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
Neal Stephenson on Science Fiction, Building Towers 20 Kilometers High ... and Insurance
Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT earlier this week, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining...
From Communications of the ACM
Crossing the Software Education Chasm
An Agile approach that exploits cloud computing.
From Communications of the ACM
Programming Goes Back to School
Broadening participation by integrating game design into middle school curricula. View a video featuring author Alexander Repenning about using games to introduce...
From ACM Opinion
Darwin's Devices
When I tell people that I work on "evolving robots," their common response is to joke—semi-seriously—about Skynet or some other sci-fi nightmare in which machines...
From ACM Opinion
We Can Survive Killer Asteroids
The chances that your tombstone will read "Killed by Asteroid" are about the same as they'd be for "Killed in Airplane Crash."
From ACM Opinion
A Rosie Future: Jetsons-Like Gadgets with 'ambient Intelligence' Are Key to Smart Homes and Cities
Fifty years after The Jetsons promised us a future of robot maids, flying cars, video phones and meals at the push of a button, it seems that reality may actually...
From ACM Opinion
The Holy Cosmos: The New Religion of Space Exploration
Think about how you feel when you see the Earth from space or the Apollo astronauts walking on the moon.
From ACM Opinion
Vernor Vinge Is Optimistic About the Collapse of Civilization
"I think that [civilization] coming back would actually be a very big surprise," he says. "The difference between us and us 10,000 years ago is … we know it can...
From ACM Opinion
We'll Someday Accept Computers as Human
Any author or filmmaker seeking ideas for a sci-fi yarn about the implications of artificial intelligence—good or bad—would be smart to talk to Ray Kurzweil.
From ACM Opinion
Captain Michio and the World of Tomorrow
By 2020, the word "computer" will have vanished from the English language, physicist Michio Kaku predicts.
From ACM Opinion
Sir Jonathan Ive: The Iman Cometh
Sir Jonathan Ive, Jony to his friends, is arguably one of the world's most influential Londoners.
From ACM Opinion
Jeff Jaffe Lights a Fire nder Web Standardization
It's been an action-packed two years since Jeff Jaffe took over as the World Wide Web Consortium's chief executive, but more action is the order of the day at...
From ACM Opinion
Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages
Compared to the versions that are hacked together late at night under insane deadline pressure, the programming languages to come out of academia are failures.
From ACM Opinion
One Thing Is Certain: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle Is Not Dead
A demonstration by experimenters at the Vienna University of Technology violates Heisenberg's original version of his uncertainty principle, but confirms a newer...
From ACM Opinion
I Love You, Killer Robots
It was way back in May 2010 that I first spotted the flying drones that will take over the world. They were in a video that Daniel Mellinger, one of the robots'...
From ACM Opinion
Silicon Valley's Humble Billionaire
It's a Saturday afternoon in Palo Alto, Calif., and there goes David Cheriton, navigating the Silicon Valley suburb's tony downtown on his bike.
From BLOG@CACM
COLT/ICML Open Problems and ICML Instructions
Open problems will be presented in a joint session in the evening of the COLT/ICML overlap day. If you have a difficult, theoretically definable problem in machine...
From ACM Opinion
Why Driverless Cars Will Increase Tensions in Cities and Suburbs Alike
Driverless cars sound less and less like science fiction with each passing month, and that's prompted widespread discussion about how they might change society.
From ACM Opinion