Communications of the ACM
Generative AI Degrades Online Communities
How large language models are influencing online communities.
From ACM Opinion
To Beat the Blues, Visits Must Be Real, Not Virtual
Imagine being stranded on a desert island with a roof over your head and sufficient provisions—but no human contact other than what you can get from your smartphone...
From ACM Opinion
The Snowden Effect: Privacy Is Good For Business
On June 6, 2013, Edward Snowden—holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room with two Guardian reporters and a filmmaker—told the world about a secret surveillance program...
From ACM Opinion
Elegy For the Capital-I Internet
We've long stopped referring to the Internet as "the information superhighway," but there was a reason for the metaphor.
From ACM Opinion
The Real Reason America Controls Its Nukes with Ancient Floppy Disks
America's nuclear arsenal depends on a surprising relic of the 1970s that few of us may recall: the humble floppy disk.
From ACM Opinion
The Woeful Tsa Doesn't Need More Staff. It Needs This Tech
American airport security has never been something to look forward to, but in the past few weeks, it's attained new levels of misery.
From ACM Opinion
Smart Tampon? The Internet of Every Single Thing Must Be Stopped
Let's play a game. Which of the following is a real smartphone-connected product?
From ACM Opinion
American Schools Are Teaching Our Kids How to Code All Wrong
The US Department of Labor projects that one million jobs in computing will go unfilled by 2020.
From ACM Opinion
The Privacy Problem with Digital Assistants
For the last century, we've imagined a future where we're surrounded by robotic butlers that are classy, smart, and discreet.
From ACM Opinion
Why Seti Researchers Must Change the Way They Announce First Contact
One of humanity’s most significant events will be the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in universe. Back in the 1980s, a group of astronomers involved in...
From Communications of the ACM
What Are You Trying to Pull?
A single cache miss is more expensive than many instructions.
From ACM Opinion
The Oracle-Google Case Will Decide the Future of Software
The legal battle between Oracle and Google is about to come to an end. And nothing less is as stake than the future of programming.
From ACM Opinion
To Write Better Code, Read Virginia Woolf
The humanities are kaput. Sorry, liberal arts cap-and-gowners. You blew it. In a software-run world, what's wanted are more engineers.
From ACM Opinion
Google Doubles Down on AI
Google announced something for everyone yesterday at its 10th annual I/O developer conference.
From ACM Opinion
What If Facebook Gave S an Opposing-Viewpoints Button?
Imagine if you could flip a switch on Facebook, and turn all the conservative viewpoints that you see liberal, or vice versa. You'd realize your news might look...
From ACM Opinion
Peek Into the Weird and Wonderful Age of AI (yes, There's a Chatbot)
On March 23, Microsoft revealed Tay, a Twitter bot trained to chat like a millennial. It worked … too well.
From ACM Opinion
Six Creative Ways to Solve Biomedicine's Big Data Problem
Biomedical research generates an obscene amount of data. Now, three funding agencies are trying to spur the development of tools and platforms to improve researchers'...
From ACM Opinion
Doom Is a Gleefully Gory Ballet Set in a Nightmare
My instinct upon leaping into id Software's hyper-gruesome Doom, a gonzo shooter out May 13 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, is to dawdle.
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Horror of Virtual Reality
If Kitchen, a five-minute virtual-reality demo created by the Japanese studio Capcom, were a short film, few viewers would be moved to panic by its misery of horror...
From ACM Opinion
Okcupid Study Reveals the Perils of Big-Data Science
On May 8, a group of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid, including usernames, age, gender,...
From ACM Opinion