Communications of the ACM
From ACM Opinion
Head of British Intelligence Agency on Apple, Snowden, and Regrets
Shortly after Robert Hannigan took over the British signals-intelligence agency GCHQ in 2014, he implored technology companies to do more to facilitate investigations...
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
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
AI Doomsayer Says His Ideas Are Catching On
Philosopher Nick Bostrom says major tech companies are listening to his warnings about artificial intelligence.
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
Former Nsa Deputy Director John C. Inglis
More than a year after ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began leaking details of the agency's electronic surveillance programs, questions remain...
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
Three Questions with Amazon's Technology Chief, Werner Vogels
In the eight years since Amazon.com rolled out its cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, this has grown from a side project that took advantage of the...
From ACM Opinion
How the .s. Could Escalate Its Name-and-Shame Campaign Against China's Espionage
Earlier this week the U.S. Department of Justice indicted five Chinese military officers for industrial espionage, accusing them of leading attacks on the computers...
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 Eugene Kaspersky
The Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab has analyzed major new kinds of malware, including Stuxnet, which four years ago was revealed to have damaged...
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 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