Communications of the ACM
Boosting Photodiode Efficiency to 220%
Researchers at the Netherlands' Eindhoven University of Technology are chasing quantum efficiency.
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 News
A New Direction for Digital Compasses
Cell phones and many other mobile devices now come packed with sensors capable of tracking them as they move. The digital compasses, gyroscopes, and accelerometers...
From ACM TechNews
Can Google Get Web Users Talking?
Google researchers are implementing voice-driven Web search capability on computers, with the goal of making such searches as easy to perform as they are on the...
From ACM Opinion
Was the Space Shuttle a Mistake?
Forty years ago, I wrote an article for Technology Review titled "Shall We Build the Space Shuttle?" Now, with the 135th and final flight of the shuttle at hand...
From ACM News
Bug-Squashing Tools Offered to Improve Network Security
The Department of Homeland Security has announced an initiative to shore up security by squashing software bugs. This follows a slew of high-profile attacks on...
From ACM News
Could This Brain Implant Revive Paralyzed Limbs?
In the annals of great oxymorons, "non-invasive brain implant" would surely rank up there. Misnomer or not, the University of Michigan is touting just such a...
From ACM News
Google Voice Search Offers Natural User Input
Google Voice Search for desktop computers isn't much more than the company porting a technology that's been on mobile phones for a while to PCs. But don't write...
From ACM News
A Preview of Future Disk Drives
A new type of data storage technology, called phase-change memory, has proven capable of writing some types of data faster than conventional flash based storage...
From ACM News
How Robots Will Beat Humans at Billiards
Once a year, at the International Computer Olympiad, teams pit their AI software against others' in a variety of nerd-appropriate sports: chess, go, backgammon...
From ACM News
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo Team Up to Advance Semantic Web
The move may finally encourage widespread use of technology that makes online information as comprehensible to computers as it is to humans. If the effort works...
From ACM News
Tracking Down Twitter's Best Rumor Spreaders
Sometimes it's easy to know which messages will spread through Twitter like wildfire. Just ask Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York), who faces pressure to resign...
From ACM News
Making the Case For Security
Major corporations have made serious mistakes with information security recently, resulting in spectacular failures to protect business and customer records....
From ACM News
Tapping Quantum Effects For Software that Learns
In a bid to enable computers to learn faster, defense company Lockheed Martin has bought a system that uses quantum mechanics to process digital data.
From ACM News
What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters
Recent weeks have been exciting for a relatively new kind of currency speculator. In just three weeks, the total value of a unique new digital currency called...
From ACM TechNews
The Invisible iPhone
Hasso Plattner Institute researchers have developed a system that enables iPhone users to perform actions on their devices without actually holding the phone.
From ACM News
Tracking How Mobile Apps Track You
Third-party apps are the weakest link in user privacy on smart phones. They often get access to large quantities of user data, and there are few rules covering...
From ACM News
The Next Big Thing in Analytics: Tracking Your Cursor's Every Move
Media, search engines, advertisers and social networks have been tracking what you click since the birth of the Web, but this measurement yields an incomplete...
From ACM News
A Business Analytics Engine that Began with the Military
Big technology companies like Netflix and Facebook make clever use of the digital traces we leave online: their algorithms can make connections between data and...
From ACM News
Workplace Robots Need a Better View
Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks says a new generation of industrial robots could be enabled by better machine vision.
From ACM News
Data Analysis Is Creating New Business Opportunities
Sitting in the left-field upper deck to watch the San Francisco Giants play baseball on May 11 would cost you eight bucks if you'd bought the ticket in late April...
From ACM TechNews