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1 month ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Gregory Mone |Allyn Jackson |Bennie Mols |Doug Meil
This year, U.S. rail carrier Amtrak will be installing two novel inspection gateways from Duos Technologies along its busy Northeast Corridor. The barn-like Duos structures straddle railway tracks; as passenger trains speed through at up to 125 miles per hour, 97 cameras and dozens of LED lights arrayed around the sides, top, and bottom of the tracks will capture thousands of high-resolution images of the railcars.
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1 month ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Bennie Mols |Allyn Jackson |Doug Meil
It was only 15 to 20 years ago that social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X), YouTube, and Instagram were hailed as drivers of social connections, multipliers of knowledge and experiences, and even as catalysts for better-functioning democracy.
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1 month ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Allyn Jackson |Bennie Mols |Doug Meil
Partial differential equations (PDEs) are workhorses of science and engineering. They describe a vast range of phenomena, from flow around a ship’s hull, to acoustics in a concert hall, to heat diffusion in a material.
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1 month ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Doug Meil |Alex Vakulov
A lot of things have come and gone in the last few decades in computing. This post will cover a short list of topics that I saw in my career that were either notable or that people used to argue about a lot. Or both. Some of this might be a fun trip down memory lane, and some may be PTSD-inducing, but it is important to periodically look back in computing to learn from past experiences, as things that seem inevitable outcomes today weren’t always so clear at the time.
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2 months ago | 
cacm.acm.org | R. Colin Johnson |Carlos Baquero |Doug Meil
U.S. National Laboratories (Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, and Oak Ridge) possess three of the world’s fastest exascale supercomputers (as of the November 2024 Top500 ranking), which are capable of performing one quintillion (a billion billion) operations per second. One of the highest priorities (among many) for these supercomputers is mapping and characterizing the 95% of the universe that is unseen but inferred to be there—namely, dark matter (~27%) and dark energy (~68%).
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2 months ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Carlos Baquero |R. Colin Johnson |Doug Meil
Imagine you have a paper list of your monthly expenses and want to find the total. A skilled comptometer (mechanical calculator) operator could perform this calculation much faster than is possible today. The reason lies in the input method and the operator’s skill. Entering numbers on a numeric keypad is a slow process, which is why barcodes and RFIDs are commonly used in shops these days. Comptometers allow pressing multiple keys simultaneously using different fingers.
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2 months ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Doug Meil |R. Colin Johnson |Carlos Baquero
An effective dashboard makes complex analysis easy to understand in small bites and hides layers of complexities. But details matter too. Posted Apr 3 2025 “I need a dashboard” says the stakeholder. Just get the data and dash it. Put it on the board. Up-lines should be trending up and the down-lines trending down. Add some graphics for sizzle.
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2 months ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Tim Hornyak |R. Colin Johnson |Carlos Baquero |Doug Meil
“We are analog beings living in a digital world, facing a quantum future,” physicist Neil Turok wrote in his 2012 book The Universe Within. The deluge of digital information we face every day “feels rather alien to us as natural, living creatures,” he later explained. If that’s true, it may be one reason why visiting the Extinct Media Museum in Tokyo, Japan, feels so relaxing.
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Mar 7, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Allyn Jackson |R. Colin Johnson |Carlos Baquero |Doug Meil
Irit Dinur's journey through mathematics and computer science led her to become the first woman professor at the Institute for Advanced Study School of Mathematics. For the first time in its 95-year history, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, NJ, has appointed a woman as a permanent professor in its School of Mathematics.
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Feb 18, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Moshe Y Vardi |R. Colin Johnson |Alex Tray |Doug Meil
Homo Sapiens, “wise human” in Latin, is the taxonomic species name for modern humans. But observing the current state of the world and its trajectory, it is hard for me to accept the description “wise.” I am not the first to object to the “sapiens” descriptor. The French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson argued in 1911 that a better term would be Homo Faber, referring to human tool-making ability. This ability goes back to early humans, about three million years ago.
