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By using sparse representation and compressed sensing, researchers have been able to demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy over traditional face-recognition techniques.
IT Drives Policy – and Vice Versa
Technologists discuss government policies affecting broadband, patent reform, privacy — and President Obama's effect on it all.
Electronic games can inspire players to explore new ideas and concepts. By gaining a better understanding of the dynamic between player and game, researchers hope to develop more interesting and effective approaches.
U.S. Unveils Cybersecurity Plan
'Intent and timing' may help the federal cyberspace initiative work better than previous blueprints.
How to Harness Petaflop Performance
Several petascale computers are up and running, and others are sure to follow. All of them face many unique challenges in trying to harness a petaflop.
Practice Makes Perfect, Even For Brain-Controlled Prosthetics
Those who learn by repetition rely on "muscle memory," a sense that practice trains muscles to perform specific actions without thought. But does muscle memory exist if no actual muscles are involved? According to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS Biology, the answer is a clear "yes." These findings strengthen hope for the future of brain-controlled prosthetics, or "neuroprosthetics", and may aid the development of robotic body extensions whose control is truly intuitive.
Shape-Shifting Material Suggests Morphable Hardware
Electronic devices that can change their physical shape depending on the needs of the user might sound far-fetched. But recent research advances on several fronts have brought such shape-shifting hardware closer to reality.
How Computing Is Changing Journalism
Computing has influenced many fields in a big way, and journalism is one of them. There’s an ongoing trend away from print media and toward digital, and this is helping to create a new discipline known as computational journalism. Computational journalism combines data, algorithms, and knowledge to produce information, and may eventually perform some of the media's watchdog role.
Award-Winning Paper Reveals Key to Netflix Prize
When the organizers of the Netflix Prize contest announced late last week that one team had met the requirement for the $1 million Grand Prize, Yehuda Koren, a member of the seven-person multinational team, was in Paris to present a paper at KDD-09, the 15th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The ideas he laid out won the conference's Best Paper Award — and, not coincidentally, had much to do with reaching the contest's target of improving the accuracy of Netflix movie recommendations by 10 percent.
Contemporary Approaches to Fault Tolerance
Thanks to computer scientists like Barbara Liskov, researchers are making major progress with cost-efficient fault tolerance for Web-based systems.
Several software projects are narrowing the performance gap between browser-based applications and their desktop counterparts. In the process, they're creating new ways to improve the security of Web-based computing.
Are We Losing Our Ability to Think Critically?
Computer technology has enhanced lives in countless ways, but some experts believe it might be affecting people's ability to think deeply.
Barbara Liskov muses about the creative process of problem solving, finding the perfect design point, and pursuing a research path.
Jon Kleinberg is honored for his pioneering research on the Web and social networking.
Among this year's distinguished honorees are Barbara Liskov of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University.
Medical researchers have long dreamed of "magic bullets" that go directly where they are needed. Now micromedicine and nanotechnology are making a range of molecules formerly inaccessible as drugs available to be delivered at the right place and time to affect specific actions.
Entertainment businesses say digital rights management prevents the theft of their products, but access control technologies have been a uniform failure when it comes to preventing piracy. Fortunately, change is on the way.
Researchers are improving unmanned helicopters' capabilities to address regulatory requirements and commercial uses.
CRA's Computing Community Consortium hosted a day-long symposium to discuss the important computing advances of the last several decades and how to sustain that track record of innovation.
The data trail we generate through our everyday activity can be reassembled into a detailed account of our past, present, and possibly even future. Where and under what circumstances can we "reasonably" expect privacy online?
Compressed sensing, which draws on information theory, probability theory, and other fields, has generated a great deal of excitement with its nontraditional approach to signal processing.
The rapidly changing advertisements that appear on Web pages are often chosen by sophisticated algorithms that seek to place the best ad in the best context before the right customer.
In a world that's increasingly global and interconnected, international education is growing, changing, and evolving. More than 1.5 million students a year study at schools outside their country's borders, and the nature and types of available programs are expanding, ranging from short-term programs of eight weeks or less to master's programs with a full term abroad.
MIT's Barbara Liskov is the 55th person, and the second woman, to win the ACM A.M. Turing Award.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
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