Communications of the ACM
From ACM Opinion
Will Millimeter Waves Maximize 5g Wireless?
Every decade or so since the first cellular networks appeared the companies that make mobile devices and the networks linking them have worked out new requirements...
From ACM Opinion
The Inner Lives of Robots: An Interview with Filmmaker Alex Garland
Like self-replicating machines, robot movies are taking over Hollywood.
From ACM Opinion
Nanotech Pioneer Langer Wins Award By Thinking Small
Bioengineer Robert Langer has spent his career looking for the next not-so-big thing.
From ACM Opinion
A Graphene Discoverer Speculates on the Future of Computing
In 2010 two physicists at Manchester University in the U.K. shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on a new wonder material: graphene, a flat sheet of carbon...
From ACM Opinion
This Mathematician Figured Out How to Solve For Zero
To mathematician Amir Aczel the most important number of all might just be zero.
From ACM Opinion
What Is It Like to Control a Robotic Arm with a Brain Implant?
Jan Scheuermann is not your average experimental subject.
From ACM Opinion
'glass Brain' Offers Tours of the Space Between Your Ears
Former Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart takes pride in his brain.
From ACM Opinion
A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How To Write Proofs
Believe it or not, I do have friends who would describe themselves as not liking math, and every so often one of them will share this meme on Facebook: And then...
From ACM Opinion
How Microsoft's 1 Percenters Balance Basic Research with Short-Term Success
When Microsoft launched its research labs in 1991, the personal computer was just beginning to blossom into a worldwide phenomenon, thanks in no small part to Windows...
From ACM Opinion
Will Ibm's Watson sher in a New Era of Cognitive Computing?
Computers as we know them have are close to reaching an inflection point—the next generation is in sight but not quite within our grasp.
From ACM Opinion
What Is 4d Printing?
The biggest breakthroughs in how we make things lie not in the technology to manipulate materials but in the materials themselves.
From ACM Opinion
Intel Sees a Future Where We Will Form 'relationships' with Our Gadgets
Rugged individualists aside, many people find themselves increasingly connected not just to one another but also to the devices that make those connections possible...
From ACM Opinion
Bluebrain: Noah Hutton's 10-Year Documentary About the Mission to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain
"Nothing quite like it exists yet, but we have begun building it," Henry Markram wrote in the June 2012 issue of Scientific American. He was referring to a "fantastic...
From ACM Opinion
Intel Futurist on Why We Should Not Fear the Future
Much of Intel's success as a microprocessor manufacturer over the past four decades has come from the company's ability to understand and anticipate the future...
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Entanglement: Bill Joy and Danny Hillis
Digital innovators Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Danny Hillis, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, talk with Scientific American Executive Editor...
From ACM Opinion
Can Math Beat Financial Markets?
Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a...
From ACM News
Can Tornado Prediction Be Improved?
Advances in computer modeling and other technologies still cannot overcome the fundamental complexity of thunderstorm and subsequent tornado formation.
From ACM Opinion
The Anti-Predictor: A Chat with Mathematical Sociologist Duncan Watts
The Yahoo! Labs scientist and author explains why the "law of the few" is bunk, why history is full of failed hedgehogs, and why we can't make good predictions...
From ACM Opinion
Connecting with an Internet Pioneer, 40 Years Later
Forty years ago—on December 5, 1969—the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at the University...12