Communications of the ACM
From ACM Opinion
The ncanny Valley Nobody's Talking About: Eerie Robot Voices
Call it the Great Convergence of Creepiness. The first bit, the uncanny valley, we're all familiar with by now: If a humanoid robot looks super realistic, but not...
From ACM Opinion
Berners-Lee Says World Wide Web, at 30, Must Emerge from 'Adolescence'
The fraying World Wide Web needs to rediscover its strengths and grow into maturity, its designer Tim Berners-Lee said on Monday, marking the 30th anniversary of...
From ACM Opinion
FBI Head Christopher Wray: We Can't Let Criminals Hide Behind Encryption
Encryption should have limits. That's the message FBI Director Christopher Wray had for cybersecurity experts Tuesday.
From ACM Opinion
NSA's Top Policy Advisor: It's Time to Start Putting Teeth in Cyber Deterrence
At an industry event in Hanover, Maryland last week, former National Security Council cybersecurity policy coordinator and acting Homeland Security Advisor Rob...
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Limiting Your Digital Footprints in a Surveillance State
What are your most important tech tools for reporting in Shanghai, especially with a government known for surveillance?
From ACM Opinion
The S Cannot Crush s, Says Huawei Founder
The founder of Huawei has said there is "no way the US can crush" the company, in an exclusive interview with the BBC.
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
'The Goal Is to Automate s': Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
We're living through the most profound transformation in our information environment since Johannes Gutenberg's invention of printing in circa 1439.
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
China vs. the S: Who Wins and Who Loses
Born in Beijing and educated at Harvard, Yasheng Huang, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, is a keen observer of China's entrepreneurial efforts and...
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
Facebook's Top AI Scientist Says It's 'Dust' Without Artificial Intelligence
Without artificial intelligence there wouldn't be much left of Facebook as we know it today.
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
AI Is Not 'Magic Dust' for Your Company, Says Google’s Cloud AI Boss
Andrew Moore is the new head of Google's Cloud AI business, a unit that is striving to make machine-learning tools and techniques more accessible and useful for...
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