Communications of the ACM
From ACM News
Google Missed 'friend Thing'
Google Inc. executive chairman Eric Schmidt said one of his biggest failures as chief executive of the search giant over the last decade was grappling with the...
From ACM Opinion
Ethernet Inventor Bob Metcalfe
It's hard to overestimate the importance of Ethernet to networking over the past 25 years. When Network World started, the technology had been around a while,...
From ACM News
Andy Rubin: Why Android Is Only Quasi-Open
Android is open-source software, but it doesn't come with much of an open-source community, and the Google leader of the project explained why.
From ACM News
The Man Who Invented the Microprocessor
Ted Hoff saved his own life, sort of. Deep inside this 73-year-old lies a microprocessor—a tiny computer that controls his pacemaker and, in turn, his heart.
From ACM Opinion
Sohaib Athar on Twitter Fame After Bin Laden Raid (q&a)
As U.S. special forces assaulted Osama bin Laden's walled compound in Pakistan, a Twitter user was already recording a rough outline of the events to come. Sohaib...
From ACM Opinion
Online 24/7: "life Logging" Pioneer Clarifies the Future of Cloud Computing
Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, paperless for more than a decade, envisions data centers saturated with information and services readily available via the...
From ACM News
Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Rails Against Facebook, Says It's a Spy Tool For .s. Government
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called Facebook "the most appalling spying machine ever invented" in an interview with Russia Today, pointing to the popular social...
From Communications of the ACM
An Interview with Steve Furber
Steve Furber, designer of the seminal BBC Microcomputer System and the widely used ARM microprocessor, reflects on his career.
From ACM News
How Google Is Teaching Computers to See
Computers used to be blind, and now they can see. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated algorithms, computers today can recognize and identify the Eiffel Tower...
From ACM Opinion
Matt Cutts, Google Engineer
It was the usual standing-room-only crowd as Google's Matt Cutts appeared at the South By Southwest technology conference to talk about the inner workings of...
From ACM Opinion
The Problem with Design Education
University industrial design programs are usually cloistered in schools of art or architecture, and students in such programs are rarely required to study science...
From ACM Opinion
When Will Sci-Fi Tech Become Real? Sooner Than You Think
Growing up, physicist Michio Kaku had two heroes. The first, predictably enough for the man who co-founded a branch of string theory, was Albert Einstein. "Second...
From ACM News
How Did a British Polytechnic Graduate Become the Design Genius Behind
Few Westerners have ever seen the forging of a Japanese samurai sword. It's considered a sacred practice in Japan; one of the few traditional arts that has yet...
From Communications of the ACM
Q&A: The Chief Computer
Kelly Gotlieb recalls the early days of computer science in Canada.
From ACM Opinion
Cell Phones Are 'stalin's Dream,' Says Free Software Movement Founder
Nearly three decades into his quest to rid the world of proprietary software, Richard Stallman sees a new threat to user freedom: smartphones.
From ACM Opinion
New Ceo Wants Faster, More Relevant W3c
Jeff Jaffe's job requires both patience and impatience. Patience, because the World Wide Web Consortium—of which he's been chief executive for nearly a year—is...
From ACM Opinion
Factcheck.org's Brooks Jackson on Overcoming Motivated Skepticism
Once upon a time, before the age of the Internet, we lived in a world of "many economists." If a newspaper reporter was writing a story on inflation, for instance...
From ACM Opinion
Social Media: 'essential Tool' In .s. Foreign Policy
What role do social media and other non-state actors play in foreign policy? James Lewis, director of technology and public policy at the Center for Strategic...
From ACM News
The 'Panda' That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google
Google's new update to its search engine addressed the growing complaint that low-quality content sites (derisively referred to as content farms) were ranked higher...
From ACM Opinion