Communications of the ACM
A Healthy Dose of AI
Building artificial intelligence into medical devices can speed diagnoses and potentially improve treatments and outcomes.
From ACM NewsAn 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
How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens
The inside story of the world's most notorious commercial spyware and the big tech companies waging war against it.
From ACM News
The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots
Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted?
From ACM News
In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing?
In 2011, Hany Farid, a photo-forensics expert, received an e-mail from a bereaved father.
From ACM News
What Termites Can Teach s
New termite colonies are founded on windless evenings, at dusk, after the rain. Most termites have neither eyes nor wings, but every mature colony has a caste of...
From ACM News
Estonia, the Digital Republic
Up the Estonian coast, a five-lane highway bends with the path of the sea, then breaks inland, leaving cars to follow a thin road toward the houses at the water's...
From ACM Careers
Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords
When David Stinson finished high school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1977, the first thing he did was get a job building houses.
From ACM News
Will Driverless-Car Makers Learn to Share?
Last Monday, the Obama Administration released a hundred-and-twelve-page policy tome, "Federal Automated Vehicles Policy," which, despite its sleep-inducing title...
From ACM News
Hacking, Cryptography, and the Countdown to Quantum Computing
Given the recent ubiquity of cyber-scandals—Colin Powell’s stolen e-mails, Simone Biles's leaked medical records, half a billion plundered Yahoo accounts—you might...
From ACM News
Learning to Trust a Self-Driving Car
On a clear morning in early May, Brian Lathrop, a senior engineer for Volkswagen's Electronics Research Laboratory, was in the driver's seat of a Tesla Model S...
From ACM News
Cyber War Comes to the Suburbs
The Bowman Avenue Dam, in Rye, New York, would seem an unlikely candidate for a new front in the cyber wars.
From ACM Opinion
Germanwings Flight 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust
Shortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of "The Second Machine Age," a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik...
From ACM News
What Your Tweets Say About You
How much can your tweets reveal about you? Judging by the last nine hundred and seventy-two words that I used on Twitter, I'm about average when it comes to feeling...
From ACM News
We Know How You Feel
Three years ago, archivists at A.T. & T. stumbled upon a rare fragment of computer history: a short film that Jim Henson produced for Ma Bell, in 1963.
From ACM News
The Solace of Oblivion
October 31, 2006, an eighteen-year-old woman named Nikki Catsouras slammed her father's sports car into the side of a concrete toll booth in Orange County, California...
From ACM Opinion
What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police
On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn't commit.
From ACM Opinion
"we're at Greater Risk": General Keith Alexander
Since Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillence, we know more about how the National Security Agency has been interpreting Section 215 of the Patriot...
From ACM News
The Daunting Challenge of Secure Email
When users of Lavabit, an encrypted e-mail service, logged on to the site this past August, they found a bewildering letter on the site's main page.
From ACM Opinion
Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence
If the New York Times's latest article is to be believed, artificial intelligence is moving so fast it sometimes seems almost "magical."
From ACM News
How the N.S.A Cracked the Web
It's been nearly three months since Edward Snowden started telling the world about the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of global communications.
From ACM News
A Quantum Leap for the Government in Mining Twitter Feeds
Last August, around fifty government employees and private contractors gathered at a Defense Department development laboratory in Crystal City, Virginia.12