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
Next-Generation Robot Needs Your Help
Carnegie Mellon University professor Manuela Veloso believes robots can be made fully autonomous by designing them to ask for help when necessary.
From ACM News
Random Image Experiment Reveals The Building Blocks of Human Imagination
Here's a curious experiment.
From ACM News
Google's Secretive Deepmind Start-up nveils A 'neural Turing Machine'
One of the great challenges of neuroscience is to understand the short-term working memory in the human brain.
From ACM News
Should Industrial Robots Be Able to Hurt Their Human Coworkers?
How much should a robot be allowed to hurt its coworkers?
From ACM News
Town Built For Driverless Cars
A mocked-up set of busy streets in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will provide the sternest test yet for self-driving cars.
From ACM TechNews
What It Will Take For Computers to Be Conscious
Christof Koch says it is possible people will some day create conscious machines, but they may not look as expected.
From ACM Opinion
What It Will Take For Computers to Be Conscious
Is a worm conscious? How about a bumblebee? Does a computer that can play chess "feel" anything?
From ACM News
Obama's Brain Project Backs Neurotechnology
The White House said that President Obama's BRAIN Initiative is generating interest from companies and philanthropies in a sign of what it calls a wider partnership...
From ACM News
Robots That Learn Through Repetition, Not Programming
Eugene Izhikevich thinks you shouldn't have to write code in order to teach robots new tricks.
From ACM News
The Challenges and Threats of Automated Lip Reading
Back in the 16th century, a Spanish Benedictine monk called Pietro Ponce pioneered the seemingly magical art of lip reading.
From ACM TechNews
The Revolutionary Technique That Quietly Changed Machine Vision Forever
Computer researchers say machines are now almost as adept at recognizing objects as humans, thanks to an algorithm created by University of Toronto scientists in...
From ACM News
A Chinese Internet Giant Starts to Dream
Punk bands from Blondie to the Ramones once played in Broadway Studios, an age-worn 95-year-old neoclassical building surrounded by strip clubs in San Francisco’s...
From ACM TechNews
A Room Where Executives Go to Get Help from IBM's Watson
IBM researchers are experimenting with a room where executives can go to discuss business problems with a version of the Watson supercomputing system.
From ACM TechNews
rban Jungle a Tough Challenge For Google's Autonomous Cars
Google's Chris Urmson, who heads the company's self-driving car program, said the project is entering its most difficult phase so far: building vehicles with the...
From ACM News
A Speech Synthesizer Direct to the Brain
Could a person who is paralyzed and unable to speak, like physicist Stephen Hawking, use a brain implant to carry on a conversation?
From ACM Opinion
Ray Kurzweil Says He's Breathing Intelligence Into Google Search
The big announcements at Google's I/O event in San Francisco Wednesday didn't mention Web search, the technology that got the company started and made it so successful...
From ACM News
The Thought Experiment
I was about 15 minutes late for my first phone call with Jan Scheuermann.
From ACM News
Neuroscience's New Toolbox
The hypothalamus is a small structure deep in the brain that, among other functions, coördinates sensory inputs—the appearance of a rival, for example—with instinctual...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions with the Man Leading Baidu's New AI Effort
Artificial intelligence is guided by the far-off goal of having software match humans at important tasks.
From ACM News