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
How Wearable Technology Could Transform Business
Once upon a time seeing your life flash before your eyes was something people did their best to avoid. The arrival of Google Glass seems to have changed that.
From ACM Opinion
Pgp Inventor and Silent Circle Co-Founder Phil Zimmermann on the Surveillance Society
Phil Zimmermann might be a technologist, but he tends to get philosophical when it comes to the issues of privacy and security and how they intersect with our society...
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 Opinion
Counterfeits Can Kill .s. Troops. So Why Isn't Congress and Dod Doing More to Stop It?
Sometime in the not-to-distant future, a submarine will sink. An air defense missile will detonate far from its intended target. These chilling scenarios will...
From ACM Opinion
Professor Emeritus Rodney Brooks Refines the Sequel to Irobot
Professor emeritus Rodney Brooks gained fame in the 1990s for co-founding iRobot, an MIT spinoff that brought the world the Roomba and other innovative, helpful...
From ACM Opinion
WikiLeaks' Teenage Benedict Arnold
When he met Julian Assange for the first time, Sigurdur Thordarson admired the WikiLeaks founder's attitude and quickly signed up to the cause.
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
Former Nsa Chief on Latest Leaked Dragnet Spy Program: It's Real, and It's Spectacular
Does the NSA really operate a vast database that allows its analysts to sift through millions of records showing nearly everything a user does on the Internet,...
From ACM Opinion
Snowden—Facts, Fictions, and Fears
"Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere ... I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your...
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 Opinion
Tech Essentials: How Cory Doctorow Gets Around
The co-editor of Boing Boing, novelist and fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation shares his tools for circumventing censorship in airports, easing back pain...
From ACM Opinion
The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership
Imagine the government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would immediately be found unconstitutional. Yet we all carry...
From ACM Opinion
The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can't Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook
"People love Facebook. They really love it," Biz Stone wrote earlier this month. "My mother-in-law looks hypnotized when she decides to put in some Facebook time...
From ACM Opinion
They Know Much More Than You Think
In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in.
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