Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Human Missions to Mars Will Look Completely Different from The Martian
Landing in U.S. theaters last week, Ridley Scott's The Martian is being acclaimed as one of the most realistic portrayals of human space exploration ever filmed...
From ACM Opinion
Searching For Life in Martian Water Will Be Very, Very Tricky
NASA scientists announced today the best evidence yet that Mars, once thought dry, sterile and dead, may yet have life in it: Liquid water still flows on at least...
From ACM Opinion
Do We Need to Prepare For the Robot prising?
For most of my life, I've been disappointed in robots.
From ACM Opinion
sing Technology to Break the Speed Barrier of Reading
I grew up in a tiny New York City apartment, packed in alongside our four cats and my father's immense personal library of some 3000 books.
From ACM Opinion
Why Neuroscience Needs Hackers
There was a time when neuroscientists could only dream of having such a problem.
From ACM Opinion
Move Over, Siri—the Next Generation of Virtual Assistants Is Almost Here
Virtual voice-controlled assistants such as Siri, Cortana and Google Now are magical.
From ACM Opinion
Will Artificial Intelligence Surpass Our Own?
Famed science-fiction writer Fredric Brown (1906–1972) delighted in creating the shortest of short stories. "Answer," published in 1954, encapsulated a prescient...
From ACM Opinion
The Pluto Punch-Through
On July 14, 2015 NASA's New Horizons spacecraft finally reaches Pluto. But the encounter is brief.
From ACM Opinion
Building an Earth-Size Telescope, 1 Station at a Time
Imagine a trio of aerobatic aircraft. Over the years they've gotten very good at their routine. But they want to add another five or six or seven members.
From ACM Opinion
Fateful Phone Call Spawned Moore's Law
In their new book, Moore's Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley's Quiet Revolutionary, authors Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock and Rachel Jones chronicle...
From ACM Opinion
Watch the First Artificial Gravity Experiment
Gravity, as the old joke goes, sucks.
From ACM Opinion
How to Restore Trust in American Technology
Last November in the town of Wuzhen, China hosted its first large international summit on Internet governance and cybersecurity.
From ACM Opinion
How to Choose the Form of an Infographic: It's All About Context
As a graphics designer, I have a love/hate relationship with circles.
From ACM News
Search Gives s Superpowers
Machine learning—an area of AI focusing on systems that "learn" from data in order to navigate future similar scenarios—is one of the ways we’ve managed to give...
From ACM Opinion
How the Smartphone Killed Typing—but Started an AI Revolution
Steve Jobs often swam against the tide of prevailing opinion.
From ACM Opinion
Why We're All Beta Testers Now
I taught a class a few years ago at Columbia Business School called "What Makes a Hit a Hit—and a Flop a Flop."
From ACM Opinion
The Surreal Task of Landing on a Comet
On November 12th 2014 the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission will eject the small robotic lander Philae on a trajectory that should take it down to the surface...
From ACM Opinion
Visualizing 4-Dimensional Asteroids
One of the largest treasure troves of astronomical data comes from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), an ongoing scan of the firmament that began 15 years ago...
From ACM Opinion
The Case For Kill Switches in Military Weaponry
This summer the insurgent group ISIS captured the Iraqi city of Mosul—and along with it, three army divisions' worth of U.S.-supplied equipment from the Iraqi army...
From ACM Opinion