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
Layer pon Layer
Graphene, a form of pure carbon arranged in a lattice just one atom thick, has interested countless researchers with its unique strength and its electrical and...
From ACM News
Protecting Medical Implants from Attack
Millions of Americans have implantable medical devices, from pacemakers and defibrillators to brain stimulators and drug pumps; worldwide, 300,000 more people...
From ACM News
Long Live the Qubit!
A quantum computer is a device—still largely theoretical—that could perform some types of calculations much more rapidly than classical computers. While a bit...
From ACM News
Honing Household Helpers
Imagine a robot able to retrieve a pile of laundry from the back of a cluttered closet, deliver it to a washing machine, start the cycle and then zip off to the...
From ACM News
Toward Faster Transistors
In the 1980s and '90s, competition in the computer industry was all about "clock speed"—how many megahertz, and ultimately gigahertz, a chip could boast. But...
From ACM TechNews
Better Glasses-Free 3-D
MIT researchers have developed HR3D, a new method for glasses-free 3D displays. The researchers say their method could double the battery life of devices such...
From ACM News
Kaashoek Wins Acm's Prize For Young Researchers
Frans Kaashoek, a professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and associate director of the Computer Science and Artificial...
From ACM News
Retooling Algorithms
Charles Leiserson and his team are experts at designing parallel algorithms—including one for a chess-playing program that outperformed IBM’s Deep Blue.
From ACM News
The Next Operating System
Operating systems for multicore chips will need more information about their own performance—and more resources for addressing whatever problems arise.
From ACM News
3D Tv? How About Holographic Tv?
Using a single Xbox Kinect and standard graphics chips, MIT researchers demonstrate the highest frame rate yet for streaming holographic video.
From ACM News
Breaking Bottlenecks
A new algorithm enables much faster dissemination of information through self-organizing networks with a few scattered choke points.
From ACM News
The Surprising sefulness of Sloppy Arithmetic
A computer chip that performs imprecise calculations could process some types of data thousands of times more efficiently than existing chips.
From ACM News
Multicore May Not Be So Scary
Research suggests that the free operating system Linux will keep up with the addition of more "cores," or processing units, to computer chips.
From ACM TechNews
Mastering Multicore
MIT researchers have developed software that makes computer simulations of physical systems run more efficiently on multicore chips.
From ACM News
Computing, Sudoku-Style
Though still in its infancy, the work of Alexey Radul as a postdoc at MIT could someday have consequences for artificial-intelligence research, parallel computing...
From ACM News
Crts Going Down the Tubes? Hardly
Many people may assume that conventional television sets and computer monitors — the kind that use CRTs rather than flat panel screens — have virtually disappeared...
From ACM TechNews
Computing With a Wave of the Hand
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab researchers have devised a way to turn liquid crystal displays (LCDs) into lens-less cameras through the use of...
From ACM News
Parallel Course
In 1995, a good computer chip had a clock speed of about 100 megahertz. Seven years later, in 2002, a good computer chip had a clock speed of about three gigahertz...
From ACM News
Breaking the Law, at the Nanoscale
A well-established physical law formulated by Max Planck describes the transfer of heat between two objects, but some physicists have long predicted that the law...
From ACM TechNews