Researchers working in medical nanorobotics are creating technologies that could lead to novel health-care applications, such as new ways of accessing areas of the human body that would otherwise be unreachable without invasive surgery.
Kirk L. Kroeker
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Researchers are addressing the computing challenges of older individuals, whose needs are different — and too often disregarded.
Computer Science Meets Environmental Science
Scientists share knowledge and seek collaborators at computational sustainability conference.
Smart Infrastructure Matches Supply and Demand
The promise of so-called "smart infrastucture" is offset by possibly perilous effects. By offloading more human intelligence to circuitry, control is ceded to automated servants, sometimes with deadly consequences.
Competitions Aim to Create Interest in Cybersecurity
U.S. government, industry, and academia are using cybersecurity competitions to interest high school and college students about the career opportunities in cybersecurity.
Cloud Computing Spurs New Encryption Solutions
University of Washington researchers’ announcement that they had created an encryption scheme called Vanish captured a lot of attention for its elegant simplicity, but two more arcane developments—presented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Crypto in the Clouds Workshop on the security challenges of cloud computing—promise more fundamental changes in applied cryptography.
Mining Virtual Worlds to Better nderstand Reality
Hugely popular online virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life offer social scientists unprecedented views of gamers' behavior, and may be used as a model for their decisions in the real world. A team of social scientists, economists, anthropologists and computer scientists are now sifting through the treasure trove of data.
Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.
Recommender systems that provide consumers with customized options have redefined e-commerce, and are spreading to other fields.
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.
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