Communications of the ACM
New York City Takes Aim at AI
The Big Apple fields an action plan for artificial intelligence.
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 News
The Mesmerizing Beauty of Nature's Fractals
Google Earth: source of information, source of wonder, source of art. In 2010, Paul Bourke, a research associate professor at the University of Western Australia...
From ACM Opinion
The Jet Propulsion Lab Is Way Weirder (and Awesomer) Than You Even Imagined
For a center of cutting-edge scientific research, Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab seems to be a pretty wacky place. Luke Johnson, a graphic designer at the lab, set...
From ACM Careers
Curiosity's Martian Playground Is Technically Located in Pasadena
Seventeen miles from downtown L.A., on the campus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, there's a small stretch of earth covered in beach sand, decomposed...
From ACM News
The Robot of the Future That's About to Explore the Deep Past of Mars
I want to tell you about a special place on the surface of Mars. Back in the solar system's early days, a large object slammed into the red planet, leaving behind...
From ACM Opinion
Inside Google's Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever
The ugly truth is that computers don't know anything. They have no common sense.
From ACM News
Get Ready, Because Voyager I Is *this Close* to Leaving Our Solar System
Last week, in the corners of the Internet devoted to outer space, things started to get a little, well, hot. Voyager 1, the man-made object farthest away from Earth...
From ACM News
Microsoft Wants to Serve You Ads Based on What You Do in Your Living Room
A new patent application from Microsoft points to a future in which your Kinect watches you, and sends ads based on your mood.
From ACM Opinion
Is It Possible to Wage a Just Cyberwar?
In the last week or so, cyberwarfare has made front-page news: the United States may have been behind the Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran; Iran may have suffered another...
From ACM News
How Big Data Is Changing Astronomy (Again)
Think of all the data humans have collected over the long history of astronomy, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Babylon to images—like the one here—taken...
From ACM News
The Technology That Allowed the Titanic Survivors to Survive
More than 1,500 people died in the sinking of the Titanic, but more than 700 survived. Those who did owed their escape to the newest communications technology of...
From ACM News
Everything You Wanted to Know About Data Mining but Were Afraid to Ask
Big data is everywhere we look these days.
From ACM Opinion
The Philosopher Whose Fingerprints Are All Over the Ftc's New Approach to Privacy
A mile or two away from Facebook's headquarters in Silicon Valley, Helen Nissenbaum of New York University was standing in a basement on Stanford's campus explaining...
From ACM News
I'm Being Followed: How Google
This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news appeared on...
From ACM Careers
The Future of Hiring: Human Resources, Without the Humans
Imagine a scenario where your next job interview isn't face-to-face, but face-to-screen. There are no questions about your former work experience and office habits...
From ACM News
Making It in America
In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction.
From ACM Careers
What Hacker Apprenticeships Tell S About the Future of Education
Three very similar compressed software development training programs have emerged in the past few months: Code Academy (not to be confused with the startup Codecademy)...
From ACM News
The Revolution in Photography
When a set of online teasers for a new camera called the Lytro appeared earlier this year, you could have been forgiven for seeing the invention as just another...
From ACM News
There Is Life on Mars! Just One Catch
NASA's Planetary Protection Officer Catharine A. Conley says that we've already contaminated the Red Planet with organisms from Earth.
From ACM News
The War on Red-Light Cameras
Late last month, after a drawn-out battle dating back to November, Houston finally turned off its 70 red-light cameras. City residents voted them down in a referendum...
From ACM Opinion