Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2011
From ACM Opinion
Director of Mit's Personal Robots Group on Designing Robots that Will Be seful in Our Everyday Lives
It's all about human-robot interaction in this more interpersonal sense, like you saw in Star Wars. Until then, the way we reacted with robots was [by] remote control or button pushing. Now, the robot becomes almost more like…
From ACM News
Encrypt the Web with Https Everywhere
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in collaboration with the Tor Project, has launched an official 1.0 version of HTTPS Everywhere, a tool for the Firefox Web browser that helps secure Web browsing by encrypting connections…
From ACM TechNews
Web Search Is Ready For a Shakeup, Says w Computer Scientist
University of Washington (UW) professor Oren Etzioni recently called on the international academic community and engineers to be more ambitious in designing how users find information online.
The main obstacle to progress…From ACM Opinion
Google's Instant Pages and the Joys of a Computer that Can Read Your Mind
Chrome is reading my mind. When I type a search query in Google's Web browser, it offers me the most likely results right in the address bar. It doesn't just offer suggestions for keywords, as other browsers do, but actual…
From ACM News
Shady Rat Hacking Is Not About China
Jeffrey Carr, author of O'Reilly Media's Inside Cyber Warfare, argues that McAfee's supposed revelations about large-scale Chinese hacking attacks are a smokescreen.
From ACM News
Meet Dark Tangent, the Hacker Behind Black Hat and Def Con
The word "hacker" evokes all kinds of scary images. But Jeff Moss says hackers are exactly what the world needs more of, because they can make the Internet safer for the rest of us.
From ACM News
David Ferrucci, Lead Researcher of Ibm's Watson Project
How do you improve on a computer that beat the world's best Jeopardy! players? Have Watson team up with humanity.
From ACM Opinion
ltimate Logic: To Infinity and Beyond
The mysteries of infinity could lead us to a fantastic structure above and beyond mathematics as we know it.
From ACM Opinion
The Next Mars Rover
Maria Zuber, the Earle A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and Planetary Science and head of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says Gale Crater may reveal clues about Mars's past. She spoke with…
From ACM Opinion
From Gamification to Intelligence Amplification to The Singularity
I've been thinking about the combination of artificial intelligence and intelligence amplification and specifically the symbiosis of these two things. And the question that comes up is what happens when we make machines make…
From ACM News
The Auteur vs. the Committee
At Apple, one is the magic number.
From Communications of the ACM
Geography Is Alive and Well in Virtual Teams
Just because a team is virtual, it doesn't mean geography is dead.
From Communications of the ACM
As Simple As Possible ? But Not More So
An assessment of the U.S. government's EINSTEIN project.
From Communications of the ACM
From Interests to Values
Computer science is not that difficult but wanting to learn it is.
From Communications of the ACM
Storage Strife
Beware keeping data in binary format.
From Communications of the ACM
Journals For Certification, Conferences For Rapid Dissemination
The publication culture in computer science is different. Whereas other disciplines focus on journal publication, the standard practice in CS has been to publish in a conference…