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 TechNews
Robots to Get Their Own Operating System
Robots are limited by the fact that they are often designed and built in isolation for specific functions, and roboticists have started to consider what aspects...
From ACM TechNews
Talking Paperclip Inspires Less Irksome Virtual Assistant
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent an estimated $150 million developing an artificially intelligent (AI) virtual assistant. DARPA's...
From ACM TechNews
Smart Machines: What's The Worst That Could Happen?
A panel of 25 artificial intelligence (AI) scientists, roboticists, and ethical and legal scholars have spent the past year discussing the risks of developing machines...
From ACM TechNews
Cyborg Crickets Could Chirp at the Smell of Survivors
Research supported by the U.S. Pentagon is attempting to turn insects into search-and-rescue systems capable of locating trapped victims in earthquake rubble and...
From ACM TechNews
Computer Learns Sign Language By Watching Tv
Software developed by researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Leeds has autonomously determined the basics of sign language by watching TV...
From ACM TechNews
Memristor Minds: The Future of Artificial Intelligence
The lack of a rigorous mathematical foundation for electronics impelled engineer Leon Chua to develop one, which led to the formulation of the memristor — a theoretical...
From ACM News
'Smart' House Texts You If There's a Problem
It may look low-tech, but a smart doll's house could one day change the way we live, its inventors claim. Part of a project called InterHome, it is designed to...
From ACM TechNews
Emotional Robots: Will We Love Them or Hate Them?
Scientists have theorized that many technologies would function better if they were aware of their users' emotional states, and progress in this field includes...
From ACM TechNews
'governor' Would Teach Military Robots the Rules of War
Georgia Institute of Technology robotics engineer Ron Arkin is researching how military robots could be programmed to act ethically and obey the rules of engagement...
From ACM TechNews
Could the Net Become Self-Aware?
The Internet is similar to the human brain in that it has a complex network of nodes for holding, processing, recalling, and transmitting information. The Web...
From ACM TechNews
Harnessing Spammers to Solve AI Problems
Some Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs) security systems are already being solved by spammers, but CAPTCHA co...
From ACM News
Robotic Computer Controlled Only by Gestures
Frederic Kaplan at the Swiss Federal Institutes in Lausanne has designed and built the QB1 computer, a PC-based robot that plays music and games and is operated...
From ACM TechNews