Communications of the ACM
An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.
From ACM News
Vision System For Household Robots
For household robots ever to be practical, they'll need to be able to recognize the objects they're supposed to manipulate.
From ACM TechNews
Spin Designers
The Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Architectures wants to use the spin of electrons on nanomagnets to encode zeros and ones in computers...
From ACM TechNews
In One Aspect of Vision, Computers Catch p to Primate Brain
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have found the most recent version of deep neural networks match the primate brain.
From ACM TechNews
Superconducting Circuits, Simplified
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a nanocryotron , a computing circuit based on the cryotron.
From ACM TechNews
Bound for Robotic Glory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an algorithm for bounding, and successfully implemented it in a robotic cheetah.
From ACM News
Where to Grab Space Debris
Objects in space tend to spin—and spin in a way that's totally different from the way they spin on earth.
From ACM News
Origami Robot Folds Itself p, Crawls Away
For years, a team of researchers at MIT and Harvard University has been working on origami robots—reconfigurable robots that would be able to fold themselves into...
From ACM News
Researchers nveil Experimental 36-Core Chip
The more cores—or processing units—a computer chip has, the bigger the problem of communication between cores becomes.
From ACM TechNews
Who's Using Your Data?
The HTTP with Accountability protocol is designed to track the transmission of private data and enable the data owner to see how it is used online.
From ACM News
Think Fast, Robot
One of the reasons we don't yet have self-driving cars and mini-helicopters delivering online purchases is that autonomous vehicles tend not to perform well under...
From ACM TechNews
Computer System Automatically Solves Word Problems
A new computer system can automatically solve the type of word problems common in introductory algebra classes.
From ACM News
New 'switch' Could Power Quantum Computing
Using a laser to place individual rubidium atoms near the surface of a lattice of light, scientists at MIT and Harvard University have developed a new method for...
From ACM Opinion
The Complexonaut
When he was in elementary school, Scott Aaronson, like many mathematically precocious kids of his generation, dreamed of making his own video games.
From ACM TechNews
Parallel Programming May Not Be So Daunting
Researchers plan to demonstrate an analytics technique suggesting that, in a wide range of real-word scenarios, lock-free algorithms can provide wait-free performance...
From ACM News
Smarter Caching
Computer chips keep getting faster because transistors keep getting smaller.
From ACM News
Herding Robots
Writing a program to control a single autonomous robot navigating an uncertain environment with an erratic communication link is hard enough; write one for multiple...
From ACM Careers
Teaching Computers to See–by Learning to See Like Computers
By translating images into the language spoken by object-recognition systems, then translating them back, researchers hope to explain the recognition systems'...
From ACM TechNews
Artificial-Intelligence Research Revives Its Old Ambitions
Artificial intelligence research has advanced significantly, but much work remains before computers can truly replicate or surpass human intelligence.
From ACM News
Artificial-Intelligence Research Revives Its Old Ambitions
The birth of artificial-intelligence research as an autonomous discipline is generally thought to have been the monthlong Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial...
From ACM TechNews