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
To Boldly Go Nowhere, For Now
On Aug. 20, NASA's administrator formally welcomed the newest candidates of the astronaut corpsand released a space exploration roadmap that includes robotic and...
From ACM Opinion
How Robots Can Trick You Into Loving Them
I like to think of my Roomba as cute and industrious.
From ACM Opinion
A Peek nder the Hood at the Brains of Self-Driving Cars
What car maker today doesn't seem to have an autonomous car bumbling around its test lot?
From ACM Opinion
Who Will Prosper in the New World
Self-driving vehicles threaten to send truck drivers to the unemployment office.
From ACM Opinion
Life After Siri: Nuance's phill Climb To Being Your Digital Assistant
In the gleaming Silicon Valley branch office of speech-recognition firm Nuance Communications, a small room has been made to look like a homey den.
From ACM Opinion
How to Think About Drones
Consider David. The shepherd lad steps up to face in single combat the Philistine giant Goliath.
From ACM Opinion
We Need a Moratorium on 'Brain-Like' Tech Stories
My "aha" moment arrived two decades ago while I was an undergrad student (and dilettante "futurist," though I didn’t know the word then), sitting in the Great Hall...
From ACM Opinion
Professor Emeritus Rodney Brooks Refines the Sequel to Irobot
Professor emeritus Rodney Brooks gained fame in the 1990s for co-founding iRobot, an MIT spinoff that brought the world the Roomba and other innovative, helpful...
From ACM Opinion
If We Landed on Europa, What Would We Want to Know?
Most of what scientists know of Jupiter's moon Europa they have gleaned from a dozen or so close flybys from NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 and NASA's Galileo...
From ACM Opinion
One Year on Mars: Curiosity Rover's Chief Scientist John Grotzinger Speaks Out
One year ago Monday (Aug. 5), NASA's Mars rover Curiosity pulled off a stunning and unprecedented landing inside Gale Crater, kicking off a two-year surface mission...
From ACM Opinion
Justice For Alan Turing?
What do we do with the knowledge that people not all that different from ourselves have behaved with astounding stupidity and cruelty, over and over again, in the...
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Computers Will Give Artificial Intelligence Big Boost, Studies Suggest
Quantum computers of the future will have the potential to give artificial intelligence a major boost, a series of studies suggests.
From ACM Opinion
Sebastian Thrun on the Future of Learning
Sebastian Thrun has worn many hats in the tech world: Stanford research professor, founder of Google's X Labs, where he oversaw the development of self-drivingUdacity...
From ACM Opinion
Software Recognition Technology Is Amazing, but Not Amazing Enough
The gadget blogs may work themselves into a frenzy over megapixels and processor speed. But if you want to know what really dazzles the masses, consider a feature...
From ACM Opinion
What the Digital Brains of the Future Might Be Like
It is the rare entrepreneur who hits it truly big twice. Those who do—such as Ev Williams, Ted Turner, and Elon Musk—tend to stay within the original industry that...
From ACM Opinion
Would You Go Full Cyborg?
It's only a matter of time, really. Google Glass, Epson's Movierio, the Oculus Rift, and similar technologies are at the cutting edge of wearable technologies....
From ACM Opinion
Mit's Magic Bag Of Sand
The camera pushes in. And there, near the meridian line, you see a faint scattering of red lights. Something is in the tar. And it's glowing.
From ACM Opinion
The Quantified Brain of a Self-Tracking Neuroscientist
Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is undertaking some intense introspection.
From ACM Opinion