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
Classical and Quantum Computers Are Vying for Superiority
Will 2019 be the year when quantum computers show they have the right stuff? Google says so; one of the company's labs, in Santa Barbara, California, has promised...
From ACM Opinion
Trolling, Hacking and the 2016 S Presidential Election
Late in 2016, then-US President Barack Obama mused in an interview with The New Yorker magazine that he had probably been elected because his campaign had begun...
From ACM Opinion
Behind the Scenes of Japan's Daring Asteroid Mission
As Japan lands a third probe on Ryugu asteroid, Nature looks at the Hayabusa2 mission in more detail.
From ACM Opinion
Forgotten Heroes of the Enigma Story
Alan Turing's crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking.
From ACM Opinion
How D-Wave's Quantum Machine Could Help Exotic Physics
Picture a computer. Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you were probably thinking of your laptop, or maybe even your smartphone if you're being smart...
From ACM Opinion
Billion-Dollar Telescopes Could End p Beyond the Reach of S Astronomers
Every ten years, US astronomers set research priorities for the following decade.
From ACM Opinion
The Ethics of Computer Science: This Researcher Has a Controversial Proposal
In the midst of growing public concern over artificial intelligence (AI), privacy and the use of data, Brent Hecht has a controversial proposal: the computer-science...
From ACM Opinion
AI Can Be Sexist and Racist; It's Time to Make It Fair
When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become "he said" or "he wrote."
From ACM Opinion
The Researchers Who Study Alien Linguistics
Sheri Wells-Jensen is fascinated by languages no one has ever heard—those that might be spoken by aliens.
From ACM Opinion
The Illusion of Time
According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn't correspond to physical reality.
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
Cambridge Analytica Controversy Must Spur Researchers to Update Data Ethics
Revelations keep emerging in the Cambridge Analytica personal-data scandal, which has captured global public attention for more than a week. But when the dust settles...
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
Technology to Watch in 2018
For all the excitement surrounding the gene-editing tool CRISPR, it is not that efficient or precise. It's hard to make many changes at once.
From ACM Opinion
Exoplanet Science 2.0
It is more than two decades since we learnt that the Universe is awash with other worlds. Since 1992, more than 3,500 exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars...
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