Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete
The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately...
From ACM Opinion
19th-Century Paleontology Was at the Forefront of Big Data
In 1981, when I was 9 years old, my father took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark.
From ACM Opinion
For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest
When I saw that Google had introduced a "Classic Papers" section of Google Scholar, its search tool for academic journals, I couldn't help but stroke my chin professorially...
From ACM Opinion
How Trump's Immigration Rules Will Hurt the .s. Tech Sector
When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday issuing a temporary ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, it went into effect...
From ACM Opinion
Why Technological Innovation Relies on Government Support
Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley pioneer who died last week at age 79, was many things: a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Hungary and refugee of Cold War Eastern...
From ACM Opinion
The Room Where the Internet Was Born
Starting a cross-country drive to New York in Los Angeles is pretty inconvenient, unless your cross-country drive is also a vision quest to see the Internet.
From ACM Careers
The Coming Age of the Internet Naturalist
Three years ago, Shaun Winterton was looking at photos of bugs on Flickr.
From ACM Opinion
Google Wants to Make 'science Fiction' a Reality—and That's Limiting Their Imagination
Self-driving cars, extreme life extension, and global wifi provided by weather balloons: Google makes projects that sound like science fiction into reality at its...
From ACM Opinion
All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines
On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New...
From ACM Opinion
Playing War: How the Military ses Video Games
According to popular discourse, video games are either the divine instrument of education’s future or the software of Satan himself, provoking young men to carry...
From ACM Careers
Students Are 'hacking' Their School-Issued Ipads: Good For Them
Almost immediately after receiving their new school-issued iPads this fall, students in Indiana and in California (and probably elsewhere) managed to bypass the...
From ACM Opinion
Civics For a Digital Age
Over half of the world’s population lives in urban environments, and that number is rapidly growing according to the World Health Organization.
From ACM Opinion
Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments
Last year, while cleaning out the basement of my childhood home, I discovered a plastic storage bin marked "Calcusoft." Inside were piles of notebooks filled with...
From ACM Opinion
Time and Navigation: How We Found Our Way in the World
Type an address into your phone, and up will pop a step-by-step route from where you are to where you want to be. This is, in its way, magic—magic that has, at...
From ACM Opinion
The Touch-Screen Generation
On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of children’s apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off...
From ACM Opinion
The Best Books About Biotechnology
I've spent the last few weeks creating a syllabus for myself on the world—people, techniques, theory, history—of biotechnology. I've talked with some scholars,...
From ACM Opinion
Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry
In April of 2010, Eric Schmidt delivered the keynote address at the conference of the American Society of News Editors in Washington, D.C. During the talk, thearticulate...
From ACM Opinion
How Computers Are Creating a Second Economy Without Workers
When the disappointing jobs numbers were reported last week (employers added 120,000 jobs in March, about half the number reported in the two previous months),...
From ACM Opinion
How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code
When Colin Hughes was about 11 years old his parents brought home a rather strange toy. It wasn't colorful or cartoonish; it didn't seem to have any lasers or...12