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 News
How Fbi Technology Woes Let Fort Hood Shooter Slip By
On November 5, 2009, an Army psychiatrist stationed at Fort Hood, Texas shot and killed 12 fellow soldiers and a civilian Defense Department employee while wounding...
From Communications of the ACM
Will Massive Open Online Courses Change How We Teach?
Sharing recent experiences with the massive open artificial intelligence course developed and conducted by Stanford faculty Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.
From ACM Opinion
Can Data Mining Stop the Killing?
Would Total Information Awareness have stopped James Eagan Holmes?
From ACM Opinion
Technology Can Be Harnessed to Fight Drug Cartels in Mexico
A couple of months ago we visited Juarez, Mexico, a city right across our border—yet so far away.
From ACM Opinion
How Google Is Becoming an Extension of Your Mind
It's time to think of Google as much more than just a search engine, and that should both excite and spook you.
From ACM Opinion
The Sun Shines on 'the Cloud'
What's the real lesson to be learned from Amazon's cloud computing failure two weeks ago, the one that knocked Netflix and other Websites offline?
From ACM Opinion
Why the Days Are Numbered For Hadoop As We Know It
Hadoop is everywhere. For better or worse, it has become synonymous with big data. In just a few years it has gone from a fringe technology to the de facto standard...
From ACM Opinion
Future Planetary Rovers May Make Their Own Decisions
It's a hot summer day, and your eyes spot an ice cream cart up ahead. Without even really thinking, you start walking that direction. Planetary scientists would...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Who Keeps Facebook Humming
Jay Parikh is happy to never get a call from Mark Zuckerberg. Why? It means he's doing his job well. As the vice president of infrastructure engineering at Facebook...
From ACM Opinion
What, Exactly, Is a Supercomputer?
It's official: The United States is home to the world's fastest supercomputer. But what exactly are supercomputers and why should we care about them? I decidedLawrence...
From ACM Opinion
How Garmin Failed to See the Iphone Threat
About nine years ago, I had a question for Min Kao, the CEO of the GPS concern Garmin. His answer was determined, and I thought of it as I watched the news from...
From ACM Opinion
The Measured Man
Like many people who are careful about their weight, Larry Smarr once spent two weeks measuring everything he put in his mouth. He charted each serving of food...
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
Inside Google's Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever
The ugly truth is that computers don't know anything. They have no common sense.
From ACM News
Google's New Brain Could Have a Big Impact
A store of information dubbed the "Knowledge Graph" now adds useful context and detail to the list of links that Google serves up.
From ACM News
Apple's Stash of Credit Card Numbers Is Its Secret Weapon
That little iPhone in your pocket is perfectly positioned to become a clone of the credit cards in your wallet or purse.
From ACM Opinion
Zoran Popovi?: Recruiting Gamers to Fight Disease
Proteins are the workhorses of our cells: They turn food into energy and determine our health. Each one is a chain of molecules—sometimes thousands of links long—that...
From ACM Opinion
Can Facebook 'monetize Eyeballs?'
In the days of the Internet bubble of the mid to late 1990s, companies received millions of dollars of venture capital to offer products that weren't especially...
From Communications of the ACM
Q&A: A Sure Thing
Artificial intelligence pioneer Judea Pearl discusses probability, causation, the calculus of intervention, and counterfactuals.
From ACM Opinion