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
Facebook Is Using You
Last week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion...
From ACM Opinion
The Rise of the New Groupthink
Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement...
From ACM Opinion
Research Bought, Then Paid For
Through the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease.
From ACM Opinion
Building the Team That Built Watson
The assignment was one of the biggest challenges in the field of artificial intelligence: build a computer smart enough to beat grand champions at the game of...
From ACM Opinion
Internet Access Is Not a Human Right
From the streets of Tunis to Tahrir Square and beyond, protests around the world last year were built on the Internet and the many devices that interact with...
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the 'knowosphere'
Here's my take on what I've begun calling the "knowosphere"—a word intentionally echoing the more allegorical "noosphere," the "planet of the mind" of Vladimir....
From ACM Opinion
Expanding Internet Domains
Come January, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers plans to allow businesses, nonprofits and others to apply for their own "top-level domain"...
From ACM Opinion
Patents and the Public Interest
Next week, in a case closely watched both by analysts and retailers, the International Trade Commission will decide whether the handset maker HTC should be allowed...
From ACM Opinion
Walter Isaacson, Biographer of Steve Jobs
I’ve known Steve off and on since 1984. I was at Time magazine and he came to our offices to show us the original Macintosh. He was talking about these icons...
From ACM Opinion
Our High-Tech Health-Care Future
Why can't Americans tap into the ingenuity that put men on the moon, created the Internet, and sequenced the human genome to revitalize our economy?
From ACM Opinion
The Genius of Jobs
One of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue.
From ACM Opinion
Running Out of Bandwidth
At a time of slow economic growth and declining competitiveness, wireless technology remains a shining example of innovation. In the last 10 years, wireless communications...
From ACM Opinion
Prospero's Tempestuous Family
Abdulfattah "John" Jandali is a casino manager outside Reno, so he knows about odds.
From ACM Opinion
The niversity of Wherever
For more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university. Digital utopians have...
From ACM Opinion
How to Fix Our Math Education
There is widespread alarm in the United States about the state of our math education. The anxiety can be traced to the poor performance of American students on...
From ACM Opinion
A Collision of Creativity and Cash at Disney/pixar
When the Walt Disney Company bought Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion in 2006, there was understandable concern that the media conglomerate that drove...
From ACM Opinion
There's No Data Sheriff on the Wild Web
A company suffers a catastrophic attack on its servers. Gone are names, email addresses, home phone numbers, passwords, credit card numbers. Everything ends up...
From ACM Opinion
Patently Obvious
On Monday the Supreme Court will consider whether to fundamentally alter the way American patent law is litigated. Specifically, in the context of an otherwise...
From ACM Opinion