Communications of the ACM
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
How Star Wars Tech Changed Silicon Valley
When Oren Jacob was a teenager, he hung up Star Wars posters on his bedroom wall. In his early 20s at a college dorm at Berkeley, he replaced them with a smallPixar...
From ACM Opinion
Q&a: What's Needed to Get a Big Data Job?
Big data will change training in all corporate units, says Michael Rappa, who created the first U.S. post graduate program in data analytics.
From ACM Opinion
10 Predictions About Networking and Moore's Law from Andy Bechtolsheim
Sun Microsystems cofounder and networking guru Andy Bechtholsheim predicted that networking chips—which determine how quickly you can surf the Internet—will keep...
From ACM Opinion
Linus Torvalds Compares Hard Disks to Satan
Linus Torvalds—creator of the Linux open source operating system—is a man of strong opinions.
From ACM Opinion
Ibm's Ginni Rometty Looks Ahead
Ginni Rometty's first customer conference as CEO of IBM was an unusual affair, especially by Big Blue's buttoned-up standards.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Man Who Gave the Mars Rover Its Eyes
Iconic pictures from the latest mission to the Red Planet are coming courtesy of space-imaging expert Michael Malin.
From ACM Opinion
Meet Mira, the Supercomputer That Makes niverses
Cosmology is the most ambitious of sciences. Its goal, plainly stated, is to describe the origin, evolution, and structure of the entire universe, a universe that...
From ACM Opinion
Arturo Bejar, Facebook Director of Engineering
Facebook engineering director Arturo Bejar is a numbers guy by training. But he's also in charge of the giant social network's foray into what it calls "compassion...
From ACM Opinion
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Says Mobile Efforts Will 'Make a Lot More Money' than Website
In his first public appearance since Facebook's trouble-plagued Wall Street debut, CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded Tuesday the company's stock performance "has obviously...
From ACM Opinion
Curious About Life: Interview with Danny Glavin
The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover has 10 science instruments, and each will be used in the coming weeks and months to help characterize the environment...
From ACM Opinion
Seven Questions For Tom Leighton, Chief Scientist of Akamai
You probably never think much about it, but there's a pretty good chance that in the course of doing your routine business on the Internet every day, you're also...
From ACM Careers
Mow Yard. Drop Off Kids. Take a Drive on Mars.
Matt Heverly, 36, started a recent workday as any young father might: up at 5:30, gulping coffee, fixing a bottle for the baby.
From ACM Opinion
10 Questions for Sir Tim-Berners Lee
What do you do after you make that thing that changes the world? If you’re Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and you breathed life into the World Wide Web, you make sure itthe...
From ACM Opinion
The Jet Propulsion Lab Is Way Weirder (and Awesomer) Than You Even Imagined
For a center of cutting-edge scientific research, Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab seems to be a pretty wacky place. Luke Johnson, a graphic designer at the lab, set...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Who Keeps Facebook Humming
Jay Parikh is happy to never get a call from Mark Zuckerberg. Why? It means he's doing his job well. As the vice president of infrastructure engineering at Facebook...
From ACM Opinion
What, Exactly, Is a Supercomputer?
It's official: The United States is home to the world's fastest supercomputer. But what exactly are supercomputers and why should we care about them? I decidedLawrence...
From ACM Opinion
The Measured Man
Like many people who are careful about their weight, Larry Smarr once spent two weeks measuring everything he put in his mouth. He charted each serving of food...
From ACM Opinion
Inside Google's Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever
The ugly truth is that computers don't know anything. They have no common sense.
From ACM Opinion