Communications of the ACM
What Would the Chatbot Say?
Seeking to explain the unanticipated abilities of large language models.
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 TechNews
How a Real Dog Taught a Robot Dog to Walk
Researchers at Google have developed a robotic dog and taught it to walk by showing it motion-capture videos of real dogs walking on treadmills.
From ACM TechNews
This Clever Robotic Finger Feels With Light
A new robotic skeleton is embedded with 32 photodiodes and 30 adjacent LEDs, and is covered by a squishy skin of reflective silicone that keeps the device's own...
From ACM News
The Secret History of Facial Recognition
Sixty years ago, a sharecropper's son invented a technology to identify faces. Then the record of his role all but vanished.
From ACM TechNews
Intel Patching the Patch for the Patch for 'Zombieload' Flaw
Intel said it will release yet another patch for a microarchitectural data sampling vulnerability that allows hackers to fool microprocessors into exposing protected...
From ACM News
AI Can Do Great Things—if It Doesn't Burn the Planet
The computing power required for AI landmarks, such as recognizing images and defeating humans at Go, increased 300,000-fold from 2012 to 2018.
From ACM News
Hackers Can Mess With Voltages to Steal Intel Chips' Secrets
A new attack called Plundervolt gives attackers access to the sensitive data stored in a processor's secure enclave.
From ACM News
50 Years Later, We Still Don't Grasp the Mother of All Demos
Doug Engelbart didn't just want to show off new technology. He wanted to demonstrate a system for improving humanity.
From ACM News
Bitcoin Will Burn the Planet Down. The Question: How Fast?
A new paper concludes that it takes more than four times as much energy to mine $1 of bitcoin as mining $1 of copper.
From ACM TechNews
Map Shows All the Code Connections Between Russia's Hacker Groups
Israeli cybersecurity firms Check Point and Intezer have charted Russian hackers' toolkits from wide-ranging analysis of 2,500 malware samples.
From ACM TechNews
Mysterious iOS Attack Changes Everything We Know About iPhone Hacking
Google researchers discovered thousands of iPhones have been compromised with sophisticated spyware over the last two years, contradicting assumptions about the...
From ACM News
How Facebook Catches Bugs in Its 100 Million Lines of Code
For the past four years, Facebook has quietly used a homegrown tool called Zoncolan to find bugs in its massive codebase.
From ACM TechNews
A Zoom Flaw Gives Hackers Easy Access to Your Webcam
Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in the Zoom videoconferencing desktop app to commandeer a user's Webcam, a security researcher warns.
From ACM News
Your Cadillac Can Now Drive Itself More Places
The automaker has expanded the range of Super Cruise to include trickier divided highways in the U.S. and Canada.
From ACM TechNews
5G Networks Could Throw Weather Forecasting Into Chaos
U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials are concerned that 5G wireless phones could interfere with weather forecasts.
From ACM News
How Google Is Cramming More Data Into Its New Atlantic Cable
Google says the fiber optic cable it's building across the Atlantic Ocean will be the fastest of its kind.
From ACM TechNews
DJs of the Future Don't Spin Records--They Write Code
Artists in the underground electronic music culture are performing live-coding shows or "algoraves," in which they program software algorithms to create new forms...
From ACM Opinion
The ncanny Valley Nobody's Talking About: Eerie Robot Voices
Call it the Great Convergence of Creepiness. The first bit, the uncanny valley, we're all familiar with by now: If a humanoid robot looks super realistic, but not...
From ACM News
China Is Catching p to the S in A.I. Research, Fast
At the world's top computer-vision conference last June, Google and Apple sponsored an academic contest that challenged algorithms to make sense of images from...
From ACM TechNews
NSA Makes Ghidra, a Powerful Cybersecurity Tool, Open Source
The U.S. National Security Agency has chosen to open source the cybersecurity tool Ghidra, a reverse-engineering platform that takes "compiled" software and "decompiles"...
From ACM News