Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Medicine Is Now
In our era of instant gratification, the world of medicine seems like an outlier.
From ACM Opinion
The Father of Fractals
In nature,technology and art the most common form of regularity is repetition: a single element repeated many times, as on a tile floor. But another form is possible...
From ACM Opinion
How Big Data Can Solve America's Gun Problem
Big data might have stopped the massacres in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek.
From ACM Opinion
We Don't Need More Data Scientists; Just Make Big Data Easier to se
Virtually any article today about big data inevitably turns to the notion that the country is suffering from a crucial shortage of data scientists.
From ACM Opinion
Sneaky Apps That Track Cellphones
A perversion of smartphone technology called "stalking apps"—precise, secretive trackings of the movements of cellphone users—is increasingly a matter of national...
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
Forget Yolo: Why 'big Data' Should Be the Word of the Year
"Big Data" hasn't made any of the words-of-the-year lists I've seen so far. That's probably because it didn't get the wide public exposure given to items like "...
From ACM Opinion
Who Owns the Content You pload Online?
The outrage over Instagram's announcement that it is changing its terms and conditions has turned the spotlight on the relationship between websites and users who...
From ACM Opinion
A Plea to Google: Protect Our Email Privacy
We recently learned that even the director of the CIA, David Petraeus, can't seem to secure his private email conversations properly, and over the past month tech...
From ACM Opinion
I Am Not Big Brother
I've grown accustomed to reading inaccurate accounts of my day job. I'm in political data.
From ACM Opinion
How Can Computational Science Surpass the Software Error Plateau?
Computation plays a crucial role in generating scientific results, but also adds to its complexity. The ability to reproduce code and data that generates results...
From ACM Opinion
No Longer Vaporware: The Internet of Things Is Finally Talking
The rise of the machines has begun: Steve Sande’s household fan is now self-aware.
From ACM Opinion
11 Big Tech Trends You'll See in 2013
Writing prediction pieces is a funny thing because there is really no such thing as "next year."
From ACM Opinion
No Warrant, No Problem: How the Government Can Still Get Your Digital Data
The U.S. government isn’t allowed to wiretap American citizens without a warrant from a judge. But there are plenty of legal ways for law enforcement, from the...
From ACM Opinion
How to Make Almost Anything
A new digital revolution is coming, this time in fabrication. It draws on the same insights that led to the earlier digitizations of communication and computation...
From ACM Opinion
How Far Away Is Mind-Machine Integration?
Okay, great: we can control our phones with speech recognition and our television sets with gesture recognition.
From ACM Opinion