I would like to add a bit of etymological history concerning the word "robot" to Vinton G. Cerf's President's Letter "What's a Robot?" (Jan. 2013).
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
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Technical Perspective: Understanding Pictures of Rooms
The rich world is getting older, so we will see many efforts to build robots that can provide some in-home care for frail people. These robots will need computer programs that can see and understand rooms where people live.
As computational tools open up new ways of understanding history, historians and computer scientists are working together to explore the possibilities.
Scientists at the Blue Brain Project are using supercomputers to simulate neural connections in a 3-D model of a slice of mammalian brain.
Offline Management in Virtualized Environments
How to run virtual machines together with physical machines, especially when sharing computational resources.
Exploration and Mapping with Autonomous Robot Teams
The MAGIC 2010 robot competition showed how well multi-robot teams can work with human teams in urban search.
Guided by collective intelligence, teams of small, simple robots could soon accomplish amazing feats.
Hazy: Making It Easier to Build and Maintain Big-Data Analytics
Racing to unleash the full potential of big data with the latest statistical and machine-learning techniques.
The Story of the Teapot in DHTML
It is easy to do amazing things, such as rendering the classic teapot in HTML and CSS.
Mobile performance issues? Fix the back end, not just the client.
Symbolic Execution For Software Testing: Three Decades Later
The challenges — and great promise — of modern symbolic execution techniques, and the tools to help implement them.
Computer modeling is radically redefining healthcare and epidemiology by providing new tools for understanding the impact of different intervention strategies.
Computational models are tackling the complexity of biology, from single-celled microbes to human organs.
The new Mars rover has attracted plenty of attention for its planetary gymnastics, but the big breakthroughs are under the hood.
Thinking Methodically About Performance
The USE method addresses shortcomings in other commonly used methodologies.
Power Challenges May End the Multicore Era
Tthe microprocessor industry has shifted to multicore scaling as its principal strategy for continuing performance growth. However, while transistor count increases continue, the per-transistor speed and energy efficiency improvements have slowed dramatically.
Positioning ACM For an Open Access Future
The age of open access is upon us. Increasingly, the consensus of authors and their funding institutions is that the fruits of taxpayer-supported research should be freely available. This is a compelling argument and a noble goal. But, achieving open access is not easy.
A Decade of OS Access-Control Extensibility
Open source security foundations for mobile and embedded devices.
Technical Perspective: Is Dark Silicon Real?
The microprocessor chip R&D community has been well aware of the so-called "power wall" challenge for over a decade. The following work by Esmaeilzadeh et al. is a landmark paper that opens our eyes to the unrelenting power challenge we face in the multicore era.
Athena Award Nominations Closing Soon!
Don't miss out on the chance to nominate someone for an Athena Award from ACM-W.
In most formulations, robots have the ability to manipulate and affect the real world. I would like to posit, however, that the notion of robot could usefully be expanded to include programs that perform functions, ingest input and produce output that has a perceptible effect.
The leading open source system for processing big data continues to evolve, but new approaches with added features are on the rise.
Human Mobility Characterization from Cellular Network Data
Anonymous location data from cellular phone networks sheds light on how people move around on a large scale.
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