Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win
In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama's campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West...
From ACM Opinion
Future Mars Missions: Can Humans Actually Trump Robots?
For decades scientists have backed the idea of sending robots to collect Martian rocks and return them to Earth, a project that should be possible well before humans...
From ACM Opinion
Can You Do a Day's Work on a Cell Phone?
"It’s really a little computer." You remember the first time you said it, a few years ago, when you grasped just how much a smartphone can do.
From ACM Opinion
Science Is the Key to Growth
Mitt Romney said in all three presidential debates that we need to expand the economy. But he left out a critical ingredient: investments in science and technology...
From ACM Opinion
Is Failure to Predict a Crime?
I learned with disbelief last Monday about the decision of an Italian judge to convict seven scientific experts of manslaughter and to sentence them to six years...
From ACM Opinion
Does a Public "find My Iphone" Search Violate Personal Privacy?
A guy stole my iPhone. I tracked it and posted his address online. Was that wrong?
From ACM Opinion
The Flop That Saved Microsoft
It wasn't very easy to get my hands on a Zune. After Microsoft's long-pitied music player wonSlate's Reader Takeover poll—in which I'd promised to reassess an overlooked...
From ACM Opinion
The Consequences of Machine Intelligence
The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers.
From ACM Opinion
Rapture of the Nerds: Will the Singularity Turn S Into Gods or End the Human Race?
Hundreds of the world’s brightest minds—engineers from Google and IBM, hedge funds quants, and Defense Department contractors building artificial intelligence—were...
From ACM Opinion
Few Winners in Heated Cellphone Wars
If you are wondering who will be your cellphone provider next year, so are the cellphone companies.
From ACM Careers
Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2013
On Monday, the research firm laid out "10 critical tech trends for the next five years." Tuesday, it took a look at a little closer in, providing a list of the...
From ACM Opinion
The Michigan Fight Song and Four Other Reasons to Avoid Internet Voting
In a Monday article, we described the security and reliability problems that have undermined public confidence in electronic voting machines within the United States...
From ACM Opinion
Cybercrime: Mobile Changes Everything—and No One's Safe
The FBI recently put out a mobile malware alert, providing us with a sobering reminder of this "evil software" for phones and tablets.
From ACM Opinion
Can We Trust Voting Machines?
Last week, a congressional report claimed that using Chinese telecommunications companies’ goods and services in the United States could threaten national security...
From ACM Opinion
DARPA-Funded Radio Hackrf Aims to Be a $300 Wireless Swiss Army Knife For Hackers
Since the days of Alan Turing, the promise of a digital computer has been that of a universal machine, one that can be a word processor one minute and a robot brain...
From ACM Opinion
Ipad Mini Launch: Why Steve Jobs Thought 7in Tablets Would Fail
So if Apple is really launching a 7.85in "iPad mini", how does that square with what Steve Jobs said two years ago?
From ACM Opinion
Capitol Hill Rhetoric Takes Aim at Wrong Cybersecurity Targets
Defense secretary Leon Panetta couldn't resist, could he? He couldn't fight the urge to dig deep into the information security cliché handbook and yank out that...
From ACM Opinion
Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button?
Over the years, Keith McCarthy has become used to a certain way of doing things on his personal computers, which, like most others on the planet, have long run...
From ACM Opinion
Star Trek Technology: How 21st Century Scientists Are Making It So
Destination Star Trek London has kicked off at the ExCeL exhibition centre, and I'm willing to bet that among those heading down for a weekend of pointy-eared fun...
From ACM Opinion