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
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
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
The Scientist Who Spots Fake Videos
Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, specialises in detecting manipulated images and videos. Farid, who provides his...
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence: The Future Is Superintelligent
Max Tegmark is a renowned physicist. He is also the irrepressibly optimistic co-founder of the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts (motto: "Technology...
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
Five Hacks For Digital Democracy
The election of a politically inexperienced president in the United States, Britain's vote to leave the European Union and the initial rejection of a peace deal...
From ACM Opinion
Track How Technology Is Transforming Work
Advances in technology pose huge challenges for jobs. Productivity levels have never been higher in the United States, for example, but income for the bottom 50...
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
2017 Sneak Peek: What the New Year Holds For Science
If the United States pulls back on its climate commitments as president-elect Donald Trump has promised, China, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases,...
From ACM Opinion
Nasa Science Chief: 'i Have No Worries About the Resilience of This Country'
Solar physicist Thomas Zurbuchen became NASA's science chief in October, replacing astronaut John Grunsfeld. Just one month later, the US political system wentwhen...
From ACM Opinion
Inside Microsoft's Quest For a Topological Quantum Computer
The race is on build a "universal" quantum computer. Such a device could be programmed to speedily solve problems that classical computers cannot crack, potentially...
From ACM Opinion
There Is a Blind Spot in AI Research
This week, the White House published its report on the future of artificial intelligence (AI)—a product of four workshops held between May and July 2016 in Seattle...
From ACM Opinion