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
Cubelets: Modular, Affordable Robotics For Kids and Students
Robotics can be a tricky subject to teach children, and it's hard to know where to start. Cubelets is a system of modular cubes that each have one use, interaction...
From ACM Opinion
My Puny Human Brain
Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.
From ACM Opinion
A Worthwhile Contest For Artificial Intelligence
If IBM's Watson machine defeats people on TV's Jeopardy this week, does that mean that computers are smarter than humans? Maybe not. But the performance could...
From ACM Opinion
Vint Cerf Re-Thinks the Internet in Stanford Talk
To most, a wine cellar is just a cool place to keep some vintage vino. For Vint Cerf, the revered former Stanford engineering professor and graduate of the university...
From ACM Opinion
Nasa's Kepler Astronomer Geoff Marcy Discusses Latest Exoplanet Discoveries
Does life exist anywhere in the universe except on Earth?
From ACM News
Mind vs. Machine
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial...
From ACM Opinion
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything...
From ACM Opinion
Space Stasis
What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.
From ACM Opinion
Beware the Cyber War Boomerang?
Stuxnet, most sophisticated cyber weapon ever developed, could turn on vulnerable U.S. infrastructure.
From ACM Opinion
The Purpose of Science Fiction
How it teaches governments—and citizens—how to understand the future of technology.
From ACM Opinion
25 Years of Digital Vandalism
In January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest...
From Communications of the ACM
Forest For the Trees
With the amount of disk space available to the modern programmer, and the lack of parental supervision in most...
From ACM Opinion
Apple: Disrupt or Perish
While the secret for Apple's success seems patently obvious to most&meash;as obvious as the form and function of the iPhone 4—a more subtle reason is the company's...
From ACM News
Bending and Stretching Classroom Lessons to Make Math Inspire
At the aptly named Tiny Thai restaurant here, a small table, about two and a half feet square, was jammed with a teapot, two plates of curry, a bowl of soup,...
From ACM Opinion
Android Programming's ps and Downs
As smartphones using Google's Android operating system become mainstream, James Steele and Nelson To are in a pretty good position.
From ACM News
Intel: Why a 1,000-Core Chip Is Feasible
Chipmaker Intel has been investigating the issue of scaling the number of cores in chips through its Terascale Computing Research Program, which has so far yielded...
From ACM Opinion
2011 Preview: Million-Dollar Mathematics Problem
A draft solution to the so-called "P versus NP" problem generated excitement in 2010; will 2011 bring a correct proof?
From Communications of the ACM
Reflections on the Toyota Debacle
A look in the rearview mirror reveals system and process blind spots.
From Communications of the ACM
Don't Bring Me a Good Idea
You want to know how to get my attention?" Jason Kalich asked the audience rhetorically. "First off, don't bring me a good...
From ACM Opinion