Communications of the ACM
From ACM News
Air France 447: How Scientists Found a Needle in a Haystack
Two weekends ago, investigators announced that they had recovered the flight data recorder from the wreckage of Air France 447—a jetliner that crashed in the deep...
From ACM Opinion
Sputnik Helped Launch Career of Professor
The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth, had a profound impact on American higher education, and drove Andrew Romberger...
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 ACM Opinion
Misleading Government Stats on It Employment
David Foote, CEO of IT workforce analyst firm Foote Partners, says that U.S. government statistics on IT employment are misleading because they do not track 16...
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 Opinion
The Anti-Predictor: A Chat with Mathematical Sociologist Duncan Watts
The Yahoo! Labs scientist and author explains why the "law of the few" is bunk, why history is full of failed hedgehogs, and why we can't make good predictions...
From ACM Opinion
Why the Basis of the niverse Isn't Matter or Energy
Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no...
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 Opinion
Eric Schmidt: What I Read
What I read varies widely based on what kind of information I’m looking for at the time.
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