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
Freaks, Geeks, and Microsoft
When the Kinect was introduced in November 2010 as a $150 motion-control add-on to Microsoft's Xbox consoles, it drew attention from more than just video-gamers...
From ACM News
Behind the Google Goggles, Virtual Reality
It wasn't so long ago that legions of people began walking the streets, talking to themselves. On closer inspection, many of them turned out to be wearing tiny...
From ACM News
Apropos Appropriation
One recent afternoon in the offices of the Midtown law firm run by David Boies and his powerful litigation partners, a large black clamshell box sat on a conference...
From ACM News
Making Science Leap From the Page
When a college textbook, "Principles of Biology," comes out from the Nature Publishing Group in January, one place it won't be is on the shelves of school bookstores...
From ACM News
Steve Jobs's Patents
The 317 Apple patents that list Steven P. Jobs among the group of inventors offer a glimpse at his legendary say over the minute details of the company's products—from...
From ACM News
Steve Jobs, Apple's Visionary, Dies at 56
Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies...
From ACM Careers
In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores
Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They're studying Shakespeare's "As...
From ACM Opinion
A Collision of Creativity and Cash at Disney/pixar
When the Walt Disney Company bought Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion in 2006, there was understandable concern that the media conglomerate that drove...
From ACM News
The First Computer Musician
In 1957 a 30-year-old engineer named Max Mathews got an I.B.M. 704 mainframe computer at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, to generate 17 seconds...
From ACM News
In Online Games, a Path to Young Consumers
Deep into one of her favorite computer games, Lesly Lopez, 10, moves her mouse to click on a cartoon bee. She drags and drops it into an empty panel, creating...
From ACM News
Busy Job of Judging Video-Game Content to Be Ceded to Machines
The little E's, T's, and M's that appear on the covers of video games get there the old-fashioned way: People working for the Entertainment Software Rating Board...
From ACM News
New Search Technology Is Enhanced With Videos
The line between cyberspace and the physical world is blurring with a new search technology being demonstrated by Autonomy, a British software publisher.
From ACM News
Moonlighting Within Microsoft, in Pursuit of New Apps
If you have a smartphone, you probably have apps on it to check the news, play games, help with shopping or further a hobby like travel or bird-watching. But...
From ACM News
On 'jeopardy,' Watson's a Natural
In the end, the humans on "Jeopardy!" surrendered meekly.
From ACM Opinion
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything...
From ACM News
Perfecting Animation, via Science
Eitan Grinspun, the director of Columbia University’s Computer Graphics Group, doesn't quite qualify as hairdresser to the stars.
From ACM News
I.b.m. Supercomputer 'watson' to Challenge 'jeopardy' Stars
An I.B.M. supercomputer system named after the company’s founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr., is almost ready for a televised test: a bout of questioning on the quiz...
From ACM News
Where Cinema and Biology Meet
When Robert A. Lue considers the "Star Wars" Death Star, his first thought is not of outer space, but inner space.
From ACM News