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 Communications of the ACM
A Response to Fake News as a Response to Citizens United
How boundaries on speech could free the market for speech.
From Communications of the ACM
Continuity and Change in Internet Law
The fundamentals of the field of Internet law have remained consistent, but details have evolved in response to technological innovation.
From Communications of the ACM
What Does It Mean for a Computing Curriculum to Succeed?
Examining the expansion, proliferation, and integration of computing education everywhere.
From ACM Opinion
How Silicon Valley Puts the 'Con' in Consent
The average person would have to spend 76 working days reading all of the digital privacy policies they agree to in the span of a year. Reading Amazon's terms and...
From ACM Opinion
Google Isn't the Company that We Should Have Handed the Web Over To
With Microsoft's decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google....
From Communications of the ACM
CRISPR: An Emerging Platform for Gene Editing
Considering a potential platform candidate in the evolving realm of gene-editing technologies research.
From Communications of the ACM
Illegal Pricing Algorithms
Examining the potential legal consequences of using pricing algorithms.
From Communications of the ACM
Opportunities and Challenges in Search Interaction
Seeking to address a wider range of user requests toward task completion.
From Communications of the ACM
Point: Should AI Technology Be Regulated?: Yes, and Here's How
Considering the difficult technical and sociological issues affecting the regulation of artificial intelligence research and applications.
From Communications of the ACM
Counterpoint: Regulators Should Allow the Greatest Space for AI Innovation
Permissionless innovation should be the governing policy for AI technologies.
From Communications of the ACM
Learning Machine Learning
A discussion of the rapidly evolving realm of machine learning.
From ACM Opinion
What Isaac Asimov Taught s About Predicting the Future
In February, the spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk conducted a test launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which successfully sent its payload into orbit around...
From ACM Opinion
How Sci-Fi Like WarGames Led to Real Policy During the Reagan Administration
This year, John Badham's WarGames—one of the movies most beloved by hackers, techies, and tech policy wonks (like me!)—celebrates its 35th anniversary.
From ACM Opinion
Clicks, Lies and Videotape
This past April a new video of Barack Obama surfaced on the Internet. Against a backdrop that included both the American and presidential flags, it looked like...
From ACM Opinion
50 Years Old, '2001: A Space Odyssey' Still Offers Insight about the Future
Watching a 50th anniversary screening of "2001: A Space Odyssey," I found myself, a mathematician and computer scientist whose research includes work related to...
From ACM Opinion
Brett Kavanaugh and the Information Terrorists Trying to Reshape America
Since the advent of Donald Trump's candidacy, there's been a ton of focus on botnets and sockpuppets—automated and semiautomated social media accounts that use...
From ACM Opinion
Detecting 'DeepFake' Videos in the Blink of an Eye
A new form of misinformation is poised to spread through online communities as the 2018 midterm election campaigns heat up. Called "deepfakes" after the pseudonymous...
From ACM Opinion
The Four Ways that Ex-Internet Idealists Explain Where It All Went Wrong
A long time ago, in the bad old days of the 2000s, debates about the Internet were dominated by two great tribes: the Optimists and the Pessimists.
From Communications of the ACM
When Machine Learning is Facially Invalid
Observations on the use of machine learning and facial inferences to classify people using inexplicable data.
From ACM Opinion