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
Why Some of Google's Coolest Projects Flop Badly
In public, companies try to trot out any hint of a success story—real or imagined. At SXSW this week, Google took a different tack: It talked all about its failures...
From ACM Opinion
Edward Snowden Issues 'call to Arms' For Tech Companies in Secret Sxsw Meeting
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a highlight of last year's SXSW, where he gave one of his first public speeches. This year, Snowden was back at SXSW—but only...
From ACM Opinion
Virtual Zombie Apocalypse Can Prepare S For Disaster
Why use online games to study our responses to catastrophic events?
From ACM Opinion
Love in the Time of Bots
Convincing people to have a romantic relationship with a computer might be easier than it sounds.
From ACM Opinion
How Isis Succeeds on Social Media Where #stopkony Fails
Social networks offer an incredible tool for tapping into the collective unconscious, a virtual Jungian arena in which competition might be expected to amplify...
From ACM Opinion
Don't Want Nsa to Spy on Your Email? 5 Things You Can Do
More than half of Americans are worried about the U.S. government's digital spies prying into their emails, texts, search requests and other online information,...
From ACM Opinion
So Sayeth Google
Search for "vaccines." At least within our filter bubble, the top item in Google's "In the news" section earlier this week was an anti-vax column about the "feds'...
From ACM Opinion
To Pi and Beyond
Possibly not everyone knows that March 14th is Pi Day, in honor of the symbol used to denote the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
From ACM Opinion
Data and Goliath: Bruce Schneier on the Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
The book chronicles how governments and corporation have built an unprecedented surveillance state.
From ACM Opinion
'brutal Doom' Makes One of the Best Games Ever Made Even Better
I still measure every first-person shooter that's released today against the two decades-old Doom, or, more accurately, my memory of playing it as a tween.
From ACM Opinion
Teaching Robots to Be Moral
"Chappie," the highest-grossing movie in America last weekend, is, to put it mildly, not a great film; the critics have given it a twenty-nine on Rotten Tomatoes...
From ACM Opinion
Don't Edit the Human Germ Line
It is thought that studies involving the use of genome-editing tools to modify the DNA of human embryos will be published shortly.
From ACM Opinion
The Disastrous Events That Would Break the Internet
The Internet is unbreakable. At least, we think it is.
From ACM Opinion
Finding Out What the Past Smelled Like
It was the smell that hit me first, a heady mixture of roasting meat, woodsmoke, and farmyard manure.
From ACM Opinion
How Apple's Embrace of the New sb Points to World Without Wires
Ready or not, Apple's new MacBook is cutting the computing industry's cables.
From ACM Opinion
If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?
Let me hazard a guess that you think a real person has written what you're reading. Maybe you're right. Maybe not.
From ACM Opinion
Smartphones Set For Large-Scale Health Studies
Countless owners of smartphones and wearable devices are already using their devices to track their sleep, exercise, blood pressure and other measures of health...
From ACM Opinion
Neil Degrasse Tyson's Latest Science Projects
If everyone else is drinking beer, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson orders a milkshake.
From ACM Opinion
Here's What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official
Three years ago, technology was going to transform higher education. What happened?
From ACM Opinion