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
Don't Let Statistics Ruin Baseball
One of the charms of baseball, which started up again this week, is the exhilarating departure it offers from the noisy bustle of daily life.
From ACM Opinion
Karen, an App That Knows You All Too Well
Thinking about a life coach but not ready to commit to the real thing?
From ACM Opinion
Learning to See Data
For the past year or so genetic scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have been collaborating with a specialist from another universe...
From ACM Opinion
The Math of March Madness
The N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament started Thursday, but for most Americans the real action began days before, as they pored over brackets, competing to make...
From ACM Opinion
If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?
Let me hazard a guess that you think a real person has written what you're reading. Maybe you're right. Maybe not.
From ACM Opinion
Here's What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official
Three years ago, technology was going to transform higher education. What happened?
From ACM Opinion
Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing Test
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is having a moment, albeit one marked by crucial ambiguities.
From ACM Opinion
The Reality of Quantum Weirdness
In Akira Kurosawa's film "Rashomon," a samurai has been murdered, but it's not clear why or by whom.
From ACM Opinion
Astro Teller, Google's ‘captain of Moonshots,' on Making Profits at Google X
Google is all over the place.
From ACM Opinion
Google, Mighty Now, but Not Forever
Technology giants often meet their end not with a bang but a whimper, a slow, imperceptible descent into irrelevancy that may not immediately be reflected in the...
From ACM Opinion
Tim O'reilly Explains the Internet of Things
Tim O'Reilly has been at the cutting edge of the Internet since it went commercial.
From ACM Opinion
Microsoft Hololens: A Sensational Vision of the Pc's Future
It's generally wise to take demonstrations of new technologies with a grain of salt.
From ACM Opinion
The Lesson of the Sony Hack: We Should All Jump to the 'erasable Internet'
This month's news provides yet another occasion for a friendly public-service reminder to anyone who uses a digital device to say anything to anyone, ever.
From ACM Opinion
Looking to Mars to Help Understand Changing Climates
Where now it stands the Plain of Gold did once my river flow.
From ACM Opinion
Turing's Spirit Hovers at a Restored Estate
When "Captain Ridley's shooting party" gathered here in late August 1938 as weekend guests at Bletchley Park, a Buckinghamshire country house, they were accompanied...
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence as a Threat
Ebola sounds like the stuff of nightmares. Bird flu and SARS also send shivers down my spine.
From ACM Opinion
Christine Kenneally's 'invisible History of the Human Race'
Of Christine Kenneally’s father’s father—a man neither Kenneally nor her father ever knew, a man who did the deed requisite to reproduction and promptly vanished—she...
From ACM Opinion