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 Communications of the ACM
In Praise of 'Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill'
Sixty years ago, Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill produced the first textbook on programming: The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital...
From ACM Opinion
Can Math Beat Financial Markets?
Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a...
From ACM Opinion
Can Math Beat Financial Markets?
Wall Street's wild swings last week helped skew both retirement portfolios and mathematical models of the financial markets. After all, a standard Gaussian function—a...
From ACM News
Futurist Ray Kurzweil Says He Can Bring His Dead Father Back to Life Through a Computer Avatar
Ray Kurzweil, a prominent inventor and "futurist" who has long predicted that mind and machine will one day merge, has been making arrangements to talk to his...
From ACM News
Google's Self-Driving Wreck: Really Human Error?
When a self-driving car crashes, one just has to wonder about those robots. Are they really all they're cracked up to be? Or might they be just as cracked as...
From ACM Opinion
Director of Mit's Personal Robots Group on Designing Robots that Will Be seful in Our Everyday Lives
It's all about human-robot interaction in this more interpersonal sense, like you saw in Star Wars. Until then, the way we reacted with robots was [by] remote...
From ACM Opinion
Google's Instant Pages and the Joys of a Computer that Can Read Your Mind
Chrome is reading my mind. When I type a search query in Google's Web browser, it offers me the most likely results right in the address bar. It doesn't justWikipedia...
From ACM News
David Ferrucci, Lead Researcher of Ibm's Watson Project
How do you improve on a computer that beat the world's best Jeopardy! players? Have Watson team up with humanity.
From ACM Opinion
ltimate Logic: To Infinity and Beyond
The mysteries of infinity could lead us to a fantastic structure above and beyond mathematics as we know it.
From ACM Opinion
From Gamification to Intelligence Amplification to The Singularity
I've been thinking about the combination of artificial intelligence and intelligence amplification and specifically the symbiosis of these two things. And the...
From ACM Opinion
The Edison of Silicon Valley
Steve Perlman, Silicon Valley’s self-styled Thomas Edison, has found a way to increase wireless capacity by a factor of 1,000.
From ACM News
When Patents Attack
Nathan Myhrvold is a genius and a polymath. He made hundreds of millions of dollars as Microsoft's chief technology officer, he's discovered dinosaur fossils,...
From ACM Opinion
Existence: Am I a Hologram?
Take a look around you. The walls, the chair you're sitting in, your own body—they all seem real and solid. Yet there is a possibility that everything we see...
From ACM Opinion
Nature's Hidden Prime Number Code
Ever since humans evolved on this planet we have been trying to make sense of the world around us. We have attempted to explain why the world looks and behaves...
From ACM News
Can We Make Machines Listen More Carefully?
You probably use voice recognition technology already, if in a limited capacity. Maybe you use Google's voice-activated search, or take advantage of its (somewhat...
From ACM News
Welcome to the Age of the Splinternet
Openness is the Internet's great strength—and weakness. With powerful forces carving it up, is its golden age coming to an end?
From Communications of the ACM
Geography Is Alive and Well in Virtual Teams
Just because a team is virtual, it doesn't mean geography is dead.
From ACM Opinion