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
Imposing Security
Three computer bugs this year exposed passwords, e-mails, financial data, and other kinds of sensitive information connected to potentially billions of people.
From ACM Opinion
How the .s. Could Escalate Its Name-and-Shame Campaign Against China's Espionage
Earlier this week the U.S. Department of Justice indicted five Chinese military officers for industrial espionage, accusing them of leading attacks on the computers...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions with the Man Leading Baidu's New AI Effort
Artificial intelligence is guided by the far-off goal of having software match humans at important tasks.
From ACM News
Do We Need Asimov's Laws?
In 1942, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov published a short story called Runaround in which he introduced three laws that governed the behaviour of robots...
From ACM Opinion
The Limits of Social Engineering
In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Eugene Kaspersky
The Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab has analyzed major new kinds of malware, including Stuxnet, which four years ago was revealed to have damaged...
From ACM Opinion
Glass, Darkly
Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone, but it's a very different machine.
From ACM Opinion
How a Database of the World's Knowledge Shapes Google's Future
For all its success, Google's famous Page Rank algorithm has never understood a word of the billions of Web pages it has directed people to over the years.
From ACM Opinion
An AI Pal That Is Better Than 'her'
In the movie Her, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, a middle-aged writer named Theodore Twombly installs and rapidly falls in love with...
From ACM Opinion
James Kuffner, Google Robotics Researcher
At a racetrack in Florida this weekend, 16 robots competed to complete a series of tasks inspired by challenges faced in cleaning up the destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi...
From ACM Opinion
Diagnosis For Healthcare.gov: nrealistic Technology Expectations
The fiasco with the $600 million federal health insurance website wasn't all bureaucratic.
From ACM Opinion
Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think
A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and...
From ACM Opinion
The Decline of Wikipedia
The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10.
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Microsoft's New Head of Research, Peter Lee
Microsoft's new head of research, Peter Lee, is tasked with helping the company invent the future.
From ACM Opinion
The Lessons of Aaron Swartz
On the day after Aaron Swartz's death in January, President Reif and I spoke about how MIT might respond to the breaking news of his suicide.
From ACM Opinion
Bruce Schneier: Nsa Spying Is Making S Less Safe
Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and author on security topics, provides perspective on the revelations from documents purloined from the U.S. National Security...
From ACM Opinion
Cryptographers Have an Ethics Problem
Last week, I visited the MIT computer science department looking for a very famous cryptographer.
From ACM Opinion
Sebastian Thrun on the Future of Learning
Sebastian Thrun has worn many hats in the tech world: Stanford research professor, founder of Google's X Labs, where he oversaw the development of self-drivingUdacity...
From ACM Opinion