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
The Attention Machine
Human attention isn't stable, ever, and it costs us: lives lost when drivers space out, billions of dollars wasted on inefficient work, and mental disorders that...
From ACM Opinion
The Voice-Activated Video Game
When he was in grad school, the roboticist Daniel Wilson installed 150 binary sensors in his house.
From ACM Careers
A Visit to the Corporate-Industrial Robotics Competition For Teenagers
Sometimes I think of school as an overlapping set of calendars.
From ACM News
How to Fool a Computer With Optical Illusions
Computers, like people, understand what they see in the world based on what they've seen before.
From ACM News
How Disney Is Perfecting Animated Eyeballs
Creating lifelike animated characters is hard.
From ACM News
Nasa Rover Finds Active and Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars
NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a...
From ACM News
Listening In: The Navy Is Tracking Ocean Sounds Collected By Scientists
In a retired shore station for transpacific communications cables on the western coast of Vancouver Island sits a military computer in a padlocked cage.
From ACM Careers
A Rare Look Inside the Air Force's Drone Training Classroom
Learning how to drop bombs and fire Hellfire missiles is more like sitting in a regular college classroom than you might expect.
From ACM News
Skip the Humans: Drug Discovery By Simulating Cells
The future of medicine, we're often told, will be personalized.
From ACM Opinion
How Darpa's Augmented Reality Software Works
Six years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) decided that they had a new dream. The agency wanted a system that would overlay digital tactical...
From ACM News
The First Look at How Google's Self-Driving Car Handles City Streets
The first rule of riding in Google's self-driving car, says Dmitri Dolgov, is not to compliment Google's self-driving car.
From ACM Opinion
How to Win $1 Billion on Ncaa Basketball: A Mathematician's Tips
Last Thursday, the underground classroom at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York was filled to capacity for a college professor's PowerPoint-aided lecture...
From ACM News
Intense Smog Is Making Beijing's Massive Surveillance Network Practically Useless
Beijing's surveillance network, one of the most extensive and invasive in the world, has been compromised by an unexpected foe: smog.
From ACM News
Of Course Gas Stations Will se Facial Recognition Tech to Serve 'Relevant' Ads
Say you're at a gas station. Say you're buying some supplies—bottled water, coffee, maybe some M&Ms—before you head back to your car.
From ACM Opinion
The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think
"It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence."
From ACM News
What Is a Jpeg? The Invisible Object You See Every Day
In 2012, the photograph of Barack and Michelle Obama embracing after his re-election was "liked" over 4 million times.
From ACM News
Productivity Tools For Cybercrime
Stealing 10 million dollars a few hundred dollars at a time used to be too labor-intensive to be a great business.
From ACM Opinion