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
Timnit Gebru Is Building a Slow AI Movement
Her new organization, DAIR, aims to show a more thoughtful mode of AI research.
From ACM Opinion
Andrew Ng Calls for Smart-Sized, 'Data-Centric' Solutions to Big Issues
AI pioneer says he has identified the next big shift in artificial intelligence
From ACM Opinion
How Much Has Quantum Computing Actually Advanced?
John Martinis, former chief architect of Google Sycamore, offers a measured perspective on quantum's progress
From ACM Opinion
Untold History of AI: The DARPA Dreamer Who Aimed for Cyborg Intelligence
At 10:30pm on 29 October 1969, a graduate student at UCLA sent a two-letter message from an SDS Sigma 7 computer to another machine a few hundred miles away at...
From ACM Opinion
The Case Against Quantum Computing
Quantum computing is all the rage. It seems like hardly a day goes by without some news outlet describing the extraordinary things this technology promises.
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
This Tech Would Have Spotted the Secret Chinese Chip in Seconds
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, spies in China managed to insert chips into computer systems that would allow external control of those systems.
From ACM Opinion
David Patterson Says It's Time for New Computer Architectures and Software Languages
David Patterson—University of California professor, Google engineer, and RISC pioneer—says there's no better time than now to be a computer architect.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape
It should come as no surprise that recent advances in big-data analytics and artificial intelligence have created strong incentives for enterprises to amass information...
From ACM Opinion
Startup JITX ses AI to Automate Complex Circuit Board Design
While anyone can learn how to design a circuit board, it takes a skilled engineer to design a circuit board that is both well optimized and unlikely to melt, explode...
From ACM Opinion
Darpa Plans a Major Remake of .S. Electronics
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is launching a huge expansion of its Electronics Resurgence Initiative, boosting the program to US $1.5 billion...
From ACM Opinion
Don Eyles: Space Hacker
In the early hours of 5 February 1971, Don Eyles had a big problem: Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell were orbiting the moon, preparing to land...
From ACM Opinion
Forging Voices and Faces: The Dangers of Audio and Video Fabrication
In 1963, before he could give the speech he'd prepared for his trip to Dallas, U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In March 2018, a company re-created...
From ACM Opinion
To Illustrate the Dangers of Cyberwarfare, the Army Is Turning to Sci-Fi
At first glance, Dark Hammer looks a lot like any other science fiction comic book: On the front cover, a drone flies over a river dividing a city with damaged...
From ACM Opinion
Computing With Random Pulses Promises to Simplify Circuitry and Save Power
In electronics, the past halfcentury has been a steady march away from analog and toward digital. Telephony, music recording and playback, cameras, and radio and...
From ACM Opinion
How to Design a New Chip on a Budget
We recently had an interesting exchange with bunnie Huang, hardware guru and creator of Chumby, NetTV, and the Novena laptop, among other things. He's also theHacking...
From ACM Opinion
Q&a: The Ethics of sing Brain Implants to pgrade Yourself
Neurotechnology is one of the hottest areas of engineering, and the technological achievements sound miraculous: Paralyzed people have controlled robotic limbs and ...
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.12