Communications of the ACM
Building a Practical Quantum Computer
Quantum computation has a long road ahead.
From Communications of the ACMAn 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
A Phone That Knows Where You're Going
Researchers have developed an algorithm that follows a person's mobility patterns and also analyzes the patterns of people in the user's social network. In a study...
From ACM News
Smart Headlights See through Rain and Snow
A prototype headlight system can detect raindrops or snow streaks and "dis-illuminate" them, thereby increasing visibility on the road ahead.
From ACM News
PageRank Algorithm Reveals Soccer Teams' Strategies
Many readers will have watched the final of the Euro 2012 soccer championships last Sunday in which Spain demolished a tired Italian team by 4 goals to nil. The...
From ACM News
Biology's Master Programmers
George Church is an imposing figure—over six feet tall, with a large, rectangular face bordered by a brown and silver nest of beard and topped by a thick mop of...
From ACM News
A Robot Takes Stock
The short figure creeping around the Carnegie Mellon University campus store in a hooded sweatshirt recently isn't some shoplifter, but a robot taking inventory...
From ACM Opinion
You Will Want Google Goggles
At first glance, Thad Starner does not look out of place at Google. A pioneering researcher in the field of wearable computing, Starner is a big, charming man with...
From ACM News
Statistics nmask Phony Online Reviews
Searching for hotels in cities they've never visited, people often turn to customer-written reviews on websites such as TripAdvisor. But how do they know those...
From ACM TechNews
Three Questions For Patti Maes
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Patti Maes recently spoke with Technology Review to discuss the future of mobile technology.
From ACM News
Intel Reveals Neuromorphic Chip Design
The brain is the most extraordinary of computing machines. It carries out tasks as a matter of routine that would fry the circuits of the most powerful supercomputers...
From ACM News
What Facebook Knows
If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world...
From ACM News
The Antivirus Era Is Over
Two weeks ago today, computer security labs in Iran, Russia, and Hungary announced the discovery of Flame, "the most complex malware ever found," according to Hungary's...
From ACM News
5 Transformative Uses For Disney's Touch-Sensitive Technology
Disney has a new technology, called Touche, that can turn any object, including the human body, into a touch-sensitive surface that recognizes not only when contact...
From ACM News
A Computer Interface that Takes a Load Off Your Mind
Conversations between people include a lot more than just words. All sorts of visual and aural cues indicate each party's state of mind and make for a productive...
From ACM News
Gesture Control System Uses Sound Alone
When you learned about the Doppler Effect in high school physics class—the wave frequency shift that occurs when the source of the wave is moving, easily illustrated...
From ACM News
The New Science of Online Persuasion
The Web has fundamentally changed the business of advertising in just a few years. So it stands to reason that the process of creating ads is bound to change, too...
From ACM News
Verizon Envisions 4g Wireless in Just About Anything
Tucked away in a new office block in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a kind of wireless Tomorrowland.
From ACM News
How Seagate's Terabit-Per-Square-Inch Hard Drive Works
Magnetic hard disks will soon be able to store one terabit (a trillion bits) per square inch.
From ACM News
How the Cost of Computation Restricts the Processes of Life
Back in the 1960s, the IBM physicist Rolf Landauer showed that computation comes with a cost: every (irreversible) calculation, he said, always burns through a...
From ACM News