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
How Not to Build a Brain
Building a brain sounds like a worthy goal, one that makes it seem as though the future is within reach.
From ACM Opinion
Early-niverse Explorer Looks For Answers
On March 17, a panel of four astrophysicists held a press conference at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., to announce that they...
From ACM Opinion
The Oculus Rift Game That's So Real It Nearly Destroyed Me
I can hear the alien breathing.
From ACM Opinion
Forget Turing, the Lovelace Test Has a Better Shot at Spotting AI
When a chatbot called Eugene Goostman passed Alan Turing's famous measure of machine intelligence in June by posing as a Ukrainian teenager with questionable language...
From ACM Opinion
The Most Annoying Problem in Computing Is Still Unsolved
When I travel these days, I tend to look like a walking Radio Shack—cords bursting out of my pockets, bag overflowing with chargers and accessories.
From ACM Opinion
The Hazards of Probing the Internet's Dark Side
Late last year, hackers breached Target's data security and stole information from millions of credit cards.
From ACM Opinion
Stop Complaining About the Facebook Study. It's a Golden Age For Research
Several years ago, my student and I studied anonymous email server data from 40,000 students, faculty and staff at a large university.
From ACM Opinion
Billy Beane on the Future of Sports: A Tech-Driven Revolution
Baseball—my passion and profession for three decades—has been at the forefront of the analytics revolution sweeping through sports.
From ACM Opinion
Arm Tries to Spread Its Chips to Forests, Felds, and Factories
Forest fire on the way? Building stress getting too high? Farmland too moist?
From ACM Careers
Keeping Time By Rubidium at the Naval Observatory
You know when you dial a number, and a man reads you the exact time at the tone? That precise timekeeping starts at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.
From ACM Opinion
7 Things You Should Know About Tor
We posted last week about the Tor Challenge and why everyone should use Tor.
From ACM Opinion
Should Facebook Manipulate sers?
Should we worry that technology companies can secretly influence our emotions?
From ACM Opinion
Snowden Asylum in Germany?
Revelations by Edward Snowden about U.S. surveillance continue to shake Germany more than one year after he came forward as a National Security Agency whistleblower...
From ACM Opinion
How My Dad's Equation Sparked the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence
A few days before Halloween in 1961, a young astronomer was mulling over a fairly serious problem.
From ACM Opinion
Studying Your sers: Facebook's Greatest Hits
Facebook's massive psychological experiment involving almost 700,000 unwitting users has attracted plenty of attention and outrage, but it's far from the only time...
From ACM Opinion
What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police
On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn't commit.
From ACM Opinion
The Troubling Truth of Why It's Still So Hard to Share Files Directly
It's not always easy to spot the compromises in the technology we use, where we've allowed corporate interests to trump public ideals like privacy and press freedom...
From ACM Opinion