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Advocates seek to protect users from potential business practices, but defenders of the status quo say that concerns are overblown.
Dealing with terabytes of data is not the monumental task it once was. The difficult part is presenting enormous amounts of information in ways that are most useful to a wide variety of users.
To create shape-shifting robotic ensembles, researchers need to teach micro-machines to work together.
Materials Restore Functionality in a Snap
Researchers are working on "self-healing" electronic materials that could lead in time to computer components that can fix themselves when they break.
New Ranking Algorithm Separates Digital Wheat from Chaff
The ranking algorithm called SPEAR (SPamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking), developed by PhD candidates Ching Man Au Yeung of the University of Southampton and Michael G. Noll of Hasso Plattner Institute, uses mutual reinforcement and time stamps to identify expert contributors to social bookmarking sites and their recommended content.
Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.
The promise of parallel computing has run afoul of the harsh reality of Amdahl's Law, which puts a ceiling on the benefit of converting sequential code to parallel code. The upshot is that parallelism will not necessarily reap rewards.
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.
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.
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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