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Communications of the ACM

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The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.

October 2017


From ACM TechNews

Facebook Research Automatically Creates an Avatar From a Photo

Facebook Research Automatically Creates an Avatar From a Photo

A new machine-learning system can automatically creating the best possible avatar of a person's face from a photo by using a customized emoji generator.


From ACM TechNews

Two Ornl-Led Research Teams Receive $10.5 Million to Advance Quantum Computing For Scientific Applications

Two Ornl-Led Research Teams Receive $10.5 Million to Advance Quantum Computing For Scientific Applications

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded two research teams more than $10 million to assess the feasibility of quantum architectures in addressing big science problems.


From ACM News

How High Can High-Rises Go?

How High Can High-Rises Go?

Digital technologies and new and better materials have stretched the boundaries of building design.


From ACM News

How We Feel About Robots That Feel

How We Feel About Robots That Feel

Octavia, a humanoid robot designed to fight fires on Navy ships, has mastered an impressive range of facial expressions.


From ACM News

These Neurons Are Alive and Firing. And You Can Watch Them in 3-D

These Neurons Are Alive and Firing. And You Can Watch Them in 3-D

For patients with epilepsy, or cancerous brain lesions, sometimes the only way to forward is down.


From ACM News

Higgs Boson ­ncovered By Quantum Algorithm on D-Wave Machine

Higgs Boson ­ncovered By Quantum Algorithm on D-Wave Machine

Machine learning has returned with a vengeance. I still remember the dark days of the late '80s and '90s, when it was pretty clear that the current generation of machine-learning algorithms didn't seem to actually learn much …


From ACM TechNews

Preservation For the (digital) Ages

Preservation For the (digital) Ages

Researchers are working to enhance the preservation of digital humanities databases.


From ACM TechNews

Bloated Browser Functionality Presents ­nnecessary Security, Privacy Risks

Bloated Browser Functionality Presents ­nnecessary Security, Privacy Risks

Researchers have identified browser functionalities that are rarely used or needed by Websites, but which pose security and privacy risks.


From ACM TechNews

Resistive Memory Components the Computer Industry Can't Resist

Resistive Memory Components the Computer Industry Can't Resist

Researchers have developed new memristor devices that last 1 trillion cycles, an achievement they say far surpasses the endurance of commercial flash memories for computing.


From ACM TechNews

Machine Learning ­sed to Predict Earthquakes in a Lab Setting

Machine Learning ­sed to Predict Earthquakes in a Lab Setting

Researchers say they have trained a machine-learning algorithm to predict future seismic events.


From ACM TechNews

Focus Computer Science Funding on Teacher Training, Code.org Founder Says

Focus Computer Science Funding on Teacher Training, Code.org Founder Says

Code.org founder Hadi Partovi says every dollar committed to computer science education should be channeled into teacher training.


From ACM TechNews

U.s. Should Invest More in Global Quantum Race, Researchers Tell Congressional Committee

U.s. Should Invest More in Global Quantum Race, Researchers Tell Congressional Committee

Researchers told the U.S. House Science Committee that more federal funding is required to train specialists and advance real-world quantum computing applications.


From ACM News

Like Magic: The Tech That Goes Into Making Money Harder to Fake

Like Magic: The Tech That Goes Into Making Money Harder to Fake

In 2005, shortly after earning a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering, Sam Cape was looking for work online when he came across a cryptic help wanted ad.


From ACM News

Photons Pair Up Like Superconducting Electrons

Photons Pair Up Like Superconducting Electrons

Superconductivity—a phenomenon in which electrons can travel through certain materials with zero resistance—has revolutionized parts of medicine, travel and science. Now, an intriguing experiment has seen the same behaviour that…


From ACM TechNews

Material Could Bring Optical Communication Onto Silicon Chips

Material Could Bring Optical Communication Onto Silicon Chips

Researchers say they have created a solution to the "interconnect bottleneck" that slows communication between different chip elements.


From ACM TechNews

With Commercial Satellite Imagery, Computer Learns to Quickly Find Missile Sites in China

With Commercial Satellite Imagery, Computer Learns to Quickly Find Missile Sites in China

The U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is calling on the private sector to develop machine-learning tools to automate repetitive and time-consuming image analysis tasks.


From ACM TechNews

Wpi Researchers Developing Autonomous Snake-Like Robots to Support Search-and-Rescue Teams

Wpi Researchers Developing Autonomous Snake-Like Robots to Support Search-and-Rescue Teams

Researchers have received a U.S. National Science Foundation grant to develop snake-like robots that can navigate through debris following a disaster.


From ACM News

Why Blockchain Is Taking Over the World

Why Blockchain Is Taking Over the World

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are booming—and for good reason.


From ACM News

How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media

How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media

Hours after the Las Vegas massacre, Travis McKinney's Facebook feed was hit with a scattershot of conspiracy theories.


From ACM News

Take a Walk on Mars, in Your Own Living Room

Take a Walk on Mars, in Your Own Living Room

When NASA scientists want to follow the path of the Curiosity rover on Mars, they can don a mixed-reality headset and virtually explore the Martian landscape.


From ACM Careers

This Company's Robots Are Making Everything, and Reshaping the World

This Company's Robots Are Making Everything, and Reshaping the World

The headquarters of Fanuc sit in the shadow of Mt. Fuji, on a sprawling, secluded campus of 22 windowless factories and dozens of office buildings.


From ACM News

Fbi Couldn't Access Nearly 7k Devices Because of Encryption  

Fbi Couldn't Access Nearly 7k Devices Because of Encryption  

The FBI hasn't been able to retrieve data from more than half of the mobile devices it tried to access in less than a year, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Sunday, turning up the heat on a debate between technology companies…


From ACM TechNews

Rendering the Invisible Visible

Rendering the Invisible Visible

Researchers at multiple institutions are working on the Mobile Material Characterization and Localization by Electromagnetic Sensing project.


From ACM TechNews

Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords

Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords

Roboticists say they now are focused on human-robot interaction in the performance of complex tasks.


From ACM TechNews

Back to the Canyon

Back to the Canyon

A team of researchers hopes to determine if fatigue can be predicted and whether life-threatening fatigue can be differentiated from recoverable fatigue.


From ACM TechNews

Making Big Data a Little Smaller

Making Big Data a Little Smaller

Researchers  have validated the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma for reducing data dimensionality.


From ACM TechNews

Andrew Ng Has a Chatbot That Can Help With Depression

Andrew Ng Has a Chatbot That Can Help With Depression

Stanford University professor Andrew Ng is supporting the development of a Facebook chatbot to offer interactive cognitive behavior therapy to people suffering from depression.


From ACM TechNews

Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries For Scarce AI Talent

Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries For Scarce AI Talent

With artificial intelligence expertise in short supply, artificial intelligence talent is commanding huge salaries from the largest technology companies.


From ACM News

Deepmind Alphago Team Receives Inaugural Ijcai Marvin Minsky Medal For Outstanding Achievements in AI

Deepmind Alphago Team Receives Inaugural Ijcai Marvin Minsky Medal For Outstanding Achievements in AI

The DeepMind team will be presented with the award at the IJCAI-2018 conference in Stockholm, Sweden, next July.


From ACM News

Deep Space Communications via Faraway Photons

Deep Space Communications via Faraway Photons

A spacecraft destined to explore a unique asteroid will also test new communication hardware that uses lasers instead of radio waves.