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
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
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
Richard Feynman at 100
A pre-eminent twentieth-century physicist and a Nobel laureate: Richard Feynman was certainly those. He was also much more.
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
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
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
Science Fiction When the Future Is Now
AlphaGo, fake news, cyberwar: 2017 has felt science-fictional in the here and now. Space settlement and sea-steading seem just around the bend; so, at times, do...
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
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