Communications of the ACM
From ACM Opinion
Microsoft's Top Lawyer Becomes a Civil Rights Crusader
When Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to help the FBI get into a mass murderer's iPhone last winter, he was hailed for his boldness in fighting the government on ...
From ACM Opinion
Will Machines Eliminate s?
Yoshua Bengio leads one of the world's preëminent research groups developing a powerful AI technique known as deep learning.
From ACM Opinion
Can This Man Make AI More Human?
Like any proud father, Gary Marcus is only too happy to talk about the latest achievements of his two-year-old son.
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Cyborg Virtual Assistant Is Learning from Its Trainers
Late last month a few hundred lucky users of Facebook's mobile messaging app got an unusual new contact to talk with: M, a virtual assistant powered by a mixture...
From ACM Opinion
3 Questions on Killer Robots
Delegates to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons are meeting this week in Geneva to discuss fully autonomous weapons—machines that could...
From ACM Opinion
Putting Technology in Its Place
Kentaro Toyama calls himself "a recovering technoholic"—someone who once was "addicted to a technological way of solving problems."
From ACM Opinion
What It Will Take For Computers to Be Conscious
Is a worm conscious? How about a bumblebee? Does a computer that can play chess "feel" anything?
From ACM Opinion
Technology Stalled in 1970
Peter Thiel has been behind some prominent technologies: he cofounded PayPal and was an early investor in such companies as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tesla Motors...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For J. Craig Venter
Genome scientist and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter is best known for being the first person to sequence his own genome, back in 2001.
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Robotics Inventor Cynthia Breazeal About Social Robots
As an academic, Cynthia Breazeal pioneered research into social interaction between humans and robots, developing Kismet, a robot that used facial expressions in...
From ACM Opinion
Ray Kurzweil Says He's Breathing Intelligence Into Google Search
The big announcements at Google's I/O event in San Francisco Wednesday didn't mention Web search, the technology that got the company started and made it so successful...
From ACM Opinion
Joseph Ledoux
When it comes to the study of memory, we might be living in something of a golden age.
From ACM Opinion
Microsoft's Quantum Search For the 'next Transistor'
Microsoft is making a significant investment in creating a practical version of the basic component needed to build a quantum computer, the company's head of research...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions with the Man Leading Baidu's New AI Effort
Artificial intelligence is guided by the far-off goal of having software match humans at important tasks.
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Leslie Lamport, Winner of Computing's Top Prize
This year's winner of the Turing Award—often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing—was announced yesterday as Leslie Lamport, a computer scientist whose research...
From ACM Opinion
How a Database of the World's Knowledge Shapes Google's Future
For all its success, Google's famous Page Rank algorithm has never understood a word of the billions of Web pages it has directed people to over the years.
From ACM Opinion
James Kuffner, Google Robotics Researcher
At a racetrack in Florida this weekend, 16 robots competed to complete a series of tasks inspired by challenges faced in cleaning up the destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Computing Pioneer Carver Mead
Computer scientist Carver Mead gave Moore's Law its name in around 1970 and played a crucial role in making sure it's held true in the decades since.
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Microsoft's New Head of Research, Peter Lee
Microsoft's new head of research, Peter Lee, is tasked with helping the company invent the future.
From ACM Opinion