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 News
Ben Fry, Information Designer
In the golden age of data visualization, he helps designers think like programmers, and vice versa.
From ACM Opinion
What Constitutes an Act of Cyberwar?
Before we get to that, there's a clue in the spelling of the word: cyberwar instead of cyber war. The U.S. Defense Department has determined that cyber is a fifth...
From ACM News
The Death of Booting p
Remember "booting up"? It was the first thing you did every morning—you waited two minutes, three minutes, sometimes even longer while your computer ran through...
From ACM Opinion
Director of Mit's Personal Robots Group on Designing Robots that Will Be seful in Our Everyday Lives
It's all about human-robot interaction in this more interpersonal sense, like you saw in Star Wars. Until then, the way we reacted with robots was [by] remote...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Instant Pages and the Joys of a Computer that Can Read Your Mind
Chrome is reading my mind. When I type a search query in Google's Web browser, it offers me the most likely results right in the address bar. It doesn't justWikipedia...
From ACM News
David Ferrucci, Lead Researcher of Ibm's Watson Project
How do you improve on a computer that beat the world's best Jeopardy! players? Have Watson team up with humanity.
From ACM Opinion
Why Twitter Should Double Its Character Limit
Five years ago this month, Twitter opened itself up to the public. The new service, initially called Twttr, was born out of software engineer Jack Dorsey's fascination...
From ACM Opinion
Why Facebook Can't Match Ravelry, the Social Network For Knitters
The best social network you've (probably) never heard of is one-five-hundredth the size of Facebook. It has no video chat feature, it doesn't let you check in...
From ACM News
Has Facebook Peaked?
Facebook's active user base grew by only 1.7% in May. That's about half its usual growth rate, and it came after similarly slow growth in April. According to Inside...
From ACM Opinion
Weiner's Law
The Web makes it easier than ever to cheat—and easier than ever for cheaters to get caught.
From ACM Opinion
Will Amazon's Recent Server Failures Slow the Rise of Cloud Computing?
Last Thursday morning around 5 a.m. eastern time, Amazon suffered a major data center outage. These sorts of outages happen now and then, but they seldom makewhy...
From ACM Opinion
No More Privacy Paranoia
Want Web companies to stop using our personal data? Be ready to suffer the consequences.
From ACM Opinion
Have Computers Made Architects Less Disciplined?
We generally assume that technological advances save time, boost efficiency, increase productivity, and so on. Once we get used to the latest conveniences, we...
From ACM Opinion
Three Cheers For the Judge Who Smacked Down Google Books
For a company with the audacity to make "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" its mission statement, it takes a lot to take...
From ACM News
Japan Has Shifted 13 Feet!
What does Japan's earthquake mean for GPS? Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake was so powerful that it actually widened Japan. While parts of the country barely...
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Mobile Gadgets
I got my first cell phone a little more than a decade ago, just as I was finishing college and looking for my first job. I didn't need a mobile phone; none of...
From ACM News
Wiring in a Wireless Age
Is Intel's Thunderbolt cable a brilliant innovation or a worthless grasp at the past?
From ACM Opinion
Tech Revolutionaries
The Arab Revolt shows that Google's and Twitter's corporate values are better than Facebook's.
From ACM Opinion
My Puny Human Brain
Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.
From ACM News