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
What a Win or Loss on Mars Will Mean
Anyone who's looked at the "Seven Minutes of Terror" trailer for next month's Mars landing might have wondered whether the planners behind NASA's $2.5 billion Mars...
From ACM Opinion
Obama Was Right: The Government Invented the Internet
Earlier this month, President Obama argued that wealthy business people owe some of their success to the government's investment in education and basic infrastructure...
From ACM Opinion
'a Perfect and Beautiful Machine': What Darwin's Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence
Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.
From ACM Opinion
You Will Want Google Goggles
At first glance, Thad Starner does not look out of place at Google. A pioneering researcher in the field of wearable computing, Starner is a big, charming man with...
From ACM TechNews
Exascale Computing: The View From Argonne
In an interview, U.S. Argonne National Laboratory directors Rick Stevens, Michael Papka, and Marc Snir contextualize the challenges and advantages of developing...
From ACM Opinion
Alan Turing: Is He Really the Father of Computing?
When Alan Turing arrived to start work at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, south-west London, he was 33 years old. It was October 1945 and he was...
From Communications of the ACM
Alan Turing's Other Universal Machine
All computer scientists know about the Universal Turing Machine, one of the foundation stones of theoretical computer science. Much less well known is the practical...
From ACM Opinion
Why the Internet Makes It Impossible to Stop Giant Wall Street Losses
In 1984, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow published his classic book, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. The odd term, "normal accident," Perrow...
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Man Who Invented the Instructions For the Internet
Steve Crocker was there when the Internet was born.
From ACM Careers
Bre Pettis: 3d Printing's First Celebrity
Bre Pettis looks like a throwback. He’s got an Elvis Presley-meets-Buddy Holly thing going on with his chunky sideburns, thick-rimmed black glasses, and sculpted...
From ACM Opinion
Thomas Sterling: 'i Think We Will Never Reach Zettaflops'
As supercomputing makes its way through the petascale era, the future of the technology has never seemed so uncertain.
From ACM Careers
Why Do Our Best and Brightest End p in Silicon Valley and Not D.c.?
Recently I visited one of the primary ventricles of Silicon Valley's investment culture, Google Ventures.
From ACM Opinion
.n. Efforts Put Internet Freedom at Risk
A mounting effort to transform a United Nations agency into a global Internet regulator is threatening to undo decades of policymaking that helped the Internet...
From ACM TechNews
A New Breed of Heterogeneous Computing
The foundation of high-performance computing is undergoing a revolution with the introduction of add-on accelerators. An emerging variant of the heterogeneous computing...
From ACM Opinion
How I Traced My Ancestry Back to the Stone Age
I recently had a genetic test to find out more about where my ancestors came from.
From ACM Opinion
Rethinking the Social Network
At some point later this year, Facebook will connect one in every seven people on the planet. When it passes the billion user mark—and really it is a question of...
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Drone Arms Race
Another terrorist overseas dies in a U.S. armed drone strike. This far from uncommon occurrence is an impressive reminder of the U.S. drone program’s remarkable...
From ACM TechNews
Robotics Trends For 2012
IEEE's Erico Guizzo and Hizook.com founder Travis Deyle make several predictions regarding what will be big news in robotics this year.
From ACM Opinion