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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.

May 2021


From ACM TechNews

Beautiful or Handsome? Neural Language Models Try Their Hand at Word Substitution

Beautiful or Handsome? Neural Language Models Try Their Hand at Word Substitution

Researchers had five neural language models compete in lexical substitution tasks, including plain substitution and word sense induction .


From ACM News

Japan's Coronavirus Vaccine Booking System Crashes

Japan's Coronavirus Vaccine Booking System Crashes

Japan has inoculated just 2.8% of its population.


From ACM News

Coding Bootcamps in the Time of COVID

Coding Bootcamps in the Time of COVID

Immersive coding schools have headed online, where their job orientation is more intense than ever.


From ACM News

Intel's Cryogenic Chip Shows It Can Control Qubits Even in a Deep Freeze

Intel's Cryogenic Chip Shows It Can Control Qubits Even in a Deep Freeze

Intel's researchers have proven that Horse Ridge could be used to control qubits directly next to the quantum processor.


From ACM TechNews

Helping Robots Collaborate to Get the Job Done

Helping Robots Collaborate to Get the Job Done

A new algorithm aims to foster cooperation between information-gathering robot teams.


From ACM TechNews

Police Departments Adopting Facial Recognition Tech Amid Allegations of Wrongful Arrests

Police Departments Adopting Facial Recognition Tech Amid Allegations of Wrongful Arrests

U.S. police departments are adopting facial recognition technology, despite complaints of wrongful arrests as a result of its use.


From ACM TechNews

The Way We Use Emojis Evolves Like Language, Changes Their Meaning

The Way We Use Emojis Evolves Like Language, Changes Their Meaning

A study of emoji use over time found that their use and meaning evolves like language, with changes dictated by context.


From ACM TechNews

An Automated Box on Wheels—with Personality

An Automated Box on Wheels—with Personality

People find boxy talking robots humorous and engaging, which may make robotic technology more acceptable in everyday life.


From ACM TechNews

Precise Touchscreens, Thanks to AI

Precise Touchscreens, Thanks to AI

A new artificial intelligence technique more precisely estimates where a finger touches a mobile phone screen, to reduce typing errors.


From ACM TechNews

Simulating Sneezes, Coughs to Show How COVID-19 Spreads

Simulating Sneezes, Coughs to Show How COVID-19 Spreads

Two groups of computer scientists created detailed simulations of droplets sprayed by coughs or sneezes, to demonstrate how COVID-19 spreads.


From ACM News

Cloudflare Reveals Plan to End CAPTCHA 'Madness'

Cloudflare Reveals Plan to End CAPTCHA 'Madness'

Cloudflare says the CAPTCHA system wastes nearly 500 human years every single day.


From ACM News

The Pentagon Inches Toward Letting AI Control Weapons

The Pentagon Inches Toward Letting AI Control Weapons

Drills involving swarms of drones raise questions about whether machines could outperform a human operator in complex scenarios.


From ACM TechNews

Ayanna Howard Named ACM Athena Lecturer

Ayanna Howard Named ACM Athena Lecturer

ACM has named Ayanna Howard, dean of the Ohio State University College of Engineering, its 2021-2022 ACM Athena Lecturer.


From ACM TechNews

Amazon Cloud Technology Aids NFL in Schedule Making

Amazon Cloud Technology Aids NFL in Schedule Making

The National Football League used Amazon Web Services' cloud platform to arrange its just-released 272-game 2021 schedule.


From ACM TechNews

System Cleans Messy Data Tables Automatically

System Cleans Messy Data Tables Automatically

A system developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology automatically cleans "dirty data."


From ACM TechNews

Overcoming Tab Overload

Overcoming Tab Overload

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have found that tab overload is an issue for many people.


From ACM TechNews

AI, Drones Will Help Pin Down Sosnovsky's Hogweed

AI, Drones Will Help Pin Down Sosnovsky's Hogweed

To monitor the spread of Sosnovsky's hogweed, scientists developed an artificial intelligence monitoring system that performs real-time image segmentation onboard drones.


From ACM News

The Autonomous Vehicle World is Shrinking — It's Overdue

 The Autonomous Vehicle World is Shrinking — It's Overdue

'The AV industry has promised too much for too long, and has delivered too little'


From ACM News

Pipeline Hack Points to Growing Cybersecurity Risk for Energy System

Pipeline Hack Points to Growing Cybersecurity Risk for Energy System

Energy infrastructure has increasingly come under assault, and analysts said the attack that cut off fuel supplies this week should be a "wake-up call."


From ACM News

New Initiatives Aim to Improve Diversity in Computer Science Department

New Initiatives Aim to Improve Diversity in Computer Science Department

Two Duke Univesity professors and a graduate student formed a group of researchers dedicated to identifying "strategies for making computing more equitable and inclusive."


From ACM News

Colonial Pipeline Paid Nearly $5 million in Ransomware Blackmail Payment

Colonial Pipeline Paid Nearly $5 million in Ransomware Blackmail Payment

The payment was reportedly made soon after the attack began. It wasn't enough to stop the disruption.


From ACM TechNews

Light Emitters Developed for Quantum Circuits

Light Emitters Developed for Quantum Circuits

Researchers at Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed integrated chips that can produce light particles on demand at room temperature.


From ACM TechNews

Integrating Medical Imaging, Cancer Biology with Deep Neural Networks

Integrating Medical Imaging, Cancer Biology with Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks can replicate reported associations between gene expression, histology, and computed tomography-derived image features of lung cancer, and identify new ones.


From ACM TechNews

Security Researcher Successfully Jailbreaks Apple AirTag

Security Researcher Successfully Jailbreaks Apple AirTag

German security researcher stacksmashing was able to break into, dump, and reflash the microcontroller of Apple's AirTag object-location product.


From ACM News

Quantum Simulator Beats Quantum Hardware

Quantum Simulator Beats Quantum Hardware

Toshiba's quasi-quantum optimization algorithm on Microsoft's Azure cloud outperforms today's fledgling quantum computer speeds.


From ACM News

Biden Signs Executive Order to Bolster Federal Government’s Cybersecurity

Biden Signs Executive Order to Bolster Federal Government’s Cybersecurity

President Biden's order places strict new standards on software sold to the government.


From ACM News

Intel Says It Has Solved a Key Bottleneck in Quantum Computing

Intel Says It Has Solved a Key Bottleneck in Quantum Computing

Intel and QuTech say they've demonstrated the first instance of high-fidelity two-qubit control using Intel's Horse Ridge cryogenic control chip.


From ACM News

This One Change Could Protect Your Systems From Attack. So Why Don't More Companies Do It?

This One Change Could Protect Your Systems From Attack. So Why Don't More Companies Do It?

One 'boring but really important' change could improve your security posture significantly. But not everyone does it.


From ACM News

Bloomberg Gives $150 Million to Help Universities Diversify STEM Doctorates

Bloomberg Gives $150 Million to Help Universities Diversify STEM Doctorates

The initiative, which will benefit Johns Hopkins and six other institutions, will be named in honor of Vivien Thomas, best known for his work treating "blue baby syndrome."


From ACM TechNews

Self-Learning Robots Go Full Steam Ahead

Self-Learning Robots Go Full Steam Ahead

Researchers in the Netherlands have demonstrated that a group of autonomous self-learning robots can change what they are doing in response to changing conditions.