Communications of the ACM
An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.
From ACM TechNews
The Robotic Equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed milli-motein, a tiny robot that could lead to future devices that can fold themselves into almost...
From ACM News
The Robotic Equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife
The device doesn't look like much: a caterpillar-sized assembly of metal rings and strips resembling something you might find buried in a home-workshop drawer.
From ACM Opinion
3 Questions: A Web For Everyone
During the opening ceremonies of this summer’s Olympic games in London, a musical performance culminated with a stage-set house rising into the rafters to reveal...
From ACM News
The Robot Revolution Is Just Beginning
When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s initially on automobile assembly lines—computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were...
From ACM News
Self-Sculpting Sand
Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool.
From ACM News
Guiding Robot Planes with Hand Gestures
Aircraft-carrier crew use a set of standard hand gestures to guide planes on the carrier deck. But as robot planes are increasingly used for routine air missions...
From ACM News
Putting the 'art' in Artificial Intelligence
Like many kids, Antonio Torralba began playing around with computers when he was 13 years old. Unlike many of his friends, though, he was not playing video games...
From ACM News
Robots in Reality
Consider the following scenario: A scout surveys a high-rise building that's been crippled by an earthquake, trapping workers inside. After looking for a point...
From ACM News
Smarter Robot Arms
A combination of two algorithms developed at MIT allows autonomous robots to execute tasks much more efficiently—and move more predictably.
From ACM News
Streamlined Rules For Robots
With the explosion of the Internet and the commoditization of autonomous robots (such as the Roomba) and small sensors (such as the ones in most cell phones),...
From ACM TechNews
Finding an Edge
MIT researchers Jason Chang and John Fisher have developed an algorithm that can determine object boundaries in digital images with at least 50,000 times greater...
From ACM News
Honing Household Helpers
Imagine a robot able to retrieve a pile of laundry from the back of a cluttered closet, deliver it to a washing machine, start the cycle and then zip off to the...
From ACM News
Joichi Ito Named Director of MIT Media Lab
MIT announced that Joichi (“Joi” — pronounced “Joey”) Ito has been selected as the next director of the MIT Media Lab.
From ACM News
Programming Crowds
With the Web, people worldwide can work on distributed tasks. But getting reliable results requires algorithms that specify workflow between people, not transistors...
From ACM News
Shape-Shifting Robots
Self-folding sheets of a plastic-like material point the way to robots that can assume any conceivable 3D structure.
From ACM News
Computer Automatically Deciphers Ancient Language
A new system that took a couple hours to decipher much of the ancient language Ugaritic could help improve online translation software.
From ACM TechNews
Seeing the Forest For the Trees
New object recognition systems that deconstruct images into ever smaller elements, using methods developed at MIT and UCLA, should be much more efficient than previous...
From ACM News
Computing, Sudoku-Style
Though still in its infancy, the work of Alexey Radul as a postdoc at MIT could someday have consequences for artificial-intelligence research, parallel computing...
From ACM News