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
Practicing Medicine at the Nanoscale
Modern medicine is largely based on treating patients with "small-molecule" drugs, which include pain relievers like aspirin and antibiotics such as penicillin.
From ACM News
Teaching Robots Lateral Thinking
Many commercial robotic arms perform what roboticists call "pick and place" tasks: The arm picks up an object in one location and places it in another.
From ACM News
Storing Data in Individual Molecules
Moore's law—the well-known doubling of computer chips' computational power every 18 months or so—has been paced by a similarly steady increase in the storage capacity...
From ACM News
The Robotic Equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife
The device doesn't look like much: a caterpillar-sized assembly of metal rings and strips resembling something you might find buried in a home-workshop drawer.
From ACM News
Proving Quantum Computers Feasible
Quantum computers are devices—still largely theoretical—that could perform certain types of computations much faster than classical computers; one way they might...
From ACM News
Predicting What Topics Will Trend on Twitter
Twitter's home page features a regularly updated list of topics that are "trending," meaning that tweets about them have suddenly exploded in volume.
From ACM Opinion
3 Questions: A Web For Everyone
During the opening ceremonies of this summer’s Olympic games in London, a musical performance culminated with a stage-set house rising into the rafters to reveal...
From ACM News
Automatic Building Mapping Could Help Emergency Responders
MIT researchers have built a wearable sensor system that automatically creates a digital map of the environment through which the wearer is moving.
From ACM News
Making Web Applications More Efficient
Most major Websites these days maintain huge databases: Shopping sites have databases of inventory and customer ratings, travel sites have databases of seat availability...
From ACM News
New Router Enhances the Precision of Woodworking
Anyone who has tried to build a piece of furniture from scratch knows the frustration of painstakingly cutting pieces of wood, only to discover that they won't...
From ACM TechNews
Computer Science Tackles 30-Year-Old Economics Problem
MIT researchers have developed an algorithm for finding an almost perfect approximation of the optimal design of a multi-item auction.
From ACM News
Researchers Amplify Variations in Video, Making the Invisible Visible
At this summer's Siggraph—the premier computer-graphics conference—researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will present new...
From ACM TechNews
System Improves Automated Monitoring of Security Cameras
MIT researchers have developed a system that can analyze several surveillance cameras more accurately and in less time than it would take a human operator.
From ACM TechNews
The Elusive Capacity of Networks
Researchers at MIT, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Technology in Munich have shown that in a wired network, network coding and error...
From ACM TechNews
Engineering a Safer World
MIT professor Nancy Leveson recently hosted a workshop to educate more than 250 safety engineering professionals from around the world about System-Theoretic Accident...
From ACM News
The Robot Revolution Is Just Beginning
When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s initially on automobile assembly lines—computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were...
From ACM News
Simulating Tomorrow's Chips
Most computer chips today have anywhere from four to 10 separate cores, or processing units, which can work in parallel, increasing the chips' efficiency. But the...
From ACM TechNews
Chips as Mini Internets
MIT researchers have established theoretical limits on the efficiency of packet-switched on-chip communication networks, and have presented measurements from a...
From ACM News
Self-Sculpting Sand
Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool.
From ACM News