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
The Delivery Guy Who Saw Jeremy Lin Coming
The morning after Jeremy Lin sank a thrilling, last-second three-pointer that lifted the New York Knicks over the Toronto Raptors and gave "Linsanity" its latest...
From ACM Opinion
What Dropbox Can Teach S About Cloud Computing
Dropbox is the most deceptively simple of services.
From ACM Opinion
Facebook Is Using You
Last week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion...
From ACM Opinion
Privacy, Technology, and Law
Every day, those of us who live in the digital world give little bits of ourselves away. On Facebook and LinkedIn. To servers that store our email, Google searches...
From ACM Opinion
Yes We Scan
Locked in our federal vaults is a tremendous storehouse of information that if digitized would form a core for our digital public libraries in America with huge...
From Communications of the ACM
What Have We Learned About Software Engineering?
Upon closer examination, everything old appears to be new again in the realm of software engineering.
From Communications of the ACM
Peer Instruction: A Teaching Method to Foster Deep Understanding
How the computing education community can learn from physics education.
From Communications of the ACM
Incentive Auctions
Reallocating valuable wireless spectrum can generate billions of dollars in revenue to the U.S. federal government while also benefiting consumers.
From ACM Opinion
Why The 'check Engine' Light Must Be Banned
It's pretty easy to dismiss the "check engine" light as just stupid, because, well, it is.
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Start 3d Scanning the World
When Microsoft was developing its Kinect 3D sensor, a critical task was to calibrate its algorithms to rapidly and accurately recognize parts of the human body,...
From ACM News
Google's Data Center Engineer Shares Secrets of 'warehouse' Computing
Luiz André Barroso doesn't see Google's data centers as data centers. He sees them as computers the size of warehouses.
From ACM TechNews
Should Computers Have Their Own Web Sites?
Organizations could use a new top-level domain, .data, to share data in a standard form, writes Stephen Wolfram, creator of the computational knowledge engine Wolfram...
From ACM Opinion
Research Bought, Then Paid For
Through the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease.
From ACM Opinion
Why America's Spies Struggle To Keep p
Before Sept. 11, 2011, there were 16 intelligence agencies in the United States.
From Communications of the ACM
Interfaces For the Ordinary User: Can We Hide Too Much?
Increasing the visibility and access to underlying file structure on consumer devices can vastly improve the user experience.
From Communications of the ACM
The IBM PC: From Beige Box to Industry Standard
Looking back at three decades of PC platform evolution.
From ACM Opinion
The Year in Computing
2011 saw the personal computer continue to be marginalized. Although PCs are still the workhorse computing device in homes and offices, the most exciting innovations...
From ACM Opinion
Marc Andreessen: Predictions For 2012 (and Beyond)
Marc Andreessen's view of the world boils down to software.
From ACM Opinion
Siri Means You'll (almost) Never Have to Die
Some 80 years ago, philanthropist Spencer Penrose amassed a fortune in Western gold, silver, and copper mines. After building a zoo and hospital, he decided to...
From ACM Opinion