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
How to Write Software with Mathematical Perfection
Leslie Lamport revolutionized how computers talk to each other, and now he's working on how engineers talk to their machines.
From ACM Opinion
What Makes Quantum Computing So Hard to Explain?
To understand what quantum computers can do—and what they can’t—avoid falling for overly simple explanations.
From ACM Opinion
Prepping for a Flood of Heavenly Bodies
This is a story of getting the good out of the bad, said Mario Jurić.
From ACM Opinion
To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect
Artificial intelligence owes a lot of its smarts to Judea Pearl.
From ACM Opinion
Wanted: More Data, the Dirtier the Better
To distill a clear message from growing piles of unruly genomics data, researchers often turn to meta-analysis—a tried-and-true statistical procedure for combining...
From ACM Opinion
Is Alphago Really Such a Big Deal?
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue system defeated the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.
From ACM Opinion
Big Data's Mathematical Mysteries
At a dinner I attended some years ago, the distinguished differential geometer Eugenio Calabi volunteered to me his tongue-in-cheek distinction between pure and...
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Computing Without Qubits
For more than 20 years, Ivan H. Deutsch has struggled to design the guts of a working quantum computer.
From ACM Opinion
Early-niverse Explorer Looks For Answers
On March 17, a panel of four astrophysicists held a press conference at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., to announce that they...
From ACM Opinion