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
What Is 4d Printing?
The biggest breakthroughs in how we make things lie not in the technology to manipulate materials but in the materials themselves.
From ACM Opinion
Intel Sees a Future Where We Will Form 'relationships' with Our Gadgets
Rugged individualists aside, many people find themselves increasingly connected not just to one another but also to the devices that make those connections possible...
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
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
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
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
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
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 News
Can Tornado Prediction Be Improved?
Advances in computer modeling and other technologies still cannot overcome the fundamental complexity of thunderstorm and subsequent tornado formation.
From ACM Opinion
The Anti-Predictor: A Chat with Mathematical Sociologist Duncan Watts
The Yahoo! Labs scientist and author explains why the "law of the few" is bunk, why history is full of failed hedgehogs, and why we can't make good predictions...
From ACM Opinion
Long Live the Web: A Call For Continued Open Standards and Neutrality
The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending.
From ACM Opinion
Connecting with an Internet Pioneer, 40 Years Later
Forty years ago—on December 5, 1969—the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at the University...
From ACM Opinion