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
Mathematicians Are Deploying Algorithms to Stop Gerrymandering
Mathematicians are implementing algorithms designed to halt gerrymandering—the partisan manipulation of U.S. Census data to redraw electoral maps for one political...
From ACM News
Weird Behavior During the Pandemic Is Messing with AI Models
Machine-learning models trained on normal behavior are showing cracks — forcing humans to step in to set them straight.
From ACM News
How Classroom Technology Is Holding Students Back
Data shows that education technology in the United States has a negative impact at a range of grade levels.
From ACM News
A Revolutionary Imaging Technique ses a Single Pixel to Fill Our Terahertz Blind Spot
At almost every wavelength, engineers have electromagnetic antennae that can detect and record the waves and create exotic images of the world at radio, microwave...
From ACM News
The Animal-AI Olympics Is Going to Treat AI Like a Lab Rat
In one of Aesop's fables, a thirsty crow finds a pitcher with a small amount of water beyond the reach of its beak.
From ACM News
Russia Wants to Cut Itself Off from the Global Internet. Here's What that Really Means.
In the next two weeks, Russia is planning to attempt something no other country has tried before. It's going to test whether it can disconnect from the rest of...
From ACM News
A 'Halo Drive' Could Accelerate Interstellar Spacecraft to Close to the Speed of Light
Back in 2016, the physicist Stephen Hawking and the billionaire Yuri Milner unveiled a plan to travel to the stars. The so-called Breakthrough Starshot project...
From ACM News
Triton Is the World's Most Murderous Malware, and It's Spreading
As an experienced cyber first responder, Julian Gutmanis had been called plenty of times before to help companies deal with the fallout from cyberattacks.
From ACM News
An AI that Writes Convincing Prose Risks Mass-Producing Fake News
Here's some breaking fake news … Russia has declared war on the United States after Donald Trump accidentally fired a missile in the air.
From ACM News
The Real Reason America Is Scared of Huawei: Internet-Connected Everything
There was a time when the world's two great superpowers were obsessed with nuclear weapons technology.
From ACM News
We'd Have More Quantum Computers If It Weren't So Hard to Find the Damn Cables
Blake Johnson spends a lot of time thinking about things like superconducting cables and supercooled refrigerators.
From ACM News
Giving Algorithms a Sense of ncertainty Could Make Them More Ethical
Algorithms are increasingly being used to make ethical decisions. Perhaps the best example of this is a high-tech take on the ethical dilemma known as the trolley...
From ACM News
A Neural Network Can Learn to Organize the World It Sees Into Concepts, Just Like We Do
GANs, or generative adversarial networks, are the social-media starlet of AI algorithms. They are responsible for creating the first AI painting ever sold at an ...
From ACM News
The S and China Are in a Quantum Arms Race that Will Transform Warfare
In the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, American military planners began to worry about the threat to US warplanes posed by new, radar-guided missile defenses...
From ACM News
These Incredibly Realistic Fake Faces Show How Algorithms Can Now Mess with s
These faces don't seem particularly remarkable. They could easily be taken from, say, Facebook or LinkedIn. In reality, they were dreamed up by a new kind of AI...
From ACM News
China's Tech Giants Want to Go Global. Just One Thing Might Stand in Their Way.
In the early 1980s, a cluster of fledging computer companies opened up shop in a chaotic corner of northwest Beijing, near the campuses of Peking and Tsinghua Universities...
From ACM News
China Has Never Had a Real Chip Industry. Making AI Chips Could Change That.
Donald Trump is speaking Mandarin.
From ACM News
Making AI Algorithms Crazy Fast sing Chips Powered by Light
Inside a small laboratory in Boston's seaport district, buried within a jumble of lasers, lenses, mirrors, and a tangle of wiring, is a tiny chip that might be...
From ACM News
A Robot Scientist Will Dream p New Materials to Advance Computing and Fight Pollution
In a laboratory that overlooks a busy shopping street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a robot is attempting to create new materials.
From ACM News