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
Scientists From the RUDN University Will Make Computer Networks More Robust
Researchers from the RUDN University in Russia have applied a new mathematical model called a Markovian arrival process to the breakdown of telecommunication systems...
From ACM TechNews
Reducing the Massive Energy Appetite of Data Centers
Researchers are developing new chips and approaches to reduce the power consumption of data centers, which accounted for about one-fiftieth of all U.S. electricity...
From ACM TechNews
Drones Can Almost See in the Dark
Researchers at the University of Zurich and NCCR Robotics have taught flying drones to navigate with an eye-inspired camera, which could create a path toward operating...
From ACM TechNews
Autonomous Vehicles' Future May Be Further Away, Different Than Imagined
Experts think autonomous vehicles (AVs) may arrive later than expected, or in a different form than most people anticipate. Ben McKeever with California PATH says...
From ACM TechNews
Artificial Intelligence Just Made Guessing Your Password a Whole Lot Easier
Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology used artificial intelligence to generate a program that successfully guessed 27 percent of the passwords from more...
From ACM TechNews
Facial Recognition Is Only the Beginning
Apple says the inclusion of its Face ID technology in the upcoming iPhone X will make smartphone unlocking, payment, and other operations possible via facial recognition...
From ACM TechNews
Streaming on a Wireless Power Connection
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a system that can deliver watts of power while also transmitting data at rates sufficiently high to...
From ACM TechNews
Choir: Bringing Harmony to Discord in the IoT World
Carnegie Mellon University professor Swarun Kumar says networking the vast number of devices making up the Internet of Things requires a sweeping technological...
From ACM TechNews
An Extra Challenge in a Crisis: Dealing With Rare Languages
Researchers at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute are building machine-learning systems to quickly translate any of the world's...
From ACM TechNews
World-First Microchip: 'Storing Lightning Inside Thunder'
Researchers at the University of Sydney, Australia have stored photonic information on a microchip as an acoustic wave, which they say is an important breakthrough...
From ACM News
These Robots Can Merge and Split Their Brains to Form New Modular Bots
We cover all kinds of modular robotics around here, and when we do, we're almost always talking about one overall robotic system made up of many different modules...
From ACM News
How the Internet Kept Humming During 2 Hurricanes
At one node of the industrial backbone that keeps the internet running, employees sheltered from the worst of Hurricane Irma in a stairwell of a seven-story building...
From ACM News
Infrared Signals in Surveillance Cameras Let Malware Jump Network Air Gaps
Researchers have devised malware that can jump airgaps by using the infrared capabilities of an infected network's surveillance cameras to transmit data to and...
From ACM News
Wind, Warm Water Revved Up Melting Antarctic Glaciers
A NASA study has located the Antarctic glaciers that accelerated the fastest between 2008 and 2014 and finds that the most likely cause of their speedup is an observed...
From ACM News
Researchers Unite in Quest for 'Standard Model' of the Brain
Leading neuroscientists are joining forces to study the brain—in much the same way that physicists team up in mega-projects to hunt for new particles.
From ACM News
Chips Off the Old Block: Computers Are Taking Design Cues From Human Brains
We expect a lot from our computers these days. They should talk to us, recognize everything from faces to flowers, and maybe soon do the driving.
From ACM Careers
Conservatives, Liberals Unite Against Silicon Valley
The days of unqualified praise from Washington are over for the country's biggest tech companies, whose size and power are increasingly drawing attacks from both...
From ACM TechNews
Stretchy Artificial 'Skin' Could Give Robots a Sense of Touch
Rubberized electronics and sensors that function normally when stretched up to half of their length could operate as artificial skin on robots.
From ACM TechNews
Congressional Redistricting Less Contentious When Resolved Using Computer Algorithm
Researchers at the University of Illinois have proposed a computer algorithm that could ease congressional districting and make the process fairer for constituents...
From ACM TechNews
Inside the Equifax Hack
The Equifax breach, attributed to a server flaw disclosed by Cisco researchers that went unpatched, has potentially exposed an estimated 143 million Americans'...12