Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM News
It's All About the Genes and the Brain Machines
The amount of time and money needed to sequence genomes continued to fall in 2012, perhaps to no one’s surprise.
From ACM Opinion
Why China's Homemade Microchips Will Struggle to Displace Western Giants
If China's ultimate aim in the sphere of technology is to become completely self-sufficient, it is well on the way to achieving this ambitious goal.
From ACM Opinion
How Technology Has Restored the Soul of Politics
In 1979, I was an aeronautical-engineering major at San Jose State University, sneaking time in the laser lab to make holograms or running over to the computer...
From ACM Opinion
By Hiring Kurzweil, Google Just Killed the Singularity
Late last Friday, Google announced a jaw-dropping hire: Ray Kurzweil will join the company as a Director of Engineering. Has the world’s brainiest tech company"rapture...
From ACM Opinion
What Sinofsky's Departure Suggests About the Current State, and Likely Future, of Microsoft
Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows division, abruptly left the company on November 12, shortly after introducing the latest version of the company's...
From ACM Opinion
Why Jony Ive Shouldn't Kill Off Apple's Skeuomorphic Interfaces
Last week Apple fired Scott Forstall, the architect of its iOS platform, and handed his duties over to the company's chief industrial designer, Jonathan Ive. Ive...
From ACM Opinion
The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years
If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years, you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford’s...
From ACM Opinion
Review: Raspberry Pi
You can get a lot for $35 these days. It bought me what looks like a credit card-size James Bond gadget prototype but is actually a fully functional computer.
From ACM Opinion
Why Did Reddit Succeed Where Digg Failed?
In August 2006, less than two years after its launch, the social content aggregation site Digg was an Internet darling. That month, founder Kevin Rose grinned from...
From ACM Careers
Automate or Perish
In Automate This, a book due out next month, author and entrepreneur Christopher Steiner tells the story of stockbroker Thomas Peterffy, the creator of the first...
From ACM Opinion
Where Speech Recognition Is Going
Until recently, the idea of holding a conversation with a computer seemed pure science fiction. If you asked a computer to "open the pod bay doors"—well, that was...
From ACM Opinion
The Facebook Fallacy
Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.
From ACM Opinion
How a Private Data Market Could Ruin Facebook
To justify its sky-high valuation, Facebook will have to increase its profit per user at rates that seem unlikely, even by the most generous predictions.
From ACM Opinion
Review: Bad Apple
Apple's 1997 "Think Different" marketing campaign was one of its most memorable ever.
From ACM Opinion
Was Cameron's Deep Dive as seless as Manned Space Flight?
Ninety-nine percent of what we know about the solar system came to us from unmanned probes.
From ACM Opinion
Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages
Compared to the versions that are hacked together late at night under insane deadline pressure, the programming languages to come out of academia are failures.
From ACM Opinion
How Young Is Too Young to Learn to Code?
When the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 spend exactly zero time in front of screens, what its members are concerned about is substitution—all...
From ACM Opinion
Why Transparent Tracking Needs Its Own App
Amid widespread concern over an obscure piece of smart-phone diagnostic software that some experts say could be used to collect and transmit sensitive information...
From ACM Opinion
Is Personal Data the New Currency?
What if Facebook paid you? Several startups envision an era in which we are all the brokers, and beneficiaries, of our own personal data.
From ACM Opinion