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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.


If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (and Amazon Has a Patent For It.)
From ACM News

If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know. (and Amazon Has a Patent For It.)

What if your employer made you wear a wristband that tracked your every move, and that even nudged you via vibrations when it judged that you were doing something...

A Small-Scale Demonstration Shows How Quantum Computing Could Revolutionize Data Analysis
From ACM TechNews

A Small-Scale Demonstration Shows How Quantum Computing Could Revolutionize Data Analysis

An experiment by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China used quantum computers to calculate Betti numbers. The work "suggests that data...

China Wants to Make the Chips that Will Add AI to Any Gadget
From ACM News

China Wants to Make the Chips that Will Add AI to Any Gadget

In an office at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a computer chip is crunching data from a nearby camera, looking for faces stored in a database.

Inside Amazon's Artificial Intelligence Flywheel
From ACM Careers

Inside Amazon's Artificial Intelligence Flywheel

In early 2014, Srikanth Thirumalai met with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Speed of Light Could Be Dropped to Zero ­sing Crystals
From ACM News

Speed of Light Could Be Dropped to Zero ­sing Crystals

In a vacuum like space, the speed of light is just over 186,280 miles per second. Scientists have now shown it's possible to slow it down to zero miles per second...

­a Researchers Observe Electrons Zipping Around in Crystals
From ACM TechNews

­a Researchers Observe Electrons Zipping Around in Crystals

Researchers at the University of Arizona are investigating transition metal dichalcogenides' potential for enabling new techniques for data processing and storage...

Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries Into Fake Accounts
From ACM News

Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries Into Fake Accounts

More than a million followers have disappeared from the accounts of dozens of prominent Twitter users in recent days as the company faces growing criticism over...

Data Visualization Tools Drive Interactivity and Reproducibility in Online Publishing
From ACM News

Data Visualization Tools Drive Interactivity and Reproducibility in Online Publishing

As Benjamin Delory started his paper documenting a new way to quantify plant morphology, he realized that one of the figures could pose a problem.

Vista From Mars Rover Looks Back Over Journey So Far
From ACM News

Vista From Mars Rover Looks Back Over Journey So Far

A panoramic image that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover took from a mountainside ridge provides a sweeping vista of key sites visited since the rover's 2012 landing,...

Every Study We Could Find on What Automation Will Do to Jobs, in One Chart
From ACM Careers

Every Study We Could Find on What Automation Will Do to Jobs, in One Chart

You've seen the headlines: "Robots Will Destroy Our Jobs—and We're Not Ready for It." "You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot—and Sooner Than You Think." "Robots May...

A New Recipe For Hunting Alien Life
From ACM News

A New Recipe For Hunting Alien Life

Imagine stepping into a time machine, one that could traverse not only billions of years but also countless light years of space, all in search of life in the universe...

Blockchain Is This Year's Buzzword, But Can It Outlive the Hype?
From ACM News

Blockchain Is This Year's Buzzword, But Can It Outlive the Hype?

The speculation around cryptocurrencies has obscured the fact that blockchain, the decentralised, open-source ledger that drives bitcoin, could radically change...

Artificial Neurons Compute Faster Than the Human Brain
From ACM News

Artificial Neurons Compute Faster Than the Human Brain

Superconducting computing chips modelled after neurons can process information faster and more efficiently than the human brain.

How Pixar's Cartoon Cheese Led to a Smarter View of Science
From ACM Careers

How Pixar's Cartoon Cheese Led to a Smarter View of Science

Ten years ago, a chunk of animated cheese in Pixar's "Ratatouille" captured the imagination of cell biologist Janet Iwasa. So much so that it changed the way she...

Vulnerable Industrial Controls Directly Connected to Internet? Why Not?
From ACM News

Vulnerable Industrial Controls Directly Connected to Internet? Why Not?

Siemens issued an update to a year-old product vulnerability warning for its SIMATIC S7-300 and S7-400 families of programmable logic controllers (PLCs)—industrial...

Tech Firms Let Russia Probe Software Widely ­sed By ­.s. Government
From ACM News

Tech Firms Let Russia Probe Software Widely ­sed By ­.s. Government

Major global technology providers SAP (SAPG.DE), Symantec (SYMC.O) and McAfee have allowed Russian authorities to hunt for vulnerabilities in software deeply embedded...

DARPA Wants to Build an Image Search Engine Out of Dna
From ACM News

DARPA Wants to Build an Image Search Engine Out of Dna

Most people use Google's search-by-image feature to either look for copyright infringement, or for shopping.

Physicists Create Star Wars-Style 3D Projections; Just Don't Call Them Holograms
From ACM News

Physicists Create Star Wars-Style 3D Projections; Just Don't Call Them Holograms

Daniel Smalley has long dreamed of building the kind of 3D holograms that pepper science-fiction films.

New Algorithm Identifies 10 Times More Naturally Occurring Antibiotics Than All Previous Studies
From ACM TechNews

New Algorithm Identifies 10 Times More Naturally Occurring Antibiotics Than All Previous Studies

VarQuest is a new computational approach for peptidic natural products identification that could identify about 10 times more of such products than all previous...

The (almost) Complete History of 'fake News'
From ACM News

The (almost) Complete History of 'fake News'

In record time, the phrase morphed from a description of a social media phenomenon into a journalistic cliche and an angry political slur.
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