Communications of the ACM
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
New Life For Magnetic Tape
Music lovers may have long forsaken them, but magnetic tapes still reign supreme when it comes to storing vast amounts of digital data. And new research from IBM...
From ACM TechNews
Helping Computers nderstand Natural Human Speech
Lockheed Martin researchers are developing software that can extract meaning from a string of spoken sentences. The technology, called Spoken Language Interaction...
From ACM News
Touchscreen Merges the Real and Digital Worlds
For all the advances in table-top and tablet computing, some design professionals will always prefer the feel of pen on paper to stylus on glass. A new device could...
From ACM News
Grid Computing and the Future of Cloud Computing
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the idea of grid computing, a type of distributed computing that harnesses the power of many computers to handle large computational...
From ACM TechNews
R&d Partnership to sher in Era of Petascale Computing in Singapore
Fujistu and the Institute of High Performance Computing at Singapore's Agency for Science Technology and Research have announced a joint research and development...
From ACM News
If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It Hackme
Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.” Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.” Despite all the reports...
From ACM News
Google Patents Mapreduce
Google has received a patent for the technique known as MapReduce. The patent, number 7,650,331, applied for in 2004, is entitled "System and method for efficient...
From ACM News
Fearing Hackers Who Leave No Trace
The crown jewels of Google, Cisco Systems or any other technology company are the millions of lines of programming instructions, known as source code, that make...
From ICT Results
Middleware Supports Easy-Build Wireless Networks
Networks that monitor life-threatening situations or improve environmental efficiencies will be easier and cheaper to develop and operate, following the creation...
From ACM News
Group Thinker: Researcher Gets $2.9 Million to Further Develop Swarm Intelligence
Swarm intelligence is a branch of artificial intelligence that attempts to get computers and robots to mimic the highly efficient behavior of colony insects such...
From ACM News
How Google Ranks Tweets
To deliver useful search returns from the so-called real-time Web--such as seconds-old Twitter "tweets" reporting traffic jams--Google has adapted its page-ranking...
From ACM News
Now, Electronics That Obey Hand Gestures
The technology industry is going retro — moving away from remote controls, mice and joysticks to something that arrives without batteries, wires or a user manual...
From ACM TechNews
DHS Eyes Science and Technology Research
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS's) Science and Technology Directorate is seeking proposals for conducting research in a wide range of technology...
From ACM News
Bringing Color to E-Readers
One of the hot topics at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas is color e-readers, with several companies showcasing new products. While E-Ink has...
From ACM News
Binary Body Double: Microsoft Reveals the Science Behind Project Natal for Xbox 360
When Nintendo's Wii game console debuted in November 2006, its motion-sensing handheld "Wiimotes" got players off the couch and onto their feet. Now Microsoft...
From ACM News
Are Doctors Ready for Virtual Visits?
For over a decade now, health care experts have been promoting telemedicine, or the use of satellite technology, video conferencing and data transfer through phones...
From ACM News
How Vegas Security Drives Surveillance Tech Everywhere
Las Vegas casinos are incubators of the world's most advanced surveillance tech. Here's how the spy gear that helps Sin City has taught everyone from government...
From ACM News
Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook
Got an e-mail list of customers or readers and want to know more about each — such as their full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education...
From ACM News
Microsoft's Body-Sensing, Button-Busting Controller
A LONG-lived videogaming skill could be on the way out this year as Microsoft hones an add-on to its Xbox 360 console aimed at making button-studded games controllers...
From ACM News