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 TechNews
CSAIL Robot Disinfects Greater Boston Food Bank
A group of researchers designed a robotic system that disinfects surfaces and neutralizes aerosolized forms of Covid-19.
From ACM TechNews
How Many Jobs do Robots Really Replace?
Two economics professors have determined that the replacement of human workers by robots is a tangible trend, although they say claims of total automation are overstated...
From ACM TechNews
Showing Robots How to Do Your Chores
A new system allows robots to learn complicated tasks that would normally confuse them with too many complicated rules.
From ACM TechNews
How Well Can Computers Connect Symptoms to Diseases?
A new study found that health knowledge graphs perform poorly for diseases with high percentages of very old or young patients, or high percentages of male or female...
From ACM TechNews
AI Could Help Data Centers Run Far More Efficiently
A new system automatically learns how to optimally allocate data processing workloads across thousands of servers as a means of boosting data center efficiency....
From ACM TechNews
This Robot Helps You Lift Objects--By Looking at Your Biceps
A new robotic system uses machines to help people lift objects by monitoring their muscle movements, producing a smoother robot-human collaboration.
From ACM TechNews
Engineers Program Marine Robots to Take Calculated Risks
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an algorithm that lets autonomous underwater vehicles weigh the risks and rewards of exploring...
From ACM TechNews
Fleets of Drones Could Aid Searches for Lost Hikers
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an autonomous system to direct a fleet of drones.
From ACM TechNews
Software Finds the Best Way to Stick a Mars Landing
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed software that could inform the selection of landing sites for scientific expeditions to Mars.
From ACM TechNews
Autonomous Boats Could Service Some Cities, Reducing Road Traffic
Researchers have highly maneuverable autonomous boats that, in waterway-rich cities, could be used to transport people or deliver goods.
From ACM TechNews
Machine-Learning System Processes Sounds Like Humans Do
Researchers have used a deep neural network to build the first model that can replicate human performance on auditory tasks such as identifying a musical genre....
From ACM TechNews
Programmable Droplets
New hardware applies electric fields to manipulate droplets of chemical or biological solutions around a surface, mixing them to test thousands of reactions in...
From ACM TechNews
Designing the Microstructure of Printed Objects
Researchers have developed a design system to catalog the physical characteristics of a huge number of tiny cube clusters that can function as building blocks for...
From ACM TechNews
Why Do Some Neighborhoods Improve?
Researchers have used a computer vision system to quantify the physical improvement or deterioration of neighborhoods in five U.S. cities.
From ACM TechNews
Teaching Robots to Teach Other Robots
C-LEARN is a system designed to let users teach robots skills that they can pass along to other robots.
From ACM TechNews
Faster Page Loads
Flowtune is a new system for allocating bandwidth in datacenter networks.
From ACM TechNews
Tackling Society's Big Problems With Systems Theory
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society doctoral program is underway.
From ACM TechNews
Automating Big-Data Analysis
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an approach to automating most of the process of big data analysis.
From ACM TechNews
An Autonomous Fleet For Amsterdam
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has partnered with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions to test a fleet of autonomous boats.
From ACM TechNews
Faster Parallel Computing
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a new programming language.12