Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2015
From ACM News
The Attention Machine
Human attention isn't stable, ever, and it costs us: lives lost when drivers space out, billions of dollars wasted on inefficient work, and mental disorders that hijack focus.
From ACM News
Human Traffickers Caught on Hidden Internet
In November 2012 a 28-year-old woman plunged 15 meters from a bedroom window to the pavement in New York City, a devastating fall that left her body broken but alive.
From ACM News
Look Into My Eyes: Tracking Your Gaze Could Be the Next Big Gaming Input
The bulk of the press release announcing a March 10 release for the PC port of Assassin's Creed Rogue is strictly boilerplate.
From ACM TechNews
Looking Under the Bitcoin Bonnet: Students Aim to Enhance Transparency
Trinity College Dublin researchers are studying Bitcoin in an effort to make the cryptocurrency more transparent and reduce the risk of fraud.
From ACM TechNews
Monkey Mustaches and Beards Help Algorithm Recognize Faces
New York University researchers have developed an algorithm that can correctly identify colorful monkeys called guenons by their faces.
From ACM TechNews
Society's View of IT Workers As 'Unwashed Nerds' Stops Women Entering Industry
Society needs to change the way it presents and views information technology careers if more women are to be encouraged to join the industry.
From ACM TechNews
Engineering Students Make History With Firefighting Humanoid Robot
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University students and the U.S. Navy recently unveiled a fire-fighting humanoid robot.
From ACM News
Senator: Your Futuristic Car Is Putting Your Privacy and Security At Risk
Cars these days have more in common with smart phones than the Model-T. But a new reportfrom Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) warns that the increasing technical complexity of vehicles is leaving drivers' security and privacy at risk
…From ACM News
Autonomous Vehicles: No Drivers Required
This summer, people will cruise through the streets of Greenwich, U.K., in electric shuttles with no one's hands on the steering wheel—or any steering wheel at all.
From ACM News
NASA's Curiosity Analyzing Sample of Martian Mountain
The second bite of a Martian mountain taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover hints at long-ago effects of water that was more acidic than any evidenced in the rover's first taste of Mount Sharp, a layered rock record of ancient
…From ACM News
Networks Reveal the Connections of Disease
Stefan Thurner is a physicist, not a biologist. But not long ago, the Austrian national health insurance clearinghouse asked Thurner and his colleagues at the Medical University of Vienna to examine some data for them.
From ACM TechNews
Forecasting the Flu Better
A research team at the University of California, San Diego says it has refined and improved the predictions of Google Flu Trends.
From ACM TechNews
Uber and CMU Collaborating on Robotically Driven Cars in Lawrenceville
Uber and Carnegie Mellon University are jointly creating a robotics research lab and technology center at the RIDC Chocolate Factory in Pittsburgh.
From ACM TechNews
Stanford Researchers Use Big Data to Identify Patients at Risk of High-Cholesterol Disorder
Stanford University researchers are working to identify hospital patients who may have a genetic disease that causes a deadly buildup of cholesterol in their arteries.
From ACM TechNews
Crowdsourcing America's Cybersecurity Is an Idea So Crazy It Might Just Work
Crowdsourced cybersecurity is gaining ground.
From ACM TechNews
European Project Launches the World's First Real-Time 'Mixed Reality' Ski Race
The European Commission is funding an interactive mixed reality downhill ski race as part of the 3D LIVE project.
From ACM News
Don't Call Them 'Utility' Rules: The FCC's Net Neutrality Regime, Explained
Within a few weeks we’ll have a huge document full of legalese on the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, to replace the near-200-page order from 2010 that was mostly overturned by a court ruling last year
…From ACM News
Could a Robot Have Written This Story? The Rise of the Robo-Journalist
At large news agencies where speed is crucial, template-style stories have long been used for company results, allowing journalists to simply key in the relevant facts and numbers and fire off the dispatch.
From ACM News
Planck Mission Explores the History of Our Universe
Hot gas, dust and magnetic fields mingle in a colorful swirl in this new map of our Milky Way galaxy.
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Computing Without Qubits
For more than 20 years, Ivan H. Deutsch has struggled to design the guts of a working quantum computer.
From ACM News
The Computer that Crunches Cloud Data to Heat Your Home
Each photo we "like", email we send, and search we run creates heat.
From ACM TechNews
Programming Safety Into Self-Driving Cars
University of Massachusetts, Amherst professor Shlomo Zilberstein has been investigating ways of helping semi-autonomous systems to better make decisions.
From ACM TechNews
Lost Chunk of Pioneering EDSAC Computer Found
An original part of one of the United Kingdom's pioneering computers has been donated to a project that is working to rebuild the machine.
From ACM TechNews
Team Led by UCLA and Columbia Engineers Uses Disorder to Control Light on a Nanoscale
Researchers have made a discovery that could lead to the more precise transfer of information in computer chips.
From ACM TechNews
'If We Want to Out Compete, We Have to Out Compute,' Witnesses Tell Congressional Science Committee
Experts in high-performance computing and science policy called for more funding for supercomputing resources and research.
From ACM News
Comet Scientists Abandon Philae Flyby
The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will not make a dedicated flyby to search for the lost comet lander Philae any time soon, according to a post on the agency's Rosetta blog.
From ACM News
Graphene's Cousin Silicene Makes Transistor Debut
Seven years ago, silicene was little more than a theorist's dream.
From ACM News
British Army Creates Team of Facebook Warriors
The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age.
From ACM Opinion
Google Brain's Co-inventor Tells Why He's Building Chinese Neural Networks
To chat with Andrew Ng I almost have to tackle him.
From ACM Careers
Programming: Pick Up Python
Last month, Adina Howe took up a post at Iowa State University in Ames. Officially, she is an assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering.