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
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
Bitcoin Is No Longer a Currency
Bitcoin might be a bubble or it might be THE FUTURE, but there's one thing it's not: a currency. It's a tech stock. The question is whether it's Pets.com or Paypal...
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
The Best Books About Biotechnology
I've spent the last few weeks creating a syllabus for myself on the world—people, techniques, theory, history—of biotechnology. I've talked with some scholars,...
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 TechNews
The Places You'll Go
In an interview, Google chief technology advocate Michael Jones discusses new technology in digital mapping and how it will change travel. Jones says the major...
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
The Greatest Bond Villain of All: Technology
Tech has always played a prominent role in the Bond franchise; it's a key element of the plot formula: Bond opens with a chase scene, the core mission is revealed...
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
The Extremely Personal Computer: The Digital Future of Mental Health
It's 2018, and you're not feeling your best.
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
Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry
In April of 2010, Eric Schmidt delivered the keynote address at the conference of the American Society of News Editors in Washington, D.C. During the talk, thearticulate...
From ACM Opinion