Communications of the ACM
From ACM News
How Google Is Teaching Computers to See
Computers used to be blind, and now they can see. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated algorithms, computers today can recognize and identify the Eiffel Tower...
From ACM Opinion
Mars Science Laboratory + Curiosity Rover: Interview with Nasa Jpl's Ashwin Vasavada
Boing Boing visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a peek inside the clean room where NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars...
From ACM Opinion
When Will Sci-Fi Tech Become Real? Sooner Than You Think
Growing up, physicist Michio Kaku had two heroes. The first, predictably enough for the man who co-founded a branch of string theory, was Albert Einstein. "Second...
From ACM Opinion
Another Win For Artificial Intelligence: The Turing Award
It's been a banner year or so for artificial intelligence, from the recent triumph of I.B.M.'s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer to a wave of news coverage of the...
From ACM Opinion
Google Schools Its Algorithm
To humans, computer intelligence is a puzzle, as if the machines have split personalities. They can be so remarkably smart at times, yet so bafflingly dumb at...
From ACM News
Is the Navy Trying to Start the Robot Apocalypse?
Whenever the military rolls out a new robot program, folks like to joke about SkyNet or the Rise of the Machines. But this time, the military really is starting...
From ACM News
10 Questions For David Ferrucci
Why aren't you letting Watson speak for himself today? Watson is trained to answer questions for Jeopardy! It's not an interactive dialogue system, so it can't...
From ACM Opinion
Cubelets: Modular, Affordable Robotics For Kids and Students
Robotics can be a tricky subject to teach children, and it's hard to know where to start. Cubelets is a system of modular cubes that each have one use, interaction...
From ACM Opinion
My Puny Human Brain
Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.
From ACM Opinion
A Worthwhile Contest For Artificial Intelligence
If IBM's Watson machine defeats people on TV's Jeopardy this week, does that mean that computers are smarter than humans? Maybe not. But the performance could...
From ACM News
Mind vs. Machine
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial...
From ACM Opinion
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything...
From ACM TechNews
How Watson Works: A Conversation With Eric Brown, IBM Research Manager
IBM's deep Question Answering system, codenamed Watson, will compete against humans in Jeopardy! tournaments in February. IBM's Eric Brown says that Jeopardy!...
From ACM News
Hackers Find New Way to Cheat on Wall Street
High-frequency trading networks, which complete stock market transactions in microseconds, are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers who can inject tiny amounts...
From Communications of the ACM
An Interview with Frances E. Allen
Frances E. Allen, recipient of the 2006 ACM A.M. Turing Award, reflects on her career.
From Communications of the ACM
IBM's Single-Processor Supercomputer Efforts
Imagine a CPU designed to issue and execute up to seven instructions per clock cycle, with a clock rate 10 times faster than the reigning supercomputer. This is...
From ACM Opinion
What We're Driving At
Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is...
From ACM Opinion
Robots vs. Suicide Terrorists
In February 2008, a pair of suicide bombers struck the Israeli town of Dimona. One of the attackers detonated his explosive vest, killing an Israeli, and injuring...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Earth
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," said the search giant's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial...
From ACM TechNews