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 Careers
10 Companies Chasing Innovations That Really Matter
PayPal co-founder Max Levchin faced some flak recently when he announced he was starting a new company in the already crowded field of digital payments.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Data Brains Behind the Rise of Facebook
Jay Parikh sits at a desk inside Building 16 at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and his administrative assistant, Genie Samuel, sits next to...
From ACM News
Cellphone Chips Will Remake the Server World. Period.
Facebook recently ran an experiment. Inside a test lab, somewhere behind the scenes at the world's most popular network, engineers sidled up to a computer server...
From ACM Opinion
The Fbi Needs Hackers, Not Backdoors
Just imagine if all the applications and services you saw or heard about at CES earlier this month had to be designed to be "wiretap ready" before they could be...
From ACM Opinion
Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—take Our Jobs
It's hard to believe you'd have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force.
From ACM Opinion
Intellectual Ventures: Why the Patent System Needs Aggregators Like S
The U.S. patent system borrowed from mainland Europe a concept that had evolved over hundreds of years: the "moral right" for inventors to protect their ideas....
From ACM Opinion
How James Dyson Makes the Ordinary Extraordinary
James Dyson leaps out of his chair like a restless child and picks up a big yellow-and-gray vacuum—one of several Dyson contraptions congregated around the podium...
From ACM Opinion
Wrath of the Math: Obama Wins Nerdiest Election Ever
Congratulations, Barack Obama: You have prevailed in the nerdiest election in the history of the American Republic.
From ACM Opinion
Rumor Review: What to Expect from Apple's September 12 Media Event
Six years since its debut, the iPhone shows no signs of slowing in popularity.
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Man Who's Rewiring Google From the Inside Out
It was a tweet that fired the imagination like few others. On May 10, 2011, at 1:35 in the afternoon, Eric Brewer told the world he was redesigning the most important...
From ACM Opinion
Todd Akin and the Anti-Science House Science Committee
Aside from the sheer biological ludicrousness of Todd Akin's ideas on female physiology, one unsettling subplot to the debacle is his presence on the House of Committee...
From ACM Opinion
Nasa Mohawk Guy Bobak Ferdowsi on Sci-Fi, Legos, and Becoming a Meme
As space geeks watched nervously to see if NASA's Curiosity rover would land safely on Mars, many found themselves wondering, "Hey, who's that cool dude with the...
From ACM Opinion
Timing Is Everything For the Games' Chief Timer
Timing is everything for Peter Hürzeler, a man for whom "good enough" simply isn't.
From ACM Opinion
Russia's Top Cyber Sleuth Foils S Spies, Helps Kremlin Pals
It's early February in Cancun, Mexico. A group of 60 or so financial analysts, reporters, diplomats, and cybersecurity specialists shake off the previous night's...
From ACM Opinion
Will Wright Wants to Make a Game Out of Life Itself
For almost 30 years, Will Wright’s creations have attracted people who would never have played videogames. He's also managed the trick of developing games that...
From ACM Opinion
How to Fly the .s.'s Trillion-Dollar Stealth Fighter Jet
The first rule of flying the world's most advanced fighter jet: Do not push the red button until you absolutely mean to.
From ACM News
Google Shaman Explains Mysteries of 'compute Engine'
Google started work on the Google Compute Engine over a year and a half ago, and it was all Peter Magnusson could do to keep his mouth shut.
From ACM Opinion
Google Glass Team: 'wearable Computing Will Be the Norm'
Even though I followed Google's I/O Conference from across the country, the event made it obvious that a company created with a strict focus on search has become...
From ACM Opinion