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 Manage Your Digital Afterlife
After their son's suicide, one Wisconsin couple was desperate for answers.
From ACM Opinion
How to Be an Email Survivalist
In the early 2000s it was the height of geek fashion to run your own email server—then along came Gmail with two gigabytes of free storage and excellent spam filtering...
From ACM Opinion
Software Recognition Technology Is Amazing, but Not Amazing Enough
The gadget blogs may work themselves into a frenzy over megapixels and processor speed. But if you want to know what really dazzles the masses, consider a feature...
From ACM Opinion
Dave Farber, Internet's "grandfather," Seeks to Cut Through Fog of Cyberwar
Over the last few years, the rhetoric if not the actuality of cyberwarfare has been escalating.
From ACM Opinion
When Will Smartglasses and Other Wearable Computers Hit the Mainstream?
Google has stoked our collective imagination via relentless promotion of its Google Glass wearable computer in recent months.
From ACM Opinion
Is High-Tech Security at Public Events Counterproductive?
Which is more intrusive: security screening and metal detectors every few blocks, or a drone flying high above it taking video of every little thing you do?
From ACM Opinion
Why Retina Displays and 4k Tvs May Not Be Worth the Trouble
When Apple unveiled its Retina screen on the iPhone 4, the world gasped.
From ACM Opinion
When Will the Internet Reach Its Limit (and How Do We Stop It from Happening)?
The number of smartphones, tablets and other network-connected gadgets will outnumber humans by the end of the year.
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
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
se It Better: The Worst Trends in Tech
Consumer technology doesn't always get better, faster and cheaper. Here are four bad moves that prove the future isn't always bright.
From ACM Opinion
Big Progress on the Little Things
In the trenches of consumer technology, there’s plenty to complain about. Today's cell-phone contracts are exorbitant and illogical (why has the price of a text...
From ACM Opinion
Can Math Beat Financial Markets?
Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a...
From ACM Opinion