Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
On Tech Issues, Obama Falls Short of High Expectations
Barack Obama was the embodiment of the modern, high-tech president when he took office. However, halfway through his first term, he has yet to deliver on much...
From ACM Opinion
Atari Co-Founder Nolan Bushnell on the Future of Software
Whether you know him by name, you almost certainly have firsthand experience with some of Nolan Bushnell's work. He's known by many as the father of video games...
From ACM Opinion
Web
The origins of our Webified age were hardly auspicious. Two decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory...
From ACM Opinion
What You Should Include in an Agreement with a Cloud Provider
Cloud computing is a lot like the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. Just 9.3% of companies say they'll be using platform or...
From ACM Opinion
I'm Not a Real Scientist, and That's Okay
What kind of discipline is computer science? I thought it was a science when I received my bachelor's degree. I believed its subdiscipline software engineering...
From ACM Opinion
Could Terrorists Launch America's Nuclear Missiles?
The Air Force calls the situation "Launch Facilities Down." On Oct. 23, a Wyoming-based squadron of 50 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—enough...
From ACM Opinion
Why China's New Supercomputer Isn't Actually the World's Fastest
Peak performance doesn't equal sustained performance, and the NVIDIA GPUs in the Tianhe 1A are especially bad at the latter.
From ACM News
The Speed Camera that Doesn't Just Check Your Speed
Everyone knows that speed cameras work. They create the discipline of a lissom lady in leather and make sure everyone understands just what the rules are. In fact...
From ACM Opinion
The Day the Internet Threw a Righteous Hissyfit About Copyright And Pie
So you might have heard a story yesterday about a little magazine called Cooks Source. Up until then, you might never have heard of Cooks Source. But maybe you've...
From ACM Opinion
Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?
American broadband capacity might not be able to keep up with everyone who wants to stream movies.
From ACM Opinion
Complexity of It Systems Will Be Our ndoing
CTO says $2 million project has less than 50% chance of success.
From ACM Opinion
Is China a Supercomputer Threat? (Q&A)
With China expected to officially take the supercomputer performance crown next month, I asked an expert about the state of supercomputing in the U.S. and whether...
From ACM Opinion
Google Is Polluting the Internet
The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore.
From ACM Opinion
On the Threshold of the Avatar Era
In a garage in Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1980s, some friends and I were the first humans to experience becoming avatars—that is, movable representations of ourselves...
From Communications of the ACM
In Support of Computer Science Teachers and the CSTA
If we want more computer science students, and if we want computer scientists to be understood for what we are, we must clarify the message about computer science...
From Communications of the ACM
Sensor Networks For the Sciences
Lessons from the field derived from developing wireless sensor networks for monitoring active and hazardous volcanoes.
From Communications of the ACM
Why Isn't Cyberspace More Secure?
Evaluating governmental actions—and inactions—toward improving cyber security and addressing future challenges.
From Communications of the ACM
Why Do Software Startups Patent (or Not)?
Assessing the controversial results of a recent empirical study of the role of intellectual property in software startups.
From Communications of the ACM