying various diagrams and measurements....

The Loyal Engineers Steering Nasa's Voyager Probes Across the Universe
From ACM Careers

The Loyal Engineers Steering Nasa's Voyager Probes Across the Universe

In the early spring of 1977, Larry Zottarelli, a 40-year-old computer engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, set out for Cape Canaveral, Fla....

E-Zpass Could Kickstart Smart Cities
From ACM News

E-Zpass Could Kickstart Smart Cities

Everyone likes the idea of a smart city. Traffic lights would automatically adjust to optimize traffic flow, you could find parking spaces without circling for...

The Origin of Complex Life on Earth Just Got a Little Less Mysterious
From ACM News

The Origin of Complex Life on Earth Just Got a Little Less Mysterious

Life on Earth goes back at least two billion years, but it was only in the last half-billion that it would have been visible to the naked eye.

Nasa's Voyager Missions Could Guide Aliens to Earth
From ACM News

Nasa's Voyager Missions Could Guide Aliens to Earth

The 40th anniversary of the launch of two of NASA's most remarkable spacecraft is fast approaching.

China Launches Brain-Imaging Factory
From ACM News

China Launches Brain-Imaging Factory

Neuroscientists who painstakingly map the twists and turns of neural circuitry through the brain are about to see their field expand to an industrial scale. 

The Imperfect Crime: How the Wannacry Hackers Could Get Nabbed
From ACM News

The Imperfect Crime: How the Wannacry Hackers Could Get Nabbed

When hackers unleashed the WannaCry "ransomware" in mid-May, not only did they wreak havoc on European hospitals, telecoms and railways, they also made off with...

This Robot Lab Has No Idea What Its Robots Are Doing
From ACM TechNews

This Robot Lab Has No Idea What Its Robots Are Doing

The Georgia Institute of Technology's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines supports the Robotarium, an arena where scientists can run experiments on...

A Researcher Disguised Himself as a Car Seat to Teach Driverless Cars How to Communicate With Humans
From ACM TechNews

A Researcher Disguised Himself as a Car Seat to Teach Driverless Cars How to Communicate With Humans

Researchers costumed themselves as car seats to give the appearance no one is driving during autonomous vehicle experiments.

First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News
From ACM TechNews

First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News

Researchers say they have proof that social bots are the key to the online proliferation of fake news.

China's Plan For World Domination in AI Isn't So Crazy After All
From ACM Careers

China's Plan For World Domination in AI Isn't So Crazy After All

Xu Li's software scans more faces than maybe any on earth. He has the Chinese police to thank.

Cassini Prepares to Say Goodbye to a True Titan
From ACM News

Cassini Prepares to Say Goodbye to a True Titan

Mere weeks away from its dramatic, mission-ending plunge into Saturn, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has a hectic schedule, orbiting the planet every week in its ...

Teaching A.i. Systems to Behave Themselves
From ACM News

Teaching A.i. Systems to Behave Themselves

At OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, machines are teaching themselves to behave like humans. But sometimes,...

Inside the Increasingly Complex Algorithms That Get Packages to Your Door
From ACM News

Inside the Increasingly Complex Algorithms That Get Packages to Your Door

If you had to hand-deliver 50 packages, how would you go about planning the best route?

25 Years of Global Sea Level Data, and Counting
From ACM News

25 Years of Global Sea Level Data, and Counting

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of a revolutionary ocean research vessel—a space "ship."
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