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
The Nsa's Crypto "breakthrough"
One difficulty of reporting on spy outfits like America's National Security Agency is the veil of secrecy they operate behind.
From ACM Opinion
Visit to the World's Fair of 2014
The New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding."
From ACM Opinion
State of Innovation: Busting the Private-Sector Myth
Images of tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs are continually thrown at us by politicians, economists and the media.
From Communications of the ACM
The Other Side of Language
The conversation for action gives a framework for completing professional actions effectively.
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the Age of Denial
In 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population...
From ACM Opinion
Meet the Nasa Scientist Devising a Starship Warp Drive
The idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light limits our interstellar ambitions. How do we get round this?
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 TechNews
Jeff Hawkins: Where Open Source and Machine Learning Meet Big Data
Smartphone pioneer Jeff Hawkins says that he primarily concentrates today on building machines that operate on neuroscientific principles.
From ACM Opinion
Craig Venter on the Hail Mary Genome and Synthetic Meat
Where are we in the hype cycle of synthetic biology?
From ACM Opinion
In Pursuit of Quantum Biology With Birgitta Whaley
As an undergraduate at Oxford University in the mid-1970s, K. Birgitta Whaley struggled to choose between chemistry and physics.
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
The End of Integrated Systems
I always travel with a pair of binoculars and, to the puzzlement of my fellow airline passengers, spend part of every flight gazing through them at whatever happens...
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 Careers
The Brains Behind Research on the Brain
While studying physics and electrical engineering as an MIT undergraduate in the late 1990s, Mehmet Fatih Yanik managed to avoid taking any biology classes until...
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 Communications of the ACM
Cherry-Picking and the Scientific Method
Software is supposed be a part of computer science, and science demands proof.
From ACM Opinion
The End of Digital Tyranny: Why the Future of Computing Is Analog
Our world is ruled by 1s and 0s.
From ACM Opinion
Your Brain at Work
When Apple fanatics lined up to get the new iPhone in 2011, the New York Times published an op-ed titled "You Love Your iPhone. Literally." It described an unpublished...
From ACM Opinion
The Hut Where the Internet Began
Let's start at the end point: what you're doing right now. You are pulling information from a network onto a screen, enhancing your embodied experience with a communication...
From ACM Opinion