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
Long Day For a Professor Who Puts Elections nder a Microscope
Monday afternoon, just half a day before the polls opened, Prof. Mark Crispin Miller was feeling pessimistic about the electoral process.
From ACM Opinion
Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win
In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama's campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West...
From ACM Opinion
What Makes Google's Maps So Good
Wow. Nothing makes you appreciate something like losing it.
From ACM Opinion
Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing
It has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing. What has happened to our profession, and our art, to cause the supposed...
From ACM Opinion
The Connected Human: How the World Is About to Get Even Smaller
It may be difficult to imagine a world where human beings are even more connected than we are now.
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
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 News
Bike Crash Wiped Details; Gps Data Filled Them In
After racing and biking back roads on the San Francisco Peninsula for almost half a century without serious incident, on July 3 I crashed while riding downhill...
From ACM Opinion
Art That Interacts If You Interface
The Museum of Modern Art’s "Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects" is one of the smartest design shows in years—by which I mean...
From ACM News
Decoding Your Email Personality
Imagine, if you will, a young Mark Zuckerberg circa 2003, tapping out mail messages from his Harvard dorm room. It's a safe bet he never would have guessed that...
From ACM Opinion
How to Design a Hot Product
When Cisco killed the beloved Flip camcorder a few months ago, a lot of people were shocked and upset—including me. It just seemed like such a ham-handed, thoughtless...
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
One on One: Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier, a partner architect at Microsoft Research, has had a long and varied career in technology. Mr. Lanier popularized the term "virtual reality" in...
From ACM Opinion
One on One: Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier, a partner architect at Microsoft Research, has had a long and varied career in technology. Mr. Lanier popularized the term "virtual reality" in...
From ACM Opinion
Against Instant Replay
Extraordinary cases make bad law. In a sense, Armando Galarraga’s non-perfect perfect game, spoiled by an umpire’s call on what should have been the 27th out, offers...
From ACM Opinion
Driving By the Numbers
In the wake of the U.S. Congressional hearings on the Toyota recalls, we have heard various proposals for countering unintended acceleration in automobiles. Transportation...
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Wants a Faster Internet
There was no lack of, well, buzz about Google's new Buzz social-media platform last week, but more important were a series of moves that suggest the search giant...
From ACM Opinion
Steve Jobs and the Economics of Elitism
The more, the better. That’s the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days. It emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the...
From ACM Opinion
Why Twitter Will Endure
I can remember when I first thought seriously about Twitter. Last March, I was at the SXSW conference in Austin, Tex., where technology, media and music are mashed...
From ACM TechNews