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
Before Reproducibility Must Come Preproducibility
From time to time over the past few years, I've politely refused requests to referee an article on the grounds that it lacks enough information for me to check...
From ACM Opinion
Regulate Artificial Intelligence to Avert Cyber Arms Race
Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, sophisticated and destructive. Each day in 2017, the United States suffered, on average, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks...
From ACM Opinion
The Ageless Appeal of 2001: A Space Odyssey
In 1968, film-maker Stanley Kubrick and his screenwriting colleague, science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, presented 2001: A Space Odyssey. Half a century later...
From ACM Opinion
Fourier's Transformational Thinking
When you listen to digital music, the harmonies and chords that you hear have probably been reconstructed from a file that stored them as components of different...
From ACM Opinion
Does Your Code Stand p to Scrutiny?
Computer code written by scientists forms the basis of an increasing number of studies across many fields—and an increasing number of papers that report the results...
From ACM Opinion
How to Make Replication the Norm
Replication is essential for building confidence in research studies, yet it is still the exception rather than the rule.
From ACM Opinion
Five Priorities For Weather and Climate Research
Meteorology is entering a new era. Demand is growing worldwide for forecasts of storms, floods and droughts.
From ACM Opinion
How an nderwater Sensor Network Is Tracking Argentina's Lost Submarine
On 15 November, Argentina's Navy lost contact with the ARA San Juan, a small diesel-powered submarine that had been involved in exercises off the east coast of...
From ACM Opinion
Five Ways to Fix Statistics
As debate rumbles on about how and how much poor statistics is to blame for poor reproducibility, Nature asked influential statisticians to recommend one change...
From ACM Opinion
Machines Moved By Mind
At Mental Work, an exhibition at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne ArtLab (EPFL), visitors can drive simple machines using the force of their own...
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Dna Sequencing
Forty years ago, two papers1, 2 described the first tractable methods for determining the order of the chemical bases in stretches of DNA. Before these 1977 publications...
From ACM Opinion
Metrology Is Key to Reproducing Results
Imagine you are a policymaker who needs to know how much carbon is stored in the South American forest.
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Teleportation Is Even Weirder Than You Think
A BBC headline last week, 'First object teleported to Earth's orbit', has to be one of the most fantastical you'll see this year. For once, it seems the future...
From ACM Opinion
Information Technology: A Digital Genius at Play
The US mathematician and electrical engineer Claude Shannon, whose life spanned the tumultuous, technologically explosive twentieth century, is often called the...
From ACM Opinion
Image Doctoring Must Be Halted
Seven years ago, a cover of The Economist showed Barack Obama, head down on a Louisiana beach in front of an oil rig—the picture of lonely despair.
From ACM Opinion
Medical Microbots Need Better Imaging and Control
More than 50 years ago, physicist Richard Feynman spoke of "swallowing the surgeon" in his classic lecture, 'There's plenty of room at the bottom'.
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence: Chess Match of the Century
Nearly 20 years ago, I was fortunate enough to play friendly blitz chess against former world champion Garry Kasparov.
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Computers Ready to Leap Out of the Lab in 2017
Quantum computing has long seemed like one of those technologies that are 20 years away, and always will be.
From ACM Opinion
Good Data Are Not Enough
This summer, I visited the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico.
From ACM Opinion