Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
President Reif Writes to Mit Community Regarding Aaron Swartz
Yesterday we received the shocking and terrible news that on Friday in New York, Aaron Swartz, a gifted young man well known and admired by many in the MIT community...
From ACM Opinion
Meeting with Biden Is a Mistake for the Game Industry
A couple weeks ago, an industry friend of mine told me that the office for Vice President Joe Biden was reaching out to so-called "game industry leaders."
From ACM Opinion
Is It Time For the Internet to Get the Plumber In?
The strange thing about the Internet is that it went from being something exotic to something mundane almost without us noticing it.
From ACM Opinion
Aaron Swartz and Me, Over a Loosely Intertwined Decade
I don't remember the first time I heard about Aaron Swartz. It probably was from reading Dave Winer's blog more than 10 years ago when I was an undergraduate at...
From ACM Opinion
Why We Should Remember Aaron Swartz
The Internet is not so old. Its graybeards live still. Vint Cerf, author of the Internet Protocol, has been installed as Google's "chief Internet evangelist," a...
From ACM Opinion
The Small Business of 2063
Our world is changing faster than ever and, in recent years, a number of transformative technologies have moved from science fiction and the research and development...
From ACM Opinion
Make Guns Smart
Voices across the political spectrum are debating how to prevent mass shootings such as the one in Newtown, Connecticut.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Let Math Pull the Wool Over Your Eyes
This column will make the case that many people, including holders of graduate degrees, professional researchers, and even editors of scientific journals, can be...
From ACM News
It's All About the Genes and the Brain Machines
The amount of time and money needed to sequence genomes continued to fall in 2012, perhaps to no one’s surprise.
From ACM Opinion
How to Design a Better World
When I was young, my teachers praised me for being good at math and art, but my father would always tell people, "You know, John is good at math."
From ACM Opinion
Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—take Our Jobs
It's hard to believe you'd have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force.
From ACM News
'hashtag' Is the 2012 Word of the Year
In its 23rd annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted "hashtag" as the word of the year for 2012. Hashtag refers to the practice used on...
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 Careers
5 Nerds to Watch in 2013
When Steve Jobs died, there was a lot of talk about who would be the next Steve Jobs. But the truth is, rarely can one person reshape the future. And breakthroughs...
From ACM Opinion
2012: What We Learned
There's a natural inclination for people at the end of each year to look back, take stock and try to draw some grand meaning or life lessons out of the events of...
From ACM Opinion
Marking the Birth of the Modern-Day Internet
A long time ago, my colleagues and I became part of a great adventure, teamed with a small band of scientists and technologists in the U.S. and elsewhere.
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
Looking Back: The Five Most Important Security Stories of 2012
The dance among blackhat, whitehat, and grayhat hackers grew ever more intricate in 2012, thanks to a steady stream of exploits, vulnerability discoveries, and...
From ACM Opinion
Social Media: Five Predictions For 2013
When you think of social media these days, you probably think primarily of Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps Instagram. But while those services have massive—and...
From ACM Opinion