Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
Behold, the World's Most Famous teapot
Martin Newell was worried about his Ph.D. research as he sat down to tea with his wife one day in 1974.
From ACM Opinion
Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges--The Aliens Are All Asleep
Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong of the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, working with Milan Ćirković of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia...
From ACM Opinion
How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics' Brain Race
In October 2016, inside a sold-out arena in Zurich, a man named Numa Poujouly steered his wheelchair up to the central podium.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Computing Depends on Making It Reversible
For more than 50 years, computers have made steady and dramatic improvements, all thanks to Moore's Law—the exponential increase over time in the number of transistors...
From ACM Opinion
Blossom: A Handmade Approach to Social Robotics from Cornell and Google
As excited as we are about the forthcoming generation of social home robots (including Jibo, Kuri, and many others), it's hard to ignore the fact that most of them...
From ACM Opinion
Jpl's Design For a Clockwork Rover to Explore Venus
The longest amount of time that a spacecraft has survived on the surface of Venus is 127 minutes.
From ACM Opinion
Human-Level AI Is Right Around the Corner, or Hundreds of Years Away
Artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly, and its impact on our daily lives will only increase.
From ACM Opinion
Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X, on the Future of Ai, Robots, and Coffeemakers
Astro Teller has an unusual way of starting a new project: He tries to kill it.
From ACM Opinion
Beyond Touch: Tomorrow's Devices Will se Mems ltrasound to Hear Your Gestures
Today, we control our electronic world by touch—we tap, we swipe, we pinch and zoom.
From ACM Opinion
The Security Challenges of Online Voting Have Not Gone Away
Online voting is sometimes heralded as a solution to all our election headaches.
From ACM Opinion
Linux at 25: Q&a With Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds created the original core of the Linux operating system in 1991 as a computer science student at the University of Helsinki in Finland.
From ACM Opinion
What Would Marvin Minsky Read?
Marvin Minsky was one of the founders of artificial intelligence, and with John McCarthy, he created MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...
From ACM Opinion
David Divincenzo on His Tenure at IBM and the Future of Quantum Computing
Theoretical physicist David DiVincenzo is widely viewed as one of the pioneers of quantum computing. He authored a 1996 paper (PDF) outlining five criteria he predicted...
From ACM Opinion
Why Fully Autonomous Robot Cars Hail from the 20th Century
A vision of fully autonomous, self-driving cars allowing human owners to nap or read in the car seems to come from the future.
From ACM Opinion
Openbci: Control An Air Shark With Your Mind
Le's be clear: This is a parlor trick, not neuroscience. Nonetheless, with the help of some friends, I was able to make a toy shark fly through the air using brain...
From ACM Opinion
Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts
The overeager adoption of big data is likely to result in catastrophes of analysis comparable to a national epidemic of collapsing bridges.
From ACM Opinion
Why Teaching a Robot to Fetch a Cup of Coffee Matters
In robotics, as in life, it often takes small steps to reach a big goal.
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Start 3d Scanning the World
When Microsoft was developing its Kinect 3D sensor, a critical task was to calibrate its algorithms to rapidly and accurately recognize parts of the human body,...
From ACM News
Big Win For the Losers at D-Wave
Does D-Wave's first big sale disprove the quantum computing naysayers?12