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
Snowden's Chronicler Reveals Her Own Life nder Surveillance
Laura Poitras has a talent for disappearing. In her early documentaries like My Country, My Country and The Oath, her camera seems to float invisibly in rooms where...
From ACM Opinion
The Embarrassing, Destructive Fight Over Biotech's Big Breakthrough
A defining moment in modern biology occurred on July 24, 1978, when biotechnology pioneer Robert Swanson, who had recently co-founded Genentech, brought two young...
From ACM Opinion
AI Is Transforming Google Search. The Rest of the Web Is Next
Yesterday, the 46-year-old Google veteran who oversees its search engine, Amit Singhal, announced his retirement. And in short order, Google revealed that Singhal's...
From ACM Opinion
Crosstown Traffic: The Bedbug Genome
In the great contest that is life, the common bedbug, Cimex lectularius, qualifies as a winner.
From ACM Opinion
Why Safe Harbor 2.0 Will Lose Again
Over the weekend, negotiators from the European Union's executive body, and the US Federal Trade Commission worked frantically to thrash out a deal to allow transatlantic...
From ACM Opinion
When Will We Be Able to Vote Online?
Sooner or later everything seems to go online. Newspapers. TV. Radio. Shopping. Banking. Dating.
From ACM Opinion
The Step Needed to Make Virtual Reality More Real
It's one thing to play the arcade game Whac-A-Mole by swinging around an oversized mallet; it's far easier to whack those moles virtually, controlling the mallet...
From ACM Opinion
Proposed State Bans on Phone Encryption Make Zero Sense
American politics has long accepted the strange notion that just a pair of states—namely Iowa and New Hampshire—get an outsize vote in choosing America’s next president...
From ACM Opinion
There May Be a Way to Allow Mass Surveillance and Preserve Our Privacy at the Same Time
If we've learned anything over the past few years, it's that governments will make all sorts of excuses to justify the surveillance of its citizens.
From ACM Opinion
The Language Barrier Is About to Fall
It used to be the case when I traveled abroad that I would take a little pocket dictionary that provided translations for commonly used phrases and words.
From ACM Opinion
Will Machines Eliminate s?
Yoshua Bengio leads one of the world's preëminent research groups developing a powerful AI technique known as deep learning.
From ACM Opinion
Digital Intuition
Napoleon had it and so did Charles Darwin. Tennis champion Roger Federer has it in spades. The dictionary defines intuition as knowledge obtained without conscious...
From ACM News
Is Blockchain the Most Important It Invention of Our Age?
There are not many occasions when one can give an unqualified thumbs-up to something the government does, but this is one such occasion.
From ACM Opinion
Go Players React to Computer Defeat
For decades, the ancient game of Go has stood out as the one board game that computers couldn't crack.
From ACM Opinion
If Killer Robots Arrive, the Terminator Will Be the Least of Our Problems
Autonomous weapons experts sounded the alarm last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, cautioning that unless governments act to limit these...
From ACM Opinion
A New and Stunning Way to See the Whole Earth
The Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 sits 22,000 miles from Earth in orbit. On August 5, 2015, it peered down at the half of Earth that it can see, a hemisphere...
From ACM Opinion
Why We'e So Vulnerable
In an age of continuing electronic breaches and rising geopolitical tensions over cyber-espionage, the White House is working on a national cybersecurity strategy...
From ACM Opinion
To Make AI More Human, Teach It to Chitchat
Tom was discussing the film star Tang Wei with a chatbot named XiaoIce, and the bot was excited: "A goddess! She stole my heart … and then went off and married!"...
From ACM Opinion
Power Wars: How Obama Justified, Expanded Bush-Era Surveillance
Over the winter holidays, I took some well-needed time offline, away from e-mail and social media.
From ACM Opinion