Communications of the ACM
From Communications of the ACM
Ulterior Motives
2023-2024 ACM Athena Lecturer Margo Seltzer recalls the motivations behind the development of the Berkeley DB database software library, and other achievements...
From ACM Opinion
Computers Have Memories Too
Simons Foundation Junior Fellow Sebastian Wolff discusses his quest to simplify the switch between the two deletion processes.
From ACM Opinion
Web Scraping
The increasing use of computational approaches for data collection and data analysis in social sciences research.
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
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
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
Alphabet Chairman Struggles With Google CEO's China Strategy
Alphabet Inc. Chairman John Hennessy is unsure about a banner strategy of the company's most-important executive.
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
Editing the Internet's Second Screen
The great social media cleanup of the past two years hasn't seemed to leave it much cleaner.
From ACM Opinion
Why Silicon Valley Should Fear Europe's Competition Chief
Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, is surely the most feared person in Silicon Valley.
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
"I Was Devastated": Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets
"For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it," Tim Berners-Lee told me one...
From ACM Opinion
Apple CEO Tim Cook on Screen Time Controls, Working with China
Tim Cook, who has led Apple since 2011, spoke with NPR's Steve Inskeep in a wide-ranging interview on Monday as the company kicked off its annual Worldwide Developers...
From ACM Opinion
Wikipedia Founder Says Internet sers Are Adrift in the 'Fake News' Era
At any given moment, volunteers and paid workers are writing fictional narratives that they present online as news stories, and some of those will get picked up...
From ACM Opinion
Alexa, How Do We Take Our Relationship to the Next Level?
As useful as it would be to interact with smartphones and other gadgets by chatting casually with them, the technology to enable such a simple but meaningful back...
From ACM Opinion
Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human (and Neanderthal) History
Geneticist David Reich used to study the living, but now he studies the dead.
From ACM Opinion
The Father of the Internet Sees His Invention Reflected Back Through a 'Black Mirror'
In 1984, two men were thinking a lot about the Internet. One of them invented it. The other is an artist who would see its impact on society with uncanny prescience...
From ACM Opinion
Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web: 'the System Is Failing'
Sir Tim Berners-Lee's optimism about the future of the web is starting to wane in the face of a "nasty storm" of issues including the rollback of net neutrality...
From ACM Opinion