Communications of the ACM
Spies in Our Pockets
Electronic eavesdropping is becoming ever more nefarious in the age of smartphones and digital devices.
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 TechNews
Cryptographers and Geneticists Unite to Analyze Genomes They Can't See
Stanford University cryptographer Dan Boneh and geneticist Gill Bejerano have developed a secure multiparty computation algorithm to discover disease-linked genetic...
From ACM News
Intelligence and the DNA Revolution
More than 60 years ago, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double-helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid—better known as DNA. Today, for the cost...
From ACM News
The Imperfect Crime: How the WannaCry Hackers Could Get Nabbed
When hackers unleashed the WannaCry "ransomware" in mid-May, not only did they wreak havoc on European hospitals, telecoms and railways, they also made off with...
From ACM News
Demystifying the Black Box That Is AI
When Jason Matheny joined the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) as a program manager in 2009, he made a habit of chatting to the organization's...
From ACM News
Ever-Elusive Neutrinos Spotted Bouncing Off Nuclei for the First Time
Neutrinos are famously antisocial. Of all the characters in the particle physics cast, they are the most reluctant to interact with other particles.
From ACM News
Robots, Start Your Engines!
There's nothing like a throw-down to push new technologies out to the masses.
From ACM News
LHC Physicists Unveil a Charming New Particle
Physicists using the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, have discovered a new kind of heavy particle, they announced...
From ACM News
Light-Powered Computers Brighten AI's Future
The idea of building a computer that uses light rather than electricity goes back more than half a century.
From ACM News
World's Most Powerful Particle Collider Taps AI to Expose Hack Attacks
Thousands of scientists worldwide tap into CERN's computer networks each day in their quest to better understand the fundamental structure of the universe.
From ACM Opinion
20 Years after Deep Blue: How AI Has Advanced Since Conquering Chess
Twenty years ago IBM's Deep Blue computer stunned the world by becoming the first machine to beat a reigning world chess champion in a six-game match.
From ACM News
When Hatred Goes Viral: Inside Social Media's Efforts to Combat Terrorism
On New Year's Eve in 2015 local and federal agents arrested a 26-year-old man in Rochester, N.Y., for planning to attack people at random later that night using...
From ACM News
The Search for Life on Mars Is about to Get Weird
Since the dawn of the space age NASA and other agencies have spent billions of dollars to reconnoiter Mars—assailing it with spacecraft flybys, photo-snapping orbiters...
From ACM TechNews
When Autonomous Machines Can Do More Than Just Vacuum
Rapidly aging populations will drive growth in home-based robotics, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Rodney Brooks.
From ACM News
The Pentagon's Seek-and-Destroy Mission for Counterfeit Electronics
The Pentagon has known for years that a significant number of the replacement parts it buys for its missile guidance and satellite systems contain substandard counterfeit...
From ACM TechNews
Our Ability to Keep 'Em Guessing Peaks Around Age 25
People's ability to behave randomly reaches its zenith at age 25, and then gradually erodes before experiencing a swift decline at age 60.
From ACM Opinion
Ghost in the Sell: Hollywood's Mischievous Vision of AI
Watch enough science fiction movies and you'll probably come to the conclusion that humans are living on borrowed time.
From ACM News
How Pedestrians Will Defeat Autonomous Vehicles
A recently published paper in the Journal of Planning Education and Research explores how interactions between humans and self-driving cars could change the rules...
From ACM TechNews
Can Artificial Intelligence Predict Earthquakes?
Paul Johnson's research team at Los Alamos National Laboratory is applying artificial intelligence to earthquake prediction, using machine-learning algorithms,...
From ACM News