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
Chipmaker Races to Save Stephen Hawking's Speech as His Condition Deteriorates
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has long relied on technology to help him connect with the outside world despite the degenerative motor neuron disease he has...
From ACM Opinion
Online Social Science: Can the Web Graduate from Digital Petri Dish to Virtual Laboratory?
In many ways the Internet is the ultimate virtual laboratory.
From ACM Opinion
How Far Away Is Mind-Machine Integration?
Okay, great: we can control our phones with speech recognition and our television sets with gesture recognition.
From ACM Opinion
Bluebrain: Noah Hutton's 10-Year Documentary About the Mission to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain
"Nothing quite like it exists yet, but we have begun building it," Henry Markram wrote in the June 2012 issue of Scientific American. He was referring to a "fantastic...
From ACM Opinion
Physicist Elected to Congress Calls For More Scientists-Statesmen
Bill Foster, member-elect of the U.S. House of Representatives, wants more scientists in Congress who can bring to bear an analytical mind-set to lawmaking.
From ACM Opinion
Does a Public "find My Iphone" Search Violate Personal Privacy?
A guy stole my iPhone. I tracked it and posted his address online. Was that wrong?
From ACM Opinion
Science in an Election Year
More than a dozen science and engineering organizations worked with ScienceDebate.org to draft 14 top science questions to ask the two main presidential candidates...
From ACM Opinion
Bring It: A Call For Candidates to Debate Science Policy
Innovation, economic growth, and climate change are just a few of the challenges and opportunities that face the U.S. They are also firmly linked to science.
From ACM Opinion
How the Icloud Hack Happened and How to Avoid Being Next
Mat Honan, the technology reporter who was digitally disemboweled this past weekend, has revealed exactly how he was so spectacularly owned. His case, a cascade...
From ACM Opinion
Why Siri Is Still the Future
When Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S last year, the new phone looked just like the previous one. It had a better camera and a faster chip, but it could do only one...
From ACM Opinion
Intel Futurist on Why We Should Not Fear the Future
Much of Intel's success as a microprocessor manufacturer over the past four decades has come from the company's ability to understand and anticipate the future...
From ACM Opinion
A Rosie Future: Jetsons-Like Gadgets with 'ambient Intelligence' Are Key to Smart Homes and Cities
Fifty years after The Jetsons promised us a future of robot maids, flying cars, video phones and meals at the push of a button, it seems that reality may actually...
From ACM Opinion
Supercomputers Can Save .s. Manufacturing
High-performance computing developed at the national labs powers much of the innovation behind the most successful U.S. commercial firms. This expertise may also...
From ACM Opinion
One Thing Is Certain: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle Is Not Dead
A demonstration by experimenters at the Vienna University of Technology violates Heisenberg's original version of his uncertainty principle, but confirms a newer...
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Entanglement: Bill Joy and Danny Hillis
Digital innovators Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Danny Hillis, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, talk with Scientific American Executive Editor...
From ACM Opinion
How to Make Science and Tech Jobs More Enticing to Undergrads
The number of U.S. undergraduate degrees being awarded in most STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) has risen steadily in recent years...
From ACM TechNews
How Siri Makes Computers (and Coders) More Human
Siri, a program in the latest Apple iPhone that can carry out a wide spectrum of vocal commands without requiring training or special syntax from the user, stands...
From ACM Opinion
Read My Email? Get a Warrant
Last October the well-known hacking group Chaos Computer Club revealed that the German state police had been monitoring the computers of ordinary citizens using...
From ACM Opinion
How Can Malware Be Stopped?
The world of cybersecurity is starting to resemble a paranoid thriller.
From ACM Opinion