Communications of the ACM
Cybersecurity Protects Food, Agriculture
Protecting the U.S. food supply from cyberattack.
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.
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The Mathematics of Taste
The design of aromas—the flavors of packaged food and drink and the scents of cleaning products, toiletries and other household items—is a multibillion-dollar business...
From ACM TechNews
Sharpening the Lines
Researchers at MIT and the University of Utah have developed a technique that they say surpasses the fundamental limits of microchip design and could lead to more...
From ACM TechNews
Streamlining Chip Design
MIT researchers have developed a system that enables hardware designers to specify, in a single programming language, all of the functions they want a device to...
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Robots in Reality
Consider the following scenario: A scout surveys a high-rise building that's been crippled by an earthquake, trapping workers inside. After looking for a point...
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Important Step Toward Computing with Light
There has been enormous progress in recent years toward the development of photonic chips—devices that use light beams instead of electrons to carry out their...
From ACM TechNews
Searching For Balloons in a Social Network
In the process of winning DARPA's Red Balloon Challenge, the MIT researchers collected and analyzed a large amount of data on the size and scope of Internet connections...
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A New Planning Tool Helps Direct Traffic on Aircraft Carriers
On the deck of an aircraft carrier, where up to 60 aircraft are crammed into 4.5 acres (1.8 hectares), real estate is at a premium. While aircraft directors wave...
From ACM TechNews
Improving Recommendation Systems
MIT professor Devavrat Shah thinks that the most common approach to recommendation systems is fundamentally flawed; he says recommendation systems should ask users...
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Long Live the Qubit!
A quantum computer is a device—still largely theoretical—that could perform some types of calculations much more rapidly than classical computers. While a bit...
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Toward Faster Transistors
In the 1980s and '90s, competition in the computer industry was all about "clock speed"—how many megahertz, and ultimately gigahertz, a chip could boast. But...
From ACM TechNews
Better Glasses-Free 3-D
MIT researchers have developed HR3D, a new method for glasses-free 3D displays. The researchers say their method could double the battery life of devices such...
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The Next Operating System
Operating systems for multicore chips will need more information about their own performance—and more resources for addressing whatever problems arise.
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The Surprising sefulness of Sloppy Arithmetic
A computer chip that performs imprecise calculations could process some types of data thousands of times more efficiently than existing chips.
From ACM TechNews
Faster Websites, More Reliable Data
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed TxCache, a database caching system that eliminates certain types of asymmetric data retrieval while...
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Multicore May Not Be So Scary
Research suggests that the free operating system Linux will keep up with the addition of more "cores," or processing units, to computer chips.
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First Improvement of Fundamental Algorithm in 10 Years
The max-flow problem, which is ubiquitous in network analysis, scheduling, and logistics, can now be solved more efficiently than ever.
From ACM TechNews
How the Brain Recognizes Objects
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's McGovern Institute of Brain Research have devised a computational model describing how the primate brain...
From ACM TechNews
When Good Enough is Better
MIT researchers have developed a system that automatically finds parts of computer code where accuracy can be traded for significant increases in speed.
From ACM TechNews