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 TechNews
Dennis Shasha: Nature Can Improve Our Computers
New York University computer science professor Dennis Shasha thinks the future of computing lies in a synthesis with nature. He believes the next big leap in computing...
From ACM Opinion
Facebook Knows Where You Are
The social network's new Places feature will make it more difficult to lie to your friends.
From ACM Opinion
Beloit College Mindset List For the Class of 2014
Born when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage, members of this fall’s entering college...
From ACM Opinion
Location Services Show the Way to the Next Great Internet Bubble
When Silicon Valley misses the mark on a new technology, the problem usually is an issue of timing. It's not what is going to happen, but when it will happen...
From ACM Opinion
Data Mining Is Shaping Our World. Are We Ready For It?
Each day we exchange a mess of content through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, discussion boards and other online forums. How are companies and other organizations using...
From ACM Opinion
Data Mining Is Shaping Our World. Are We Ready For It?
Each day we exchange a mess of content through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, discussion boards and other online forums. How are companies and other organizations using...
From ACM Opinion
Will Someone Leak the Leaker's Secrets?
Who has the right to decide what information should be kept secret? That's the vexatious question raised by WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who masterminded...
From ACM Opinion
A Review of Verizon and Google's Net Neutrality Proposal
Efforts to protect net neutrality that involve government regulation have always faced one fundamental obstacle: the substantial danger that the regulators will...
From ACM Opinion
Qualifications Needed to Be Hp's Next Ceo
The world's largest technology company by revenue and the outfit that birthed Silicon Valley has very suddenly and unexpectedly put out a figurative "help wanted"...
From ACM Opinion
The First Church of Robotics
This constant stream of stories about artificial intelligence suggests that machines are becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should...
From ACM Opinion
Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty, With Real Dangers
In a 1963 Supreme Court opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren observed that "the fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger...
From ACM Opinion
Technology Lessons from the Wikileaks Saga
There's already debate about whether Wikileaks's release of 92,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan was more of a milestone in the annals of national...
From ACM Opinion
Charging the Wikileaks Leaker with Treason Would Be Absurd
Should Pvt. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst charged with leaking troves of classified documents to WikiLeaks, be tried for treason? And what about...
From ACM Opinion
The Itch of Curiosity
Curiosity is one of those personality traits that gets short scientific shrift. It strikes me as a really important mental habit—how many successful people are...
From ACM Opinion
I Tweet, Therefore I Am
On a recent lazy Saturday morning, my daughter and I lolled on a blanket in our front yard, snacking on apricots, listening to a download of E. B. White reading...
From ACM Opinion
Protecting Privacy
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog but advertisers may infer that you own one. The flow of information from users of the internet both to social networks...
From ACM Opinion
Cyberwar Is Hell
While we obsessed over Russian spies, top diplomats were working to stop a greater espionage problem: the threat of cyberwarfare.
From ACM Opinion