Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2017
From ACM TechNews
11,000 Girls Compete in International Mobile App Challenge
Girls ages 10-18 from around the world are competing in the Technovation Challenge, a global effort to learn and apply technology to try to solve problems in their communities.
From ACM News
First Object Teleported from Earth to Orbit
Last year, a Long March 2D rocket took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert carrying a satellite called Micius, named after an ancient Chinese philosopher who died in 391 B.C.
From ACM News
Hackers Find 'ideal Testing Ground' For Attacks: Developing Countries
The attack had the hallmarks of something researchers had dreaded for years: malicious software using artificial intelligence that could lead to a new digital arms race in which A.I.-driven defenses battled A.I.-driven offenses…
From ACM News
Nasa's Juno Spacecraft Completes Flyby Over Jupiter's Great Red Spot
NASA's Juno mission completed a close flyby of Jupiter and its Great Red Spot on July 10, during its sixth science orbit.
From ACM TechNews
Intelligent Machines Are Asked to Explain How Their Minds Work
Researchers are trying to teach intelligent machines to explain, in human terms, how their minds work.
From ACM TechNews
Fighting Tick-Borne Disease With Computer Science
Researchers are using new data on ticks in the southeastern U.S. to build mathematical models of how the grasses, wildlife, and ticks respond to different conditions.
From ACM TechNews
Study Finds 'smart' Transformers Could Make Reliable Smart Grid a Reality
North Carolina State University researchers are developing smart solid-state transformers that could be used to make a stable, reliable smart grid.
From ACM News
Adding Humanity to Smart Machines
A chat with former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov about his new book, machine intelligence, and human creativity.
From ACM News
Ai, People, and Society
Isaac Asimov's stories about the relationship between people and robots were only a few years old when the phrase "artificial intelligence" was used in a 1955 study proposal.
From ACM News
More Progress on Carbon Nanotube Processors: A 2.8ghz Ring Oscillator
Back in 2012, I had the pleasure of visiting the IBM Watson research center.
From ACM News
Sun's Gravity Could Power Interstellar Video Streaming
Need to send a message across interstellar space? Use the sun for a signal boost. A new proposal suggests that the sun's gravity could be used to amplify signals from an interstellar space probe, allowing video to be streamed…
From ACM TechNews
California Moves to Expand K-12 Computer Science Instruction
California's 2017-2018 state budget includes funding for initiatives to broaden K-12 student access to computer science coursework and instruction.
From ACM TechNews
New 3D Chip Combines Computing and Data Storage
A new computer chip integrates carbon nanotubes and resistive random-access memory cells.
From ACM TechNews
Artificial Musician Builds New Melodies Without Music Theory
A new deep-learning algorithm can generate melodies that imitate a given style of music.
From ACM TechNews
To End Distracted Driving, Mit Figures Out How People Really Drive
Researchers are producing accurate models of people's behavior in cars, in order to shape that behavior to preserve safety.
From ACM TechNews
Detecting Forged Parts of Photographs Faster and More Accurately
Researchers say they have developed a method for detecting "copy-move forgery" in photographs that is more successful and faster than conventional methods.
From ACM TechNews
International Group Aims to Protect the Core of the Public Internet
The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace has established a research group to protect the public Internet's core and critical infrastructure.
From ACM TechNews
Artificial Intelligence-Based System Warns When a Gun Appears in a Video
A new artificial intelligence program automatically detects in real time when a subject in a video draws a gun.
From ACM News
Two Giants of AI Team p to Head Off the Robot Apocalypse
There's nothing new about worrying that superintelligent machines may endanger humanity, but the idea has lately become hard to avoid.
From ACM News
Peering Inside an Ai's Brain Will Help S Trust Its Decisions
Oi, AI—What do you think you're looking at? Understanding why machine learning algorithms can be tricked into seeing things that aren't there is becoming more important with the advent of things like driverless cars.
From ACM News
As Elites Switch to Texting, Watchdogs Fear Loss of Transparency
In a bygone analog era, lawmakers and corporate chiefs traveled great distances to swap secrets, to the smoke-filled back rooms of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or the watering holes at the annual Allen & Company…
From ACM TechNews
Practical Parallelism
Researchers have developed a system called Fractal that enables up to 88-fold acceleration in a parallelism strategy known as speculative execution.
From ACM TechNews
Making Waves
Researchers have introduced a novel representation of waves that improves computational efficiency by at least an order of magnitude.
From ACM TechNews
Thousands of Rome's Historical Images Digitized With Help of Stanford Researchers
Researchers at Stanford University have contributed to the creation of a digital visual archive charting Rome's evolution over the centuries.
From ACM TechNews
Tracking Humans in 3D With Off-the-Shelf Webcams
VNect is a new system for capturing human movements digitally in three dimensions in real time using a single video camera.
From ACM TechNews
Eu Developing Robot Badgers For nderground Excavation
The European Union is underwriting the roBot for Autonomous unDerGround trenchless opERations, mapping, and navigation (BADGER) project.
From ACM News
Lhc Physicists nveil a Charming New Particle
Physicists using the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, have discovered a new kind of heavy particle, they announced this week at a conference in Venice.
From ACM News
How AI Detectives Are Cracking Open the Black Box of Deep Learning
Loosely modeled after the brain, deep neural networks are spurring innovation across science.
From ACM News
Robocalypse Now? Central Bankers Argue Whether Automation Will Kill Jobs
The rise of robots has long been a topic for sci-fi best sellers and video games and, as of this week, a threat officially taken seriously by central bankers.
From ACM News
Light-Powered Computers Brighten Ai's Future
The idea of building a computer that uses light rather than electricity goes back more than half a century.