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
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
How Depressives Surf the Web
In what way do you spend your time online? Do you check your email compulsively? Watch lots of videos? Switch frequently among multiple Internet applications—from...
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
What Facebook Knows
If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world...
From ACM News
Google Fights Back in China
Two giants on the world stage are battling over the future of information.
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 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
First Amendment Protection For Search Engine Search Results
Google commissioned me to write this White Paper ("First Amendment Protection for Search Engine Search Results"), so I thought I’d pass it along. I wrote the paper...
From ACM Opinion
Is It Time To Stop Trusting Google?
Was Google's snooping on home Wi-Fi users the work of a rogue software engineer? Was it a deliberate corporate strategy? Was it simply an honest-to-goodness mistake...
From ACM Opinion
Don't Be Evil, but Don't Miss the Train
Back in 2004, as Google prepared to go public, Larry Page and Sergey Brin celebrated the maxim that was supposed to define their company: "Don’t be evil."
From ACM Opinion
Web Freedom Faces Geatest Threat Ever, Warns Google's Sergey Brin
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the Internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to...
From Communications of the ACM
Is Human Mobility Tracking a Good Idea?
Considering the trade-offs associated with human mobility tracking.
From ACM Opinion
Google Adds (even More) Links to the Pentagon
On Monday, the Defense Department’s best-known geek announced that she was leaving the Pentagon for a job at Google. It was an unexpected move: Washington and Mountain...
From ACM Opinion
Apple Pioneer Brings Emotion to Google+
Andy Hertzfeld was ready to retire back in 2009, following a momentous 30-year plus career where he worked side by side with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to design...
From ACM Opinion
Silicon Valley's Humble Billionaire
It's a Saturday afternoon in Palo Alto, Calif., and there goes David Cheriton, navigating the Silicon Valley suburb's tony downtown on his bike.
From Communications of the ACM
The Artificiality of Natural User Interfaces
Toward user-defined gestural interfaces.
From Communications of the ACM
The Idea Idea
What if practices rather than ideas are the main source of innovation?
From ACM Opinion
Google Knows Too Much About You
If you use Google, and I know you do, you may have noticed a little banner popping up at the top of the page announcing: "We're changing our privacy policy and...
From ACM Opinion