Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2023
From ACM TechNews
Rats Use Imagination to Navigate in VR
Researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute tested whether rats, like humans, can use their thoughts to navigate a virtual environment.
From ACM News
Magnetic Sensors Pinpoint GPU Cryptojacking Attacks
Identifying incursions with magnetic sensors.
From ACM News
A Man with Parkinson's Regained the Ability to Walk, Thanks to a Spinal Implant
The implant delivers bursts of electrical signals, stimulating his spinal cord to make his leg muscles move.
From ACM News
Thousands in Line to Get Brain Chip Implant by Elon Musk's Neuralink
The implant, designed to replace the removed skull piece, will read and analyse the person's brain activity and wirelessly relay this information to a nearby laptop or tablet.
From ACM News
Personalized A.I. Agents Are Here. Is the World Ready for Them?
The age of autonomous A.I. assistants could have huge implications.
From ACM TechNews
Engineers Are on a Failure-Finding Mission
An algorithm developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers aims to identify potential failures in simulated autonomous systems prior to their real-world deployment.
From ACM TechNews
Silicon Valley's Big, Bold Sci-Fi Bet on the Device That Comes After the Smartphone
San Francisco-based startup Humane is pinning its hopes on what's being billed as the first artificially intelligent device.
From ACM TechNews
Digital Twins May Enable Personalized Health Treatment
Combining data about the human body with patients’ personal data to create digital twins of their organs could lead to personalized treatments and help avoid medical complications.
From ACM TechNews
Finding Answers (About the Best Way to Find Answers)
Computer scientists at the University of Southern California considered which knowledge graph representations are best for different applications.
From ACM TechNews
Smartphone Application Increases Safety in Liver Surgery
An international team of researchers developed a smartphone application that provides a personalized risk score for patients undergoing liver surgery.
From ACM TechNews
Robot Mimics a 450-Million-Year-Old Extinct Marine Organism
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new approach to robotics that uses insights from extinct organisms to create soft robots.
From ACM TechNews
Algorithm Aids in Early Detection of Age-Related Eye Disease
A new deep learning algorithm can predict whether an individual's age-related macular degeneration will progress to geographic atrophy, which is more severe, within a year.
From ACM TechNews
AI Makes Mobile Networks More Efficient
A new artificial intelligence model could boost U.K. telecommunications providers' bandwidth efficiency and augment mobile networks' environmental sustainability.
From ACM TechNews
Study Helps Explain How Selfies Are Used to Communicate
Researchers at Germany's Bamberg Graduate School of Affective and Cognitive Sciences enlisted 132 people to examine 1,001 selfies and characterize their first impressions.
From ACM TechNews
Using Language to Give Robots a Better Grasp of Open-Ended World
The Feature Fields for Robotic Manipulation method helps robots identify nearby objects by forming three-dimensional scenes from two-dimensional images and vision foundation models.
From ACM News
Earbuds to Monitor Brain, Body
These earbuds listen to you, to determine if your brain and/or body are working at peak efficiency.
From ACM News
Datacenter Waste Energy to Heat Homes in 'U.K.-First' Scheme
The London scheme is the U.K.'s first large-scale project to use datacenter waste heat to power homes.
From ACM TechNews
5G-Powered Robots Clean Singapore's Rivers
Singapore-based Weston Robot is supplying uncrewed surface vessels to clean Singapore's rivers by collecting garbage and monitoring water quality.
From ACM TechNews
Kids with Disabilities Are Gamers, Too
Students developed prototype assistive technologies that could enable children with cerebral palsy to play video games.
From ACM TechNews
Doctors Wrestle with AI in Patient Care
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approval of artificial intelligence tools has raised doubts among doctors about their ability to improve patient care.
From ACM News
OpenAI Announces Bigger, Badder, and Weirder Chatbots
GPTs promises to let users create their own fully-customizable chatbots with zero coding experience required.
From ACM News
Bengio Receives Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering
The award is given annually to an individual whose body of work, conducted in Canada in the natural sciences or engineering, has demonstrated persistent excellence and influence.
From ACM News
AIrtist: Co-creativity and Computer-Human Collaboration in the Arts
Far from being threatened by artificial intelligence, many creative practitioners are already embracing it—with some novel and unexpected results.
From ACM TechNews
Vision via Sound for the Blind
Scientists have created "acoustic touch" technology that uses sound to help blind people "see."
From ACM TechNews
Smart Scalpel Helps Doctors Hone Surgical Skills
A smart scalpel developed by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Edinburgh measures the amount of force applied during surgical procedures and could facilitate surgical training.
From ACM TechNews
UMD-Led Research Powers Montgomery County's Prosecution Data Dashboard
University of Maryland researchers helped the Montgomery County State's Attorney's Office roll out the state's first Prosecution Data Dashboard to clarify its handling of cases.
From ACM News
Chatbots May 'Hallucinate' More Often Than Many Realize
When summarizing facts, ChatGPT technology makes things up about 3% of the time, according to research from a new start-up. A Google system's rate was 27%.
From ACM TechNews
As a Teen, She Loved Video Games. Now She's Using A.I. to Try to Quash Malaria
In Senegal, Rokhaya Diagne is using artificial intelligence to help the world eradicate malaria by 2030.
From ACM TechNews
Checking for Counterfeit Medication Using a Smartphone
The SmartID barcode system developed by researchers at a group of Germany's Fraunhofer research institutes allows users to verify a medical product is genuine using a smartphone.
From ACM TechNews
As Baby Boomers Retire, German Businesses Turn to Robots
As Germany's baby boomers retire, exacerbating the country's labor shortage, many companies are filling job openings with robots.