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
Putting the 'art' in Artificial Intelligence
Like many kids, Antonio Torralba began playing around with computers when he was 13 years old. Unlike many of his friends, though, he was not playing video games...
From ACM News
Robots in Reality
Consider the following scenario: A scout surveys a high-rise building that's been crippled by an earthquake, trapping workers inside. After looking for a point...
From ACM News
Smarter Robot Arms
A combination of two algorithms developed at MIT allows autonomous robots to execute tasks much more efficiently—and move more predictably.
From ACM News
Streamlined Rules For Robots
With the explosion of the Internet and the commoditization of autonomous robots (such as the Roomba) and small sensors (such as the ones in most cell phones),...
From ACM TechNews
Finding an Edge
MIT researchers Jason Chang and John Fisher have developed an algorithm that can determine object boundaries in digital images with at least 50,000 times greater...
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
Joichi Ito Named Director of MIT Media Lab
MIT announced that Joichi (“Joi” — pronounced “Joey”) Ito has been selected as the next director of the MIT Media Lab.
From ACM News
Programming Crowds
With the Web, people worldwide can work on distributed tasks. But getting reliable results requires algorithms that specify workflow between people, not transistors...
From ACM News
Shape-Shifting Robots
Self-folding sheets of a plastic-like material point the way to robots that can assume any conceivable 3D structure.
From ACM News
Computer Automatically Deciphers Ancient Language
A new system that took a couple hours to decipher much of the ancient language Ugaritic could help improve online translation software.
From ACM TechNews
Seeing the Forest For the Trees
New object recognition systems that deconstruct images into ever smaller elements, using methods developed at MIT and UCLA, should be much more efficient than previous...
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
Robotic Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Regain Function
Stroke patients who received robot-assisted therapy were able to regain some ability to use their arms, even if the stroke had occurred years earlier, according...
From ACM TechNews
A Grand Unified Theory of AI
MIT research scientist Noah Goodman has developed Church, a programming language that combines a rules-based artificial intelligence system with probabilistic inference...
From ACM TechNews
Context Is Ev . . . Well, Something, Anyway
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a way to improve object recognition systems by using information about their context.
From ACM TechNews
What Computer Science Can Teach Economics
Professor Constantinos Daskalakis in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is applying the theory...
From ACM TechNews