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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

Driverless Cars Could Let You Choose Who Survives in a Crash

Driverless Cars Could Let You Choose Who Survives in a Crash

Researchers have developed a dial that will switch a smart car's setting from "full altruist" to "full egoist," with the middle setting being impartial.


From ACM TechNews

Could AI Be the Future of Fake News and Product Reviews?

Could AI Be the Future of Fake News and Product Reviews?

Researchers are experimenting with artificial intelligence-based techniques for automatically generating convincing online reviews, such as bogus restaurant critiques.


From ACM TechNews

Internet Researchers Harnessed the Power of Algorithm to Find Hate Speech

Internet Researchers Harnessed the Power of Algorithm to Find Hate Speech

Researchers have trained an algorithm to identify hate speech by comparing what differentiates text that includes hate speech from text that does not contain hate speech.


From ACM TechNews

Johns Hopkins Scientists to Build Machine Translation System For Obscure Languages

Johns Hopkins Scientists to Build Machine Translation System For Obscure Languages

A team of scientists has received a grant from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence to create an information retrieval and translation system for obscure languages.


From ACM TechNews

Put Humans at the Center of AI

Put Humans at the Center of AI

Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Lab director Fei-Fei Li advocates for more human-centered AI and the benefits it can yield.


From ACM News

The World Once Laughed at North Korean Cyberpower. No More.

The World Once Laughed at North Korean Cyberpower. No More.

When North Korean hackers tried to steal $1 billion from the New York Federal Reserve last year, only a spelling error stopped them.


From ACM News

Twitter Is Crawling With Bots and Lacks Incentive to Expel Them

Twitter Is Crawling With Bots and Lacks Incentive to Expel Them

On Wednesday, the exterior of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters bore an eerie message: "Ban Russian Bots." Someone—the company doesn't know who—projected the demand onto the side of its building.


From ACM News

How Do You Build the Next-Generation Internet?

How Do You Build the Next-Generation Internet?

Imagine super-fast computers that can solve problems much quicker than machines today.


From ACM News

Stretchable Electronics to Top $1 Billion By 2030

Stretchable Electronics to Top $1 Billion By 2030

A growing variety of stretchable polymers will help integrate electronics into medical implants, consumer products, and more.


From ACM TechNews

The Female Code Breakers Who Helped Defeat the Nazis

The Female Code Breakers Who Helped Defeat the Nazis

More than 10,000 female "cryptoanalysts" were enlisted by the U.S. Army and Navy to help crack Nazi codes and ensure the Allies' victory in World War II.


From ACM TechNews

Driverless Cars Learn From Humans in Greenwich Project

Driverless Cars Learn From Humans in Greenwich Project

Tests are underway in the London borough of Greenwich in the U.K. that could expedite the development of safer driverless vehicles under the government-funded Move_UK project.


From ACM TechNews

Facebook Thinks the Most ­seful Digital Assistant Is the One That Can Read Minds

Facebook Thinks the Most ­seful Digital Assistant Is the One That Can Read Minds

The head of Facebook's moonshot division says the company wants to use brain-computer interface technology to enable people to type with their minds.


From ACM TechNews

Could Virtual Reality Replace Therapy?

Could Virtual Reality Replace Therapy?

Psychologists are testing virtual reality systems as a therapeutic tool for phobias and disorders.


From ACM TechNews

Mathematical Modeling For Better Designs and Simulations

Mathematical Modeling For Better Designs and Simulations

Dublin City University professor Patricia Moore in Ireland says she tries "to make it easier for computers to solve simulation problems as efficiently and accurately as possible."


From ACM News

Inside the Moonshot Effort to Finally Figure Out the Brain

Inside the Moonshot Effort to Finally Figure Out the Brain

"Here's the problem with artificial intelligence today," says David Cox.


From ACM News

Two Computer Scientists Among 2017 Macarthur 'genius' Grant Winners

Two Computer Scientists Among 2017 Macarthur 'genius' Grant Winners

Two computer scientists are recognized for pushing the boundaries of machine learning and cybersecurity.


From ACM News

Reconstructing Cassini's Plunge Into Saturn

Reconstructing Cassini's Plunge Into Saturn

As NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its fateful dive into the upper atmosphere of Saturn on Sept. 15, the spacecraft was live-streaming data from eight of its science instruments, along with readings from a variety of engineering…


From ACM News

How the Search For a 'death Ray' Led to Radar

How the Search For a 'death Ray' Led to Radar

You can trace the extent of our reliance on air travel to many inventions. The jet engine, perhaps, or the aeroplane itself. But sometimes inventions need other inventions to unlock their full potential.


From ACM TechNews

This Soft Robotic Gripper Can Screw in Your Light Bulbs For You

This Soft Robotic Gripper Can Screw in Your Light Bulbs For You

Researchers at UC San Diego have developed a robotic gripper that can pick up and manipulate objects without needing to see them in advance. 


From ACM TechNews

Scientists Enlist Supercomputers, Machine Learning to Automatically Identify Brain Tumors

Scientists Enlist Supercomputers, Machine Learning to Automatically Identify Brain Tumors

A team of researchers is developing a fully automatic method that combines biophysical models of tumor growth with machine-learning algorithms to analyze magnetic resonance imaging data of glioma patients. 


From ACM TechNews

Computer Visualizations Bring New Perspective to Science

Computer Visualizations Bring New Perspective to Science

Researchers at Brown University say they have used data gathered from 3-D microscopy instruments to create an immersive visualization where scientists can view inside a single drop of water to examine plankton and how they function…


From ACM TechNews

­ Michigan to Study Flexible STEM Classrooms

­ Michigan to Study Flexible STEM Classrooms

Researchers at the University of Michigan are using a U.S. National Science Foundation grant to examine the difference between teaching and learning in traditional lecture halls and more flexible classrooms. 


From ACM Opinion

The Scientist Who Spots Fake Videos

The Scientist Who Spots Fake Videos

Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, specialises in detecting manipulated images and videos. Farid, who provides his services to clients as varied as universities, media organizations…


From ACM News

O.k., Computer, Tell Me What This Smells Like

O.k., Computer, Tell Me What This Smells Like

Our sense of smell is gloriously specific.


From ACM News

Half the ­niverse's Missing Matter Has Just Been Finally Found

Half the ­niverse's Missing Matter Has Just Been Finally Found

The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe—protons, neutrons and electrons—unaccounted for by previous observations of stars…


From ACM TechNews

7 Ways to Get More Girls and Women Into STEM (and Encourage Them to Stay)

7 Ways to Get More Girls and Women Into STEM (and Encourage Them to Stay)

A recent forum of industry and academic experts offered proposals for encouraging girls and women to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math careers.


From ACM TechNews

Careers For Women in Technology Companies Are a Global Challenge

Careers For Women in Technology Companies Are a Global Challenge

Gender bias in technology is a problem for women on both sides of the Atlantic, although the challenges and opportunities they face can differ due to political and cultural divergences.


From ACM TechNews

The Race to Secure Voting Tech Gets an ­rgent Jumpstart

The Race to Secure Voting Tech Gets an ­rgent Jumpstart

There is an urgent need to secure U.S. voting systems ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, according to a report by the Atlantic Council think tank and hacking conference DefCon.


From ACM TechNews

Ada Lovelace Day Honors 'the First Computer Programmer'

Ada Lovelace Day Honors 'the First Computer Programmer'

Pioneering 19th-century English mathematician Ada Lovelace is honored on the second Tuesday of every October for her contributions to computer programming.


From ACM TechNews

Organization to Teach Coding to Girls in Detroit Area

Organization to Teach Coding to Girls in Detroit Area

The Oakland, CA-based Black Girls CODE organization, which introduces young African-American, Latino, and Native American females to computer science, is opening a chapter in Detroit.