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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.


Military Moves Closer to Truly Autonomous Drones
From ACM News

Military Moves Closer to Truly Autonomous Drones

Imagine a flying machine equipped with bombs and missiles, navigating the skies stealthily without human control.

Conquering Babel
From ACM News

Conquering Babel

In "Star Trek", a television series of the 1960s, no matter how far across the universe the Starship Enterprise traveled, any aliens it encountered would converse...

Chipmaker Races to Save Stephen Hawking's Speech as His Condition Deteriorates
From ACM Opinion

Chipmaker Races to Save Stephen Hawking's Speech as His Condition Deteriorates

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has long relied on technology to help him connect with the outside world despite the degenerative motor neuron disease he has...

Can You Predict the Future By Reading Twitter? The Pentagon Thinks Maybe
From ACM News

Can You Predict the Future By Reading Twitter? The Pentagon Thinks Maybe

The Defense Department wants new computer tools to analyze mounds of unstructured text, blogs, and tweets as part of a coordinated push to help military analysts...

­.s. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder
From ACM News

­.s. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder

Who needs the freaky precogs of Minority Report to predict if someone’s likely to commit murder when you have an algorithm that can do it for you?

NASA Mars Rover Preparing to Drill Into First Martian Rock
From ACM News

NASA Mars Rover Preparing to Drill Into First Martian Rock

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is driving toward a flat rock with pale veins that may hold clues to a wet history on the Red Planet.

Google's Kurzweil on Teaching Human Language to Computers
From ACM Opinion

Google's Kurzweil on Teaching Human Language to Computers

Famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil joined Google last month to work on "some of the hardest problems in computer science," specifically machine learning and...

Andrew Schwartz: Brain Control For Artificial Limbs
From ACM News

Andrew Schwartz: Brain Control For Artificial Limbs

When Jan Scheuermann grasped a chocolate bar and raised it to her mouth last year, it was a neuroscience breakthrough.

Nasa's Robotic Refueling Demo Set to Jumpstart Expanded Capabilities in Space
From ACM News

Nasa's Robotic Refueling Demo Set to Jumpstart Expanded Capabilities in Space

In mid-January, NASA will take the next step in advancing robotic satellite-servicing technologies as it tests the Robotic Refueling Mission, or RRM, aboard the ...

Drivers With Hands Full Get a Backup: The Car
From ACM News

Drivers With Hands Full Get a Backup: The Car

Car makers increasingly are adopting technologies for use in autonomous vehicles that take advantage of the array of optical and radar sensors in new cars. The...

Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—take Our Jobs
From ACM Opinion

Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—take Our Jobs

It's hard to believe you'd have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force.

Military Must Prep Now For 'mutant' Future, Researchers Warn
From ACM News

Military Must Prep Now For 'mutant' Future, Researchers Warn

The U.S. military is already using, or fast developing, a wide range of technologies meant to give troops what California Polytechnic State University researcher...

What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
From ACM Opinion

What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

I couldn't help thinking of John Le Carré's spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union...

Robotic 'pack Mule' Would Relieve Equipment Burden For Soldier in the Field
From ACM TechNews

Robotic 'pack Mule' Would Relieve Equipment Burden For Soldier in the Field

DARPA researchers are developing the Legged Squad Support System, a robotic system designed to carry 400 pounds of equipment, walk 20 miles at a time, and serve...

The Life-Saving Real World Results of Intelligent Vehicle Systems
From ACM TechNews

The Life-Saving Real World Results of Intelligent Vehicle Systems

The European field-operational test on active-safety functions in vehicles project recently completed the first-ever pan-European field operational test to assess...

Scientists Construct First Map of How the Brain Organizes Everything We See
From ACM News

Scientists Construct First Map of How the Brain Organizes Everything We See

Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day?

Online Translation Breaks Language Barriers
From ACM TechNews

Online Translation Breaks Language Barriers

Free online translation services are improving thanks to better data and more sophisticated algorithms.  Google Translate currently has more than 200 million users...

Big Nsf Grant Funds Research Into Training Robots to Work With Humans
From ACM TechNews

Big Nsf Grant Funds Research Into Training Robots to Work With Humans

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded a $3.5 million grant to University of California, Berkeley robotics researchers Ken Goldberg and Pieter Abbeel...

Beyond Hadoop
From Communications of the ACM

Beyond Hadoop

The leading open source system for processing big data continues to evolve, but new approaches with added features are on the rise.

A More Human Artificial Brain
From ACM News

A More Human Artificial Brain

There are times when I wonder why so many scientists are spending so much time trying to recreate something as fickle and full of fogginess as the human brain.
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