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 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 Opinion
Why Everyone Was Wrong About Net Neutrality
Today, the Federal Communications Commission, by a vote of three to two, enacted its strongest-ever rules on net neutrality, preserving an open Internet by prohibiting...
From ACM News
This Is Your Avatar Speaking
Last year, in a lab at the University of Barcelona, an anonymous woman was fitted with headphones, a microphone, a head-mounted virtual-reality display, a motion...
From ACM Opinion
The Shape of Things to Come
In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in secondary school, and still has...
From ACM Opinion
Netflix's Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
On the opening night of this year's Sundance Film Festival, two films, as usual, had their premières, gaining maximum exposure to reporters and critics.
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
Material Question
Until Andre Geim, a physics professor at the University of Manchester, discovered an unusual new material called graphene, he was best known for an experiment...
From ACM News
Print Thyself
In February of 2012, a medical team at the University of Michigan's C. S. Mott Children's Hospital, in Ann Arbor, carried out an unusual operation on a three-month...
From ACM Opinion
The Hazards of Going on Autopilot
At 9:18 P.M. on February 12, 2009, Continental Connection Flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air, took off from Newark International Airport.
From ACM Opinion
What Comes After the Turing Test?
Over the weekend, the news broke that a "supercomputer" program called "Eugene Goostman"—an impersonation of a wisecracking, thirteen-year-old Ukranian boy—had...
From ACM News
The Electronic Holy War
In May, 1997, I.B.M.'s Deep Blue supercomputer prevailed over Garry Kasparov in a series of six chess games, becoming the first computer to defeat a world-champion...
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
Nasa's Asteroid-In-A-Bag Recipe
"It’s not as crazy as it seemed at the beginning," Charles Elachi, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Washington Post, about NASA's latest...
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.
From ACM News
The Seventy-Billion-Mile Telescope
When I was a teen-ager, I spent many nights gazing through a telescope at an amateur observatory in Cranford, New Jersey. Saturn, to the naked eye, is a shining...
From ACM News
The Evolution of the Web, in a Blink
The Web browser you're probably using to read this article is a small marvel of engineering.
From ACM News
The Martian Chroniclers
There once were two planets, new to the galaxy and inexperienced in life. Like fraternal twins, they were born at the same time, about four and a half billion years...
From ACM News