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 It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter
In the summer of 2011, while he was fighting an indictment for alleged computer crimes, Aaron Swartz, an information activist, read Kafka’s "The Trial" and ...
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New ATM Designs Imitate Online and Mobile Banking
Before heading to lunch, Kirsten Keary-Taylor, 29, uses an iPhone app to request $20 from a nearby ATM. Passing the cash machine on her way out, she scans it with...
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Manage Your Smart Home with a Single Gesture
Our homes will get a lot smarter in the coming years, allowing us to use a smartphone to manage an integrated system of appliances and other electronics from any...
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Investors Buy Into Software-Defined Networks, Will Customers Follow?
As Superstorm Sandy bore down on the East coast last year, companies with data centers in its path needed another location fast. But moving computer servers is...
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Encryption Has Foiled Wiretaps For First Time Ever, Feds Say
For the first time, encryption is thwarting government surveillance efforts through court-approved wiretaps, U.S. officials said Friday.
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Nasa Decommissions Its Galaxy Hunter Spacecraft
NASA has turned off its Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) after a decade of operations in which the venerable space telescope used its ultraviolet vision to study...
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A Cutting-Edge Second Look at the Battle of Gettysburg
The technological limits of surveillance during the American Civil War dictated that commanders often decided where to deploy their troops based largely on what...
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The Seventy-Billion-Mile Telescope
When I was a teen-ager, I spent many nights gazing through a telescope at an amateur observatory in Cranford, New Jersey. Saturn, to the naked eye, is a shining...
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Siri's Creators Demonstrate an Assistant That Takes the Initiative
In a small, dark, room off a long hallway within a sprawling complex of buildings in Silicon Valley, an array of massive flat-panel displays and video cameras track ...
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The Internet of Things: Open Garden
When the Large Hadron Collider went online in 2009, most scientists saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to conduct experiments involving the building blocks...
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Nasa's Voyager 1 Explores Final Frontier of Our 'solar Bubble'
Data from Voyager 1, now more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun, suggest the spacecraft is closer to becoming the first human-made object...
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Researcher Dreams p Machines That Learn Without Humans
Yoshua Bengio recently had a vision—a vision of how to build computers that learn like people do.
From ACM News
The Race to a $100 Genome
Mark Costa has a higher-than-average risk of stomach cancer, a lower-than-average risk for Alzheimer's, and he metabolizes caffeine very slowly.
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Overprotection May Be Hampering Hunt For Mars Life
There are aliens on Mars—and they came from Earth.
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Father's Genetic Quest Pays Off
Hugh Rienhoff says that his nine-year-old daughter, Bea, is "a fire cracker", "a tomboy" and "a very sassy, impudent girl". But in a forthcoming research paper,...
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Submarine Internet Cables Are a Gift For Spooks
It's a golden age for spying. The subsea fibre-optic cables that carry telephone and Internet traffic are a technological marvel—and a gift to intelligence agencies...
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The Watchers
Looking down from 500 miles above Earth's surface, you could watch the FedEx Custom Critical Delivery truck move across the country along 3,140 miles of highway...
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Privacy Paradox: Americans Happy to Share Personal Data With Big Business
It's official: Americans may freak out when government collects their data to track terrorists, but they would happily have banks use it to catch some jerk trying...
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Spark: Open Source Superstar Rewrites Future of Big Data
Ram Sriharsha works in the engine room powering one of Silicon Valley's most influential companies. He’s an engineer at Yahoo.
From ACM News