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 News
Ibm: Commercial Nanotube Transistors Are Coming Soon
For more than a decade, engineers have been fretting that they are running out of tricks for continuing to shrink silicon transistors.
From ACM News
The Space-Based Quantum Cryptography Race
One of the great benefits of quantum communication is the ability to send messages from one point in space to another with perfect security.
From ACM Opinion
Ray Kurzweil Says He's Breathing Intelligence Into Google Search
The big announcements at Google's I/O event in San Francisco Wednesday didn't mention Web search, the technology that got the company started and made it so successful...
From ACM TechNews
How to Make Smart Watches Not Worth Stealing
A prototype device can identify someone by measuring the electrical resistance of tissues within the person's wrist.
From ACM News
Neuroscience's New Toolbox
The hypothalamus is a small structure deep in the brain that, among other functions, coördinates sensory inputs—the appearance of a rival, for example—with instinctual...
From ACM TechNews
Thermal Camera Turns Many Things Into Interactive Surfaces
Augmented reality company Metaio is developing technology that could enable people to use all kinds of objects as interactive touch surfaces.
From ACM Careers
How Ebay's Research Laboratories Are Tackling the Tricky Task of Fashion Recommendations
If you've ever puzzled over what to wear in the morning, you might also have wondered whether you could leave the choice to an algorithm that could recommend a...
From ACM TechNews
Google’s Experimental Smartphone Captures a Future Mapped in 3D
Google's Project Tango prototype Android smartphone could make it easier, faster, and less expensive to scan and map the world in 3D.
From ACM News
How Statisticians Found Air France Flight 447 Two Years After It Crashed Into Atlantic
"In the early morning hours of June 1, 2009, Air France Flight AF 447, with 228 passengers and crew aboard, disappeared during stormy weather over the Atlantic...
From ACM TechNews
How Your Location Data Is Being Used to Predict the Events You Will Want to Attend
Researchers are tapping data from location-based social media network Foursquare to learn what makes people more likely to attend one event rather than another.
From ACM TechNews
How Your Tweets Reveal Your Home Location
An algorithm developed by IBM researchers exploits anyone's last 200 Twitter postings to reveal their home city location with nearly 70-percent accuracy.
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Leslie Lamport, Winner of Computing's Top Prize
This year's winner of the Turing Award—often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing—was announced yesterday as Leslie Lamport, a computer scientist whose research...
From ACM TechNews
Are You a Super-Spreader of Disease?
New research could yield insight into monitoring a specific group of disease carriers to identify nascent outbreaks early and help prevent epidemics.
From ACM TechNews
A Breakthrough For Speeding Satellite Feeds
A new data-coding technology based on transmission control protocol could more than double bandwidth on satellite Internet connections.
From ACM TechNews
Wikipedia's Secret Multilingual Workforce
Versions of Wikipedia content in different languages have little overlap, with the English edition, for example, containing just 51 percent of the articles in German...
From ACM TechNews
An App-Led Walk Down Memory Lane
The Memoir iPhone app accesses photos and status updates from a user's social networks based on the user's location, what is going on, and who else is around.
From ACM TechNews
Data Mining Reveals the Secret to Getting Good Answers
A new algorithm can rank the questions and answers on question and answer websites, while weeding out off-topic and irrelevant entries.
From ACM News
The Secrets of Online Money Laundering
Money laundering is increasingly becoming a cybercrime.
From ACM News
Graphics Chips Help Process Big Data Sets in Milliseconds
New software can use the graphics processors found on everyday computers to process torrents of data more quickly than is normally possible, opening up new ways...
From ACM TechNews