Communications of the ACM
Multimodal AI Connects the Digital Dots
By knitting together multiple components and data streams, multimodal AI offers the promise of smarter, more human-like systems… From ACM NewsAn 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
2011: The Year of the Personal Robot?
Willow Garage's PR2 personal robot platform, released last year, could lead to new advances in robotic technology. Georgia Tech professor Charles Kemp. Kemp and...
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Electric Currents Move Racetrack Memory Bits with Precision
The moving bits in the proposed data-storage scheme do not stop and start instantaneously, but their motion is easy to quantify.
From ACM TechNews
Diminishing Returns? U.s. Science Productivity Continues to Decline
U.S. science research efficiency is trending downward, according to a National Science Foundation study. U.S. research output, as measured by scientific publication...
From ACM News
Diminishing Returns?: U.s. Science Productivity Continues to Drop
A historic downward shift in U.S. research efficiency is described in a new report on science publication trends, showing that while funding rose, the quantity...
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How Can Online Advertising Companies Be Kept from Tracking Web Surfers?
The FTC is calling for "do not track" software, but one privacy and security expert said such programming would have to be incorporated into a browser for it...
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Power Hackers: The U.s. Smart Grid Is Shaping Up to Be Dangerously Insecure
Achieving greater efficiency and control of the electricity grid requires hooking almost every aspect of it up to the Internet, making it more vulnerable to cyber...
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Would Wiretapping Laws Spell the End of Quantum Encryption?
A new effort to ensure that the government can gain back-door access to encrypted messages could thwart one of the most promising applications of physics for...
From ACM TechNews
Heady Days of Nanotech Funding Behind It, the .s. Faces Big Challenges
Despite the U.S.'s lead in patenting nanotechnology inventions, it has not been able to translate that success into the marketplace, which has enabled other countries...
From ACM News
A Car That Drives Itself
In September a driverless Audi TTS will speed to the top of Colorado's Pikes Peak at just under 100 kilometers per hour—that's right, no driver. It is an early...
From ACM TechNews
Robot Pills
Pill-sized robotic capsules are under development for screening, diagnostic, and therapeutic procedures.
From ACM News
How Will the Smart Grid Handle Heat Waves?
Pretty well, once the technology to automatically respond to peak demand and store renewable energy matures.
From ACM TechNews
Robocup 2010: Could Robot Versus Human Be Far Behind?
The goal of the RoboCup 2010 competition in Singapore is to advance the real-world applications of robotics and eventually to build a robot team that can beat the...
From ACM News
Inside the Military-Robotics Complex
Robots are already in use by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their variety and use is only growing.
From ACM News
The Doctor Is Out, but New Patient Monitoring and Robotics Technology Is In
A new generation of medical devices using wireless communications, sophisticated software and data center-driven "cloud" computing promises to deliver health care...
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Researchers Turn to Supercomputing to Find Malaria's Soft Spot
Intellectual Ventures builds computer simulations to better understand how malaria spreads and how it responds to eradication efforts.
From ACM News
When Will We Be Able to Build Brains Like Ours?
When physicists puzzle out the workings of some new part of nature, that knowledge can be used to build devices that do amazing things--airplanes that fly, radios...
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Pentagon Turns to 'softer' Sciences
By highlighting the limits of traditional military technology, the drawn-out conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred the U.S. defense department to shake...
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Braille Displays Promise to Deliver the Web to the Blind
The Web's wealth of information would lose some of its luster if you read it only one line at a time. Yet this is exactly how blind and other vision-impaired...
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De-Worming Software More Effective at Detecting Infected Network Computers Before Contagion Can Spread
More than a year after being launched by hackers on a campaign to infect computers running Microsoft Windows, the Conficker worm's effects are still being felt....
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