Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
The Do-Not-Call List Has a Gaping Hole
Sure, legitimate telemarketers will refrain from calling you if you've put your phone number on it. But criminal telephone spammers will call you anyway because...
From ACM Opinion
How to Read Between the Lines of Tim Cook's Epic Interview
To celebrate five years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook has given a very long, exclusive interview to the Washington Post about his experiences so far. But what he didn’t...
From ACM Opinion
The All-American Iphone
Donald Trump says that if he becomes president, he will "get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China." Bernie Sanders...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Selling Shovels in the Machine-Learning Gold Rush
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia, is either very prescient or very lucky.
From ACM Opinion
What If Apple Is Wrong?
Soon after Devon Godfrey was shot to death in his apartment in Harlem on the evening of April 12, 2010, officers with the New York Police Department thought they...
From ACM Opinion
Head of British Intelligence Agency on Apple, Snowden, and Regrets
Shortly after Robert Hannigan took over the British signals-intelligence agency GCHQ in 2014, he implored technology companies to do more to facilitate investigations...
From ACM Opinion
How Apple Could Fed-Proof Its Software pdate System
Apple's refusal to comply with a judge's demand that it help the FBI unlock a terrorist's iPhone has triggered a roiling debate about how much the U.S. government...
From ACM Opinion
The Step Needed to Make Virtual Reality More Real
It's one thing to play the arcade game Whac-A-Mole by swinging around an oversized mallet; it's far easier to whack those moles virtually, controlling the mallet...
From ACM Opinion
Fighting Isis Online
The two men pecked out messages on opposite sides of the country.
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Cyborg Virtual Assistant Is Learning from Its Trainers
Late last month a few hundred lucky users of Facebook's mobile messaging app got an unusual new contact to talk with: M, a virtual assistant powered by a mixture...
From ACM Opinion
Putting Technology in Its Place
Kentaro Toyama calls himself "a recovering technoholic"—someone who once was "addicted to a technological way of solving problems."
From ACM Opinion
Toolkits For the Mind
When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern...
From ACM Opinion
Reality Check: Comparing Hololens and Magic Leap
I've seen two competing visions for a future in which virtual objects are merged seamlessly with the real world.
From ACM Opinion
What Are Moocs Good For?
A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these "massive open online courses" stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Robotics Inventor Cynthia Breazeal About Social Robots
As an academic, Cynthia Breazeal pioneered research into social interaction between humans and robots, developing Kismet, a robot that used facial expressions in...
From ACM Opinion
Ray Kurzweil Says He's Breathing Intelligence Into Google Search
The big announcements at Google's I/O event in San Francisco Wednesday didn't mention Web search, the technology that got the company started and made it so successful...
From ACM Opinion
Imposing Security
Three computer bugs this year exposed passwords, e-mails, financial data, and other kinds of sensitive information connected to potentially billions of people.
From ACM Opinion
Glass, Darkly
Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone, but it's a very different machine.
From ACM Opinion