Communications of the ACM
Multimodal AI Connects the Digital Dots
By knitting together multiple components and data streams, multimodal AI offers the promise of smarter, more human-like systems… 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.
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Autonomous Flying Robots Flock Like Birds
At Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale’s Laboratory of Intelligence Systems in Lausanne, Sabine Hauert and Dario Floreano have found a way to make small, fixed-wing...
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Astronomers Plead For Space Telescope's Life
NASA officials and leading astronomers say the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, should still fly despite mounting criticism...
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10 Award-Winning Scientific Simulation Videos
Thanks to increasingly cheap, fast, efficient computing power, scientific simulations are now a crucial tool for researchers who want to ask once impractical...
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Self-Assembling Minirobots Swim and Manipulate Objects
Tiny, self-assembling robots can swim and clamp onto particles and then release them when subjected to the right magnetic fields.
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Stanford
What better way to combine your nerdy loves of computer programming and Star Wars than with a robot that can actually battle with a light saber?
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Why Brains Get Creeped Out By Androids
We've all found ourselves in the uncanny valley before. It's that uneasy feeling you get when viewing a realistic humanoid or CGI person that’s so close to looking...
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DARPA Searches For Life
There’s a hidden clock that underlies every process of every living thing—from when our cells start dividing to how quickly we age. Researchers at Darpa, the...
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DARPA Crowdsources Interstellar Travel
Last August, a bunch of Star Wars fans pestered NASA about a timetable for building a hyperdrive engine. Maybe someone was listening. In May, the Defense Advanced...
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How to Make a Clock Run For 10,000 Years
High on a rocky ridge in the desert, nestled among 5,000-year-old bristlecone pines, is the topmost part of a clock that has been ticking for thousands of years...
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Nanomagnetic Computers Are the ltimate in Efficiency
Computers that run on chips made from tiny magnets may be as energy-efficient as physics permits.
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Next Mars Rover Faces Race Against Time, Funding
NASA's next Mars rover faces looming technical, financial, and scheduling challenges before its planned launch in November, according to an internal audit released...
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Quantum Calculations Can Make Atomic Clocks of the Future Far More Accurate
New calculations of how atoms swell when they’re warmed up can help make the next generation of atomic clocks 10 times more precise.
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Army Wants Its Computers Acting Like Human Brains
The brain is our body’s natural multi-system parallel processing organ. Its job, on a continuous basis, is to compute a huge onslaught of incoming data and spit...
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Hoops 2.0: Inside the Nba
Outside Oracle Arena, it’s a balmy 65-degree spring day. But up in the building’s rafters, 80-odd feet above the hardwood floor, the air is crisp and the view...
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Military
The Pentagon has spent decades and gazillions of dollars trying to build the perfect translation device. Now, its far-out research arm is looking at a new direction...
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Ancient Greek Computer Had Surprising Sun Tracker
The world's oldest astronomical calculator is famous for having intricate gear systems centuries ahead of their time. But new work shows the Antikythera mechanism...
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Dissecting the Physics of Basketball Bank Shots
Here’s the scenario: You’re a college basketball player and your team is down by one. You’ve got a trip to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on the line, but...
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Is the Navy Trying to Start the Robot Apocalypse?
Whenever the military rolls out a new robot program, folks like to joke about SkyNet or the Rise of the Machines. But this time, the military really is starting...
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Thinking Your Way Through Traffic in a Brain-Control Car
John Prine wasn’t far off when he sang in "Living In the Future" that "we're all driving rocket ships and talking with our minds." We're still waiting for our...
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