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
Wireless Network Modded to See Through Walls
The way signal strength varies in a wireless network can reveal what's going on behind closed doors. It's every schoolboy's dream: an easy way of looking through...
From ACM TechNews
A Simpler, Gentler Robotic Grip
Harvard and Yale University researchers have designed a soft robotic hand that can pick up objects, suggesting a promising future in prosthetic arms. The new device...
From ACM TechNews
Greener Computing in the Cloud
Researchers say that custom data centers being built for cloud computing systems are very energy efficient. "There are issues with property rights and confidentiality...
From ACM TechNews
Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?
A researcher who studied the voting patterns on Amazon.com, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and the book review site BookCrossings says a small group of users...
From ACM TechNews
Capsules for Self-Healing Circuits
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) researchers are developing a material that could enable a computer circuit to repair itself. The researchers have...
From ACM TechNews
Catching Fake Meds in a Snapshot
New York University researchers have proposed Epothecary, a system that uses cell phones to authenticate and track drugs distributed in the developing world. The...
From ACM TechNews
Adding Trust to Wikipedia, and Beyond
WikiTrust, developed by University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) researchers, helps users evaluate information published on Wikipedia by automatically assigning...
From ACM TechNews
A New Language For Phone Networks
University of Cambridge professor Jon Crowcroft is leading a research effort to change how cell phones send information by creating peer-to-peer mobile device networks...
From ACM TechNews
The Evolution of Retweeting
Twitter has announced that it will establish a set format for retweeting, or reposting another user's message, for use within the micro-blogging service. Retweeting...
From ACM TechNews
Robots 'evolve' the Ability to Deceive
Robots programmed to find food concealed their performance from other robots by the 50th generation in a research project at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de...
From ACM TechNews
Wi-Fi via White Spaces
The transition from analog to digital broadcasts has opened up radio spectrum that could be used to deliver long-range, low-cost wireless Internet service using...
From ACM TechNews
Making Android More Secure
Google developed a new approach to mobile phone security with its open source Android operating system. Android developer Rich Cannings says there must be a balance...
From ACM TechNews
Energy-Aware Internet Routing
A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University, and Akamai indicates an Internet-routing algorithm that tracks electricity...
From ACM TechNews
How to Build Anonymity Into the Internet
At the 9th annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, security researchers discussed alternatives to existing systems designed to help Internet users maintain...
From ACM TechNews
Finding the Right Piece of Sky
At the recent ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 conference, Microsoft Research's Visual Computing Group presented SkyFinder, a search system designed to analyze images of the sky...
From ACM TechNews
Supercomputer Visuals Without Graphics Chip
The obsolescence of graphics-processing clusters is being hastened by the rapidly accelerating data processing speed of supercomputers. Scientists at Argonne National...
From ACM TechNews
Warning Issued on Web Programming Interfaces
Application programming interfaces (APIs), software specifications that allow Web sites and services to interact with each other, have been a major factor in the...
From ACM TechNews
Hackers Game a Multiplayer World
Two programmers have hacked the World of Warcraft online game environment with a set of programs that automate in-game characters, which game developer Blizzard...
From ACM TechNews
Five Futuristic Interfaces on Display at Siggraph
ACM's SIGGRAPH 2009 conference will showcase a quintet of innovative interface models. University of Tokyo researchers have created a touchable holographic interface...
From ACM TechNews