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From ACM NewsAn edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.
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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Self-Sculpting Sand
Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool.
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Guiding Robot Planes with Hand Gestures
Aircraft-carrier crew use a set of standard hand gestures to guide planes on the carrier deck. But as robot planes are increasingly used for routine air missions...
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Sometimes the Quickest Path Is Not a Sraight Line
Sometimes the fastest pathway from point A to point B is not a straight line: for example, if you're underwater and contending with strong and shifting currents...
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Hail to the Geeks
Basketball dominates the American sports landscape in March. So perhaps it’s fitting that the sixth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, held last week...
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Tiny 3D Chips
Microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, are small devices with huge potential. Typically made of components less than 100 microns in size—the diameter of a human...
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Microchips' Optical Future
To keep energy consumption under control, future chips may need to move data using light instead of electricity—and the technical expertise to build them may reside...
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The Mathematics of Taste
The design of aromas—the flavors of packaged food and drink and the scents of cleaning products, toiletries and other household items—is a multibillion-dollar business...
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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...
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Important Step Toward Computing with Light
There has been enormous progress in recent years toward the development of photonic chips—devices that use light beams instead of electrons to carry out their...
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A New Planning Tool Helps Direct Traffic on Aircraft Carriers
On the deck of an aircraft carrier, where up to 60 aircraft are crammed into 4.5 acres (1.8 hectares), real estate is at a premium. While aircraft directors wave...
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Long Live the Qubit!
A quantum computer is a device—still largely theoretical—that could perform some types of calculations much more rapidly than classical computers. While a bit...
From ACM News