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
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 Careers
Hacking a niverse's Worth of Data
On a Friday night in New York City you can find just about anything. And this past Friday about 130 hackers gathered in the Hayden Planetarium to participate in...
From ACM News
The Quiet Rise of the Satellite Spy Agency
As far as intelligence agencies go, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has remained relatively low profile—attracting neither the intrigue of, say, the...
From ACM Careers
How Two Men nlocked Modern Encryption
In September of 1974, when he was 30 years old, Whitfield Diffie was obsessed with cryptography.
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
Vexed in the City: Starved For Tech Talent and Yet Nobody to Hire?
Darin Wedel made headlines in 2012 when his wife, Jennifer, asked President Barack Obama during a Google+ Hangout why her husband was still out of work while H-1B...
From ACM Opinion
How to Invent a Person Online
On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio.
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 News
The Military Is Building Brain Chips to Treat Ptsd
How well can you predict your next mood swing?
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 Opinion
Should .s. Hackers Fix Cybersecurity Holes or Exploit Them?
There's a debate going on about whether the U.S. government—specifically, the NSA and United States Cyber Command—should stockpile Internet vulnerabilities or disclose...
From ACM Opinion
The Not-So-Distant Future When We Can All pgrade Our Brains
In a decade, cognitive enhancement may have gone mainstream.
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
Remembering Mit, When There Were Just 50 Women in a Class of 1,000
When Radia Perlman attended MIT in the late '60s and '70s, she was one of just a few dozen women (about 50) out of a class of 1,000.
From ACM News