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
Rise of the Drone: From Calif. Garage to Multibillion-Dollar Defense Industry
In 1980, Abraham Karem, an engineer who had emigrated from Israel, retreated into his three-car garage in Hacienda Heights outside Los Angeles and, to the bemusement...
From ACM News
Beijing Launches Its Own Gps Rival
China has begun operating a homegrown satellite navigation service that is designed to provide an alternative to the U.S. Global Positioning System and, according...
From ACM News
Carmakers, .s. Worry About Hacking of Cars
Imagine this nightmarish possibility: al-Qaida terrorists remotely disabling the brakes on thousands of cars racing down a Bay Area freeway during the morning...
From Communications of the ACM
John McCarthy, 1927 - 2011
Winner of the 1971 A.M. Turing Award, John McCarthy was a founder of artificial intelligence and inventor of the Lisp programming language.
From Communications of the ACM
Revamping Storage Performance
Great strides are being made in finding fast alternatives to the slow disks that dominate storage systems, but fast media are not nearly enough.
From Communications of the ACM
Better Medicine Through Machine Learning
Computers that tease out patterns from clinical data could improve patient diagnosis and care.
From ACM TechNews
Congress Funds Exascale Computing
The U.S. Department of Energy recently won full Congressional funding to support the pursuit of exascale computing.
From ACM News
No More Access to Google's Hadoop Cloud For Researchers
Google announced it is ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access...
From ACM News
Self-Healing Electronic Chip Tests May Aid Space Travel
Self-repairing electronic chips are one step closer, according to a team of U.S. researchers, creating a circuit that heals itself when cracked thanks to the...
From ACM News
The Perfect Software Tester?
As Aspiritech and other companies are discovering, autistic individuals possess certain unique skills that make them ideal as software testers.
From ACM News
Amazon Builds World's Fastest Nonexistent Supercomputer
The 42nd fastest supercomputer on earth doesn’t exist.
From ACM News
The Tevatron's Enduring Computing Legacy
Few laypeople think of computing innovation in connection with the Tevatron particle accelerator, which shut down earlier this year. Mention of the Tevatron inspires...
From ACM News
Mystery Men Forge Servers For Giants of Internet
If you drive down highway 880 from Oakland, Calif., take an exit about 30 miles south, and snake past a long line of car dealerships, you’ll find an ordinary...
From ACM News
How the 10,000-Year Clock Measures Time
Ten thousand years is about the age of civilisation. Archaeologists have a few relics that have spanned this period, mostly stone tools and works of art. But...
From ACM Opinion
Why Apple's Acquisition of Anobit Matters
Apple reportedly acquired the Israeli flash memory design firm Anobit in a deal that cost the company $500 million.
From ACM News
Quantum Computing with Holograms
Light is one of the most promising carriers of quantum information. It is robust against decoherence because it does not interact with stray electric and magnetic...
From ACM News
Supercomputers Get Real
HPC designers, domain experts, and embedded chip makers are teaming up to create optimized applications.
From ACM News
Rare, Last Look Inside Space Shuttle Atlantis
Space shuttle Atlantis, which only five months ago flew the final mission of NASA's 30-year shuttle program, is now being prepared for its public display at the...
From ACM TechNews
San Diego Supercomputer Center Welcomes 'gordon' Supercomputer as a Research Powerhouse
The San Diego Supercomputer Center's new Gordon supercomputer is designed to help researchers solve the most challenging data-intensive problems, including mapping...
From ACM TechNews