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Latest News News Archive Refine your search:
dateMore Than a Year Ago
subjectPerformance And Reliability
authorMIT News
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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

Speed Limit For Birds

The northern goshawk is one of nature’s diehard thrill-seekers.

Sharpening the Lines
From ACM TechNews

Sharpening the Lines

Researchers at MIT and the University of Utah have developed a technique that they say surpasses the fundamental limits of microchip design and could lead to more...

Streamlining Chip Design
From ACM TechNews

Streamlining Chip Design

MIT researchers have developed a system that enables hardware designers to specify, in a single programming language, all of the functions they want a device to...

Robots in Reality
From ACM News

Robots in Reality

Consider the following scenario: A scout surveys a high-rise building that's been crippled by an earthquake, trapping workers inside. After looking for a point...

Important Step Toward Computing with Light
From ACM News

Important Step Toward Computing with Light

There has been enormous progress in recent years toward the development of photonic chips—devices that use light beams instead of electrons to carry out their...

Searching For Balloons in a Social Network
From ACM TechNews

Searching For Balloons in a Social Network

In the process of winning DARPA's Red Balloon Challenge, the MIT researchers collected and analyzed a large amount of data on the size and scope of Internet connections...

A New Planning Tool Helps Direct Traffic on Aircraft Carriers
From ACM News

A New Planning Tool Helps Direct Traffic on Aircraft Carriers

On the deck of an aircraft carrier, where up to 60 aircraft are crammed into 4.5 acres (1.8 hectares), real estate is at a premium. While aircraft directors wave...

Improving Recommendation Systems
From ACM TechNews

Improving Recommendation Systems

MIT professor Devavrat Shah thinks that the most common approach to recommendation systems is fundamentally flawed; he says recommendation systems should ask users...

Long Live the Qubit!
From ACM News

Long Live the Qubit!

A quantum computer is a device—still largely theoretical—that could perform some types of calculations much more rapidly than classical computers. While a bit...

Toward Faster Transistors
From ACM News

Toward Faster Transistors

In the 1980s and '90s, competition in the computer industry was all about "clock speed"—how many megahertz, and ultimately gigahertz, a chip could boast. But...

Better Glasses-Free 3-D
From ACM TechNews

Better Glasses-Free 3-D

MIT researchers have developed HR3D, a new method for glasses-free 3D displays. The researchers say their method could double the battery life of devices such...

From ACM News

The Next Operating System

Operating systems for multicore chips will need more information about their own performance—and more resources for addressing whatever problems arise.

The Surprising ­sefulness of Sloppy Arithmetic
From ACM News

The Surprising ­sefulness of Sloppy Arithmetic

A computer chip that performs imprecise calculations could process some types of data thousands of times more efficiently than existing chips.

Faster Websites, More Reliable Data
From ACM TechNews

Faster Websites, More Reliable Data

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed TxCache, a database caching system that eliminates certain types of asymmetric data retrieval while...

From ACM News

Multicore May Not Be So Scary

Research suggests that the free operating system Linux will keep up with the addition of more "cores," or processing units, to computer chips.

First Improvement of Fundamental Algorithm in 10 Years
From ACM News

First Improvement of Fundamental Algorithm in 10 Years

The max-flow problem, which is ubiquitous in network analysis, scheduling, and logistics, can now be solved more efficiently than ever.

From ACM TechNews

How the Brain Recognizes Objects

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's McGovern Institute of Brain Research have devised a computational model describing how the primate brain...

When Good Enough is Better
From ACM TechNews

When Good Enough is Better

MIT researchers have developed a system that automatically finds parts of computer code where accuracy can be traded for significant increases in speed. 

Seeing the Forest For the Trees
From ACM TechNews

Seeing the Forest For the Trees

New object recognition systems that deconstruct images into ever smaller elements, using methods developed at MIT and UCLA, should be much more efficient than previous...

Mastering Multicore
From ACM TechNews

Mastering Multicore

MIT researchers have developed software that makes computer simulations of physical systems run more efficiently on multicore chips. 
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