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
Paul Otellini's Intel: Can the Company That Built the Future Survive It?
Forty-five years after Intel was founded by Silicon Valley legends Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, it is the world's leading semiconductor company.
From ACM News
How Facebook Designs the 'perfect Empty Vessel' For Your Mind
One day in March, I was sitting across from Facebook's design director, Kate Aronowitz, at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park when she told me, "It takes a lot of work...
From ACM Opinion
Governments Won't Need to Issue Ids: Data Brokers Will Identify You For Them
Our government collects a lot of information about us. Tax records, legal records, license records, records of government services received—it's all in databases...
From ACM Opinion
The Meaning of (making) Life
Christina Agapakis is a rising star among the new generation of biology researchers. Trained in the science of custom-building organisms known as synthetic biology...
From ACM Opinion
Time and Navigation: How We Found Our Way in the World
Type an address into your phone, and up will pop a step-by-step route from where you are to where you want to be. This is, in its way, magic—magic that has, at...
From ACM Opinion
The Touch-Screen Generation
On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of children’s apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off...
From ACM Opinion
How Augmented-Reality Content Might Actually Work
Augmented reality is very exciting. The promise of it is this: all the information on the Internet overlaid on the real world exactly where and when you need it...
From ACM Opinion
The Definitive Story of Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Phone Phreaking
Like the flap of a butterfly's wings causing a hurricane half a world away, the ripples of unintended consequences from Ron Rosenbaum's "Secrets of the Little Blue...
From ACM Opinion
How Big Data Can Solve America's Gun Problem
Big data might have stopped the massacres in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek.
From ACM Opinion
How the n's 'game-Changing' Internet Treaty Failed
Did you know that, for the past two weeks, the future of the Internet has been at stake?
From ACM Opinion
In China, 25 Million People se Only Their Cell Phones to Read Books
On vacation in China earlier this month, I stopped by Shanghai's seven-story downtown "Book City," bustling with activity on a weekday afternoon that, as a publisher...
From ACM Opinion
The Giant nderground Machinery That Runs San Francisco's Famous Cable Cars
Every day and night, beneath the streets of San Francisco, huge wheels turn, pulling cable cars to their far-flung destinations and back again, as if weaving them...
From ACM Opinion
Data Doesn't Belong to the Democrats
One of the leading narratives of the 2012 campaign is that data trumped all.
From ACM Opinion
The Consequences of Machine Intelligence
The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers.
From ACM Opinion
Meet Mira, the Supercomputer That Makes niverses
Cosmology is the most ambitious of sciences. Its goal, plainly stated, is to describe the origin, evolution, and structure of the entire universe, a universe that...
From ACM Opinion
Iphone 5? Yawn. What Will the 'phone' of 2022 Look Like?
The near-term future of phones is fairly well-established. The iPhone 5 was released Wednesday and its similarity to every Apple phone since 2007 serves as a reminder...
From ACM Opinion
The Jet Propulsion Lab Is Way Weirder (and Awesomer) Than You Even Imagined
For a center of cutting-edge scientific research, Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab seems to be a pretty wacky place. Luke Johnson, a graphic designer at the lab, set...
From ACM Opinion
E-Reading: A Midterm Progress Report
E-readers have been around long enough now that the novelty has largely worn off.
From ACM Opinion