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3 weeks ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Sam Greengard |Mario Antoine Aoun |Gregory Goth
The examples are nothing if not relatable: preparing breakfast, or playing a game of chess or tic-tac-toe. Yet the idea of learning from the environment and taking steps that progress toward a goal apparently was under-studied when ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton took on the topic in the late 1970s. Eventually, their research led to the creation of reinforcement learning algorithms that sought not to recognize patterns but maximize rewards.
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Feb 13, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Alex Tray |Doug Meil |Sam Greengard
In an age of breathless predictions and sky-high valuations, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has emerged as one of the best-known skeptics of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |R. Colin Johnson |Mark Halper |Karen Emslie
2024 ACM Athena Award recipient and University of Southern California professor Maja Matarić is not afraid to get personal. In her quest to design socially assistive robots—robots that provide social, not physical, support in realms like rehabilitation, education, and therapy—she realized that personalizing interactions would boost both engagement and outcomes. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made that easier, though as always, surprises are never far when human beings are involved.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Sam Greengard |Herbert Bruderer
Amanda Randles on how modeling blood flows inside the human body can save, and improve, lives. Posted Oct 25 2024 What does your blood look like as it circulates through your body? The answer depends not just on the structure of your cells but the geometry of your vascular system.
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Apr 10, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Neil Savage |Saurabh Bagchi |Karen Emslie
Drawn to computer science at the suggestion of his parents—who thought the field might provide a more practical outlet for his love of mathematics—Avi Wigderson, the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient, has made lasting contributions to the theory of computational complexity. Wigderson’s voracious intellectual curiosity led him to explore topics ranging from cryptography and optimization to randomness, pseudorandomness, and circuit complexity.
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Feb 29, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Douglas Schuler |Orit Hazzan |Alex Vakulov
Cryptographer and 2022 ACM Prize winner Yael Tauman Kalai is keenly aware of the trade-offs that often must be made between security and computational efficiency. Kalai, who works as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and as an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has developed groundbreaking methods for succinctly verifying the correctness of a computation. Here, she explains how they work.
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Feb 22, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann
View as:PrintMobile AppACM Digital LibraryIn the Digital EditionShare:Cryptographer and 2022 ACM Prize winner Yael Tauman Kalai is keenly aware of the trade-offs that often must be made between security and computational efficiency. Kalai, who works as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has developed groundbreaking methods for succinctly verifying the correctness of a computation.
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Dec 21, 2023 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann
View as:PrintMobile AppACM Digital LibraryIn the Digital EditionShare:David Papworth, recipient of the 2022 ACM Charles P. "Chuck" Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award, accepted a big job in 1990 when he joined Intel's P6 micro-processor team as lead designer. The P6—commercialized as the Pentium Pro—was intended to leapfrog micro-processor design, and it did.
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Nov 17, 2023 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann
View as:PrintMobile AppACM Digital LibraryFull Text (PDF)In the Digital EditionShare:Margo Seltzer, the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems at the University of British Columbia and 2023–2024 ACM Athena Lecturer, is the kind of researcher who stands out not just for her accomplishments, but for her tirelessness.
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Aug 23, 2023 | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann
View as:PrintMobile AppACM Digital LibraryFull Text (PDF)In the Digital EditionShare:The human brain is wired to be able to learn new things—and in all kinds of different ways, from imitating others to watching online explainer videos. What if robots could do the same thing? It is a question that ACM Prize recipient Pieter Abbeel, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, has spent his career researching.
