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
Big Data and Dna: What Business Can Learn from Junk Genes
The science world was rocked Wednesday by the discovery that the 80 percent of the human genethat scientists throught was "junk" actually contains genetic regulators...
From ACM Opinion
Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing
It has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing. What has happened to our profession, and our art, to cause the supposed...
From Communications of the ACM
Seven Lessons From Bad History
Journalists, historians, and the invention of email.
From ACM Opinion
Forget the Desktop
Every morning I wake up too early, reach for my iPad, and scan the morning's tech headlines. This is a pathetic enough existence, but the Web sites I frequent aren't...
From ACM Opinion
Five Things I've Learned from 20 Years of Email
It's been 20 years since I got my first-ever email address. Back then, I read email with a 2,400 bps modem. Today, emails reach me instantaneously on my phone whereever...
From ACM Opinion
Timing Is Everything For the Games' Chief Timer
Timing is everything for Peter Hürzeler, a man for whom "good enough" simply isn't.
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
Why There Are Too Many Patents in America
Recently, while sitting as a trial judge, I dismissed a case in which Apple and Motorola had sued each other for alleged infringement of patents for components...
From ACM Opinion
Talking To Your Mac: The Coolest Feature of Mountain Lion, and the Future of Computers
Mountain Lion, the next big software cat for your Mac, has a gazillion new features. Too many to name, and frankly, to care about. But there's one you should pay...
From ACM Opinion
'brave' Director Talks About the Pixar Process
Mark Andrews has worked in animation and live-action as a storyboard artist, story supervisor, writer, and even as a voice actor, including The Incredibles, John...
From ACM TechNews
Researcher: Interdependencies Could Lead to Cloud 'meltdowns'
As cloud computing becomes increasingly common, serious operational "meltdowns" could take place as end users and vendors mix, match, and bundle services for various...
From ACM Opinion
How Google and Microsoft Taught Search to 'understand' the Web
Despite the massive amounts of computing power dedicated by search engine companies to crawling and indexing trillions of documents on the Internet, search engines...
From ACM Opinion
Where Speech Recognition Is Going
Until recently, the idea of holding a conversation with a computer seemed pure science fiction. If you asked a computer to "open the pod bay doors"—well, that was...
From ACM Opinion
Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World's Energy Crisis
There is one version of Craig Venter's life story where he would’ve been a dutiful scientist at the National Institutes of Health, a respected yet anonymous researcher...
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
Machines Shouldn't Grade Student Writing
In 2002, Indiana rolled out computer scoring of its 11th grade state writing exam.
From ACM Careers
5 Questions with the Creator of the First Ipad-Made Ios Game
Rui Viana isn't a full-time app developer and he hasn't learned how to use Apple's iOS software development kit.
From Communications of the ACM
Crossing the Software Education Chasm
An Agile approach that exploits cloud computing.
From Communications of the ACM
Programming Goes Back to School
Broadening participation by integrating game design into middle school curricula. View a video featuring author Alexander Repenning about using games to introduce...
From ACM Opinion