Communications of the ACM
Blinding the Watchman
Internet constellations could thwart killer asteroid discovery algorithms.
From ACM NewsAn 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
Robot vs. Robot
Beautiful mathematical patterns are hidden in the chaos of Jackson Pollock’s famous drip paintings.
From ACM Opinion
Finding Out What the Past Smelled Like
It was the smell that hit me first, a heady mixture of roasting meat, woodsmoke, and farmyard manure.
From ACM Careers
Watching the Universe in Real Time
Even though the sky looks about the same every night to those of us here on Earth, cataclysmic things happen in outer space constantly.
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 Careers
The Anti-Plagiarism Machine
Every day, researchers add hundreds of new papers to ArXiv, the massive public database of scientific writing and research.
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 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 TechNews
How Darpa's Augmented Reality Software Works
Four experts at Applied Research Associates discuss the augmented reality system they created for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
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 TechNews