The clash of two titans—physics and chemistry—are major barriers to human space travel to Mars and beyond, and may well make it impossible... at least with current...Cosmos Magazine From ACM Opinion | April 13, 2011
The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation.Google From ACM Opinion | April 5, 2011
Strategic theorists frequently lament that military planners are very effective at preparing for the last war, not the next one. Planners today must cope with...Strategic Studies Quarterly From ACM Opinion | April 1, 2011
Programming is a creative endeavor, and therefore there is such a thing as coder's block. What does it take to clear the blockage?George V. Neville-Neil From Communications of the ACM | April 1, 2011
Successful global IT team managers combine general distributed team management skills enhanced with cultural sensitivity.
Fred Niederman, Felix B. Tan From Communications of the ACM | April 1, 2011
Years ago, when I was an ROTC instructor, the first unit of instruction for rising juniors dealt with communication skills. Near the beginning of the unit, I...Strategic Studies Quarterly From ACM Opinion | March 15, 2011
It's been a banner year or so for artificial intelligence, from the recent triumph of I.B.M.'s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer to a wave of news coverage of the...The New York Times From ACM Opinion | March 10, 2011
To humans, computer intelligence is a puzzle, as if the machines have split personalities. They can be so remarkably smart at times, yet so bafflingly dumb at...The New York Times From ACM Opinion | March 7, 2011
Whenever the military rolls out a new robot program, folks like to joke about SkyNet or the Rise of the Machines. But this time, the military really is starting...Wired From ACM News | March 4, 2011
James Gleick's first chapter has the title "Drums That Talk." It explains the concept of information by looking at a simple example.The New York Review of Books From ACM News | February 28, 2011
Robotics can be a tricky subject to teach children, and it's hard to know where to start. Cubelets is a system of modular cubes that each have one use, interaction...Arstechnica From ACM Opinion | February 23, 2011
If IBM's Watson machine defeats people on TV's Jeopardy this week, does that mean that computers are smarter than humans? Maybe not. But the performance could...Technology Review From ACM Opinion | February 15, 2011
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial...The Atlantic From ACM News | February 8, 2011
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything...The New York Times From ACM Opinion | February 7, 2011
In January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest...The New York Times From ACM Opinion | January 28, 2011
With the amount of disk space available to the modern programmer, and the lack of parental supervision in most...George V. Neville-Neil From Communications of the ACM | February 1, 2011