Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2018
From ACM News
Google Wants China. Will Chinese Users Want Google?
Google CEO Sundar Pichai was upbeat Monday when he told WIRED about internal tests of a censored search engine designed to win approval from Chinese officials. It will take more than a government nod for Google to succeed, however…
From ACM News
Double the Fun: Mars Scientists Push NASA to Send Rock-Harvesting Rover to Two Sites
NASA's next Mars rover—the first to gather rock samples meant to come back to Earth—should dream big and visit as many places on the red planet as possible, scientists concluded on 18 October.
From ACM TechNews
How Robots and Drones Will Change Retail Forever
The world's companies are in the initial stages of what might be called the "physical cloud," an e-commerce ecosystem that functions like the Internet.
From ACM TechNews
Using Smartphone Cameras to Track Alertness
A new tool tracks alertness by measuring pupil size, captured through a burst of photos taken whenever a user unlocks their smartphone.
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Unveil AI System That Predicts Problems During Surgery
A new artificial intelligence system uses patient data to predict whether patients are at risk of abnormally low blood oxygen (hypoxia) during surgery.
From ACM TechNews
3D Printers Have Fingerprints, a Discovery That Could Help Trace 3D-Printed Guns, Counterfeit Goods
University at Buffalo researchers have outlined the first accurate technique for tracing a three-dimensionally printed object to the machine that produced it.
From ACM TechNews
Cities Are Using New Cloud Technology to Fight Increasingly Expensive Catastrophic Flooding
New companies are turning to cloud technology to help cities better manage catastrophic flooding.
From ACM Careers
Shaken by Hype, Self-Driving Leaders Adopt New Strategy: Shutting Up
Three former executives at Google, Tesla and Uber who once raced to be the first to develop self-driving cars have adopted a new strategy: Slow down. And shut up.
From ACM News
MIT Finds a Smarter Way to Fight Spectre-style CPU Attacks
DAWG offers more security without a steep performance hit.
From ACM News
How Political Campaigns Weaponize Social Media Bots
In the summer of 2017, a group of young political activists in the United Kingdom figured out how to use the popular dating app Tinder to attract new supporters.
From ACM News
Nvidia Updates Its Moon Landing Conspiracy Debunk with Its New GPU
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon almost 50 years ago, but some conspiracy theorists don't believe that it actually happened.
From ACM News
AI on a MEMS Device Brings Neuromorphic Computing to the Edge
In order to achieve the edge computing that people talk about in a host of applications including 5G networks and the Internet of Things (IoT), you need to pack a lot of processing power into comparatively small devices.
From ACM News
2018 Packard Fellowships Include 2 Computer Scientists
Packard Fellowships are among the largest nongovernmental fellowships in the U.S., designed with minimal constraints on how the funding is used.
From ACM TechNews
Open Source Platform Launched to Help Bring GPU Acceleration to Data Analytics
Several collaborating organizations have launched a new open source platform for data science and machine learning.
From ACM TechNews
Hackers Hide Cryptocurrency Mining Malware in Adobe Flash Updates
Palo Alto Networks researchers have discovered a fake Flash updater that installs a malicious cryptocurrency mining bot.
From ACM News
Detecting Mental Illness by Watching You Type
Show us how you type, and artificial intelligence may be able to identify whether you suffer from a brain disorder.
From ACM News
These New Tricks Can Outsmart Deepfake Videos, for Now
For weeks, computer scientist Siwei Lyu had watched his team's deepfake videos with a gnawing sense of unease.
From ACM News
Hackers, Trolls and the Fight Over Your Vote in the 2018 Midterm Elections
The election interference that came to define the 2016 presidential race hasn't stopped.
From ACM TechNews
Neural Networks Don't Understand What Optical Illusions Are
Researchers have found that machine vision systems cannot process optical illusions in the same way humans can.
From ACM TechNews
High-Performance Flexible Transparent Force Touch Sensor for Wearable Devices
A new flexible transparent hierarchical nanocomposite film can be used to create a high-performance, transparent nanoforce touch sensor for wearable computing devices.
From ACM TechNews
Stringent Password Policies Help Prevent Fraud, IU Study Finds
Researchers have found that requiring longer, more complicated passwords lowers the likelihood of password reuse on multiple websites.
From ACM TechNews
MIT Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has announced a plan to establish a new artificial intelligence college.
From ACM TechNews
Felten Confirmed as Member of U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
The U.S. Senate has confirmed the appointment of computer science and public affairs professor Ed Felten to the bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
From ACM TechNews
Watching YouTube Videos May Someday Let Robots Copy Humans
Researchers have trained a neural network to reconstruct human acrobatics in YouTube video clips and manipulate a simulated humanoid to ape those movements.
From ACM News
All Systems Go for Second-Ever Mission to Enter Mercury's Orbit
A European rocket is ready to launch the most ambitious mission ever taken towards Mercury, Earth's once-neglected sibling in the Solar System.
From ACM TechNews
Google to Release DeepMind's StreetLearn for Teaching Machine Learning Agents to Navigate Cities
Google is preparing a November release of its DeepMind unit's StreetLearn dataset for training machine learning models to navigate cities without a map.
From ACM TechNews
Supercomputer Predicts Optical, Thermal Properties of Complex Hybrid Materials
Researchers used a supercomputer to predict the electrical and optical characteristics of semiconductors fashioned from layered hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites.
From ACM TechNews
An Evaluation of the Accuracy-Efficiency Tradeoffs of Neural Language Models
Researchers studying the accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs of neural language models have proposed a simple technique to recover some perplexity using negligible memory.
From ACM News
Learning to Use Data Better
Using artificial intelligence to process medical sensor data can have great impact on health-related costs and outcomes.
From ACM News
Update on Opportunity Rover after Martian Dust Storm
One month since increasing their commanding frequency, engineers have yet to hear from NASA's Opportunity rover.