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
Another Win For Artificial Intelligence: The Turing Award
It's been a banner year or so for artificial intelligence, from the recent triumph of I.B.M.'s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer to a wave of news coverage of the...
From ACM Opinion
Google Schools Its Algorithm
To humans, computer intelligence is a puzzle, as if the machines have split personalities. They can be so remarkably smart at times, yet so bafflingly dumb at...
From ACM News
Is the Navy Trying to Start the Robot Apocalypse?
Whenever the military rolls out a new robot program, folks like to joke about SkyNet or the Rise of the Machines. But this time, the military really is starting...
From ACM News
10 Questions For David Ferrucci
Why aren't you letting Watson speak for himself today? Watson is trained to answer questions for Jeopardy! It's not an interactive dialogue system, so it can't...
From ACM Opinion
Paul Buchheit, Creator of Gmail, Venture Capitalist
Soon after Paul Buchheit joined Google in 1999, he coined the phrase "Don't be evil," which along with profit and loss, remains the yardstick by which Google...
From ACM News
How We Know
James Gleick's first chapter has the title "Drums That Talk." It explains the concept of information by looking at a simple example.
From ACM Opinion
Cubelets: Modular, Affordable Robotics For Kids and Students
Robotics can be a tricky subject to teach children, and it's hard to know where to start. Cubelets is a system of modular cubes that each have one use, interaction...
From ACM Opinion
My Puny Human Brain
Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.
From ACM Opinion
A Worthwhile Contest For Artificial Intelligence
If IBM's Watson machine defeats people on TV's Jeopardy this week, does that mean that computers are smarter than humans? Maybe not. But the performance could...
From ACM Opinion
Vint Cerf Re-Thinks the Internet in Stanford Talk
To most, a wine cellar is just a cool place to keep some vintage vino. For Vint Cerf, the revered former Stanford engineering professor and graduate of the university...
From ACM Opinion
Nasa's Kepler Astronomer Geoff Marcy Discusses Latest Exoplanet Discoveries
Does life exist anywhere in the universe except on Earth?
From ACM News
Mind vs. Machine
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial...
From ACM Opinion
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything...
From ACM Opinion
Space Stasis
What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.
From ACM Opinion
Beware the Cyber War Boomerang?
Stuxnet, most sophisticated cyber weapon ever developed, could turn on vulnerable U.S. infrastructure.
From ACM Opinion
The Purpose of Science Fiction
How it teaches governments—and citizens—how to understand the future of technology.
From ACM Opinion
25 Years of Digital Vandalism
In January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest...
From Communications of the ACM
Forest For the Trees
With the amount of disk space available to the modern programmer, and the lack of parental supervision in most...
From ACM Opinion
Apple: Disrupt or Perish
While the secret for Apple's success seems patently obvious to most&meash;as obvious as the form and function of the iPhone 4—a more subtle reason is the company's...
From ACM News