Communications of the ACM
From ACM Opinion
Google Assistant Is Getting Sci-Fi Ambitious
From 550 feet in the air, Google's Scott Huffman peers down at the Las Vegas skyline. It's a sunny afternoon in early January and, at the moment, Google owns this...
From ACM Opinion
Have Aliens Found s? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua
On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as "a red...
From ACM Opinion
What the Future of Work Means for Cities
Two weeks ago, MIT's David Autor gave the prestigious Richard T. Ely lecture at the annual meeting of American economists in Atlanta. Introduced by the former chair...
From ACM Opinion
To Cover China, There's No Substitute for WeChat
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Li Yuan, a technology columnist in Hong Kong, discussed the tech she's...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Turning China Into a Quantum Superpower
On September 29, 2017, a Chinese satellite known as Micius made possible an unhackable videoconference between Vienna and Beijing, two cities half a world apart...
From ACM Opinion
Nailing Down the Nature of 'Oumuamua; It's Probably a Comet, but . . .
Shortly before Halloween, the chairman of Harvard's astronomy department openly declared that an interstellar object hurtling through our Solar System might just...
From ACM Opinion
CRISPR Inventor Feng Zhang Calls for Moratorium on Gene-Edited Babies
Feng Zhang, one of the inventors of the gene-editing technique CRISPR, has called for a global moratorium on using the technology to create gene-edited babies. ...
From ACM Opinion
One of the Fathers of AI Is Worried About Its Future
Yoshua Bengio is a grand master of modern artificial intelligence.
From ACM Opinion
The Vulnerabilities of Our Voting Machines
A few weeks ago computer scientist J. Alex Halderman rolled an electronic voting machine onto a Massachusetts Institute of Technology stage and demonstrated how...
From ACM Opinion
Author Richard K. Morgan Wants to Destroy Your Mars Fantasies
Richard K. Morgan has spent most of the past decade working on his fantasy trilogy A Land Fit For Heroes.
From ACM Opinion
Prepping for a Flood of Heavenly Bodies
This is a story of getting the good out of the bad, said Mario Jurić.
From ACM Opinion
A Q&A With Micron Technology's Memory Mastermind
For over 50 years, the exponential shrinking of circuit components on chips predicted by Gordon Moore has allowed all sorts of modern wonders, from personal computers...
From ACM Opinion
Why the Search for Aliens Could nite s Here on Earth
If aliens are trying to talk to us (or even if they are not), Jill Tarter will be the one to find them.
From ACM Opinion
How Do You Find an Alien Ocean? Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out
The data was like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.
From ACM Opinion
Behind the Scenes of Japan's Daring Asteroid Mission
As Japan lands a third probe on Ryugu asteroid, Nature looks at the Hayabusa2 mission in more detail.
From ACM Opinion
Former Google CEO Predicts the Internet Will Split in Two by 2028, and One Part Will Be Led by China
Eric Schmidt, who has been the CEO of Google and executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, predicts that within the next decade there will be two distinct...
From ACM Opinion
David Patterson Says It's Time for New Computer Architectures and Software Languages
David Patterson—University of California professor, Google engineer, and RISC pioneer—says there's no better time than now to be a computer architect.
From ACM Opinion
For Safety's Sake, We Must Slow Innovation in Internet-Connected Things
Smart gadgets are everywhere.
From ACM Opinion