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
Proceed with Caution Toward the Self-Driving Car
Driving on Interstate 495 toward Boston in a Ford Fusion one chilly afternoon in March, I did something that would've made even my laid-back long-ago driving instructor...
From ACM Opinion
Why Obama's Brain-Mapping Project Matters
Last week, President Obama officially announced $100 million in funding for arguably the most ambitious neuroscience initiative ever proposed.
From ACM Opinion
The Brain Is Not Computable
Miguel Nicolelis, a top neuroscientist at Duke University, says computers will never replicate the human brain and that the technological Singularity is "a bunch...
From ACM Opinion
Q&a with Ben Silbermann
Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann discusses his company's popularity, its advancement of online discovery, and how facillitating discovery will eventually...
From ACM Opinion
Geeks Are the New Guardians of Our Civil Liberties
A decade-plus of anthropological fieldwork among hackers and like-minded geeks has led me to the firm conviction that these people are building one of the most...
From ACM News
It's All About the Genes and the Brain Machines
The amount of time and money needed to sequence genomes continued to fall in 2012, perhaps to no one’s surprise.
From ACM Opinion
Why China's Homemade Microchips Will Struggle to Displace Western Giants
If China's ultimate aim in the sphere of technology is to become completely self-sufficient, it is well on the way to achieving this ambitious goal.
From ACM Opinion
How Technology Has Restored the Soul of Politics
In 1979, I was an aeronautical-engineering major at San Jose State University, sneaking time in the laser lab to make holograms or running over to the computer...
From ACM Opinion
Security Guru Pledges to Strengthen Critical Computers
Stuxnet, a piece of malicious software discovered in 2010, targeted industrial software controlling Iran’s uranium-enrichment centrifuges. But the code got loose—and...
From ACM Opinion
China's Innovation Success Depends on Political Changes
Since 1978, the Chinese economy has seen phenomenal growth. While that’s not in dispute, the reason why China has managed to grow so fast and whether it can maintain...
From ACM Opinion
The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years
If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years, you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford’s...
From ACM Opinion
Christopher Soghoian
Christopher Soghoian sniffs out security holes and privacy shortcomings on the Web. Then he urges companies that are responsible—Google, AT&T, and Dropbox have...
From ACM News
What Facebook Knows
If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world...
From ACM Opinion
Neal Stephenson on Science Fiction, Building Towers 20 Kilometers High ... and Insurance
Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT earlier this week, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining...
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Telescope on Human Behavior
Cameron Marlow, the leader of Facebook's efforts to mine its piles of data, says the effort can help explain why people act as they do.
From ACM Opinion
How Young Is Too Young to Learn to Code?
When the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 spend exactly zero time in front of screens, what its members are concerned about is substitution—all...
From ACM Opinion
The Year on the Web
We've been living in the age of social media for a long time, but 2011 was the year that all the information we share online began to accrete into something greater...
From ACM Opinion
Why Transparent Tracking Needs Its Own App
Amid widespread concern over an obscure piece of smart-phone diagnostic software that some experts say could be used to collect and transmit sensitive information...
From ACM Opinion
The Personal Computer Is Dead
Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors.
From ACM Opinion