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
Stephen Wolfram on Personal Analytics
Don't be surprised if Stephen Wolfram, the renowned complexity theorist, software company CEO, and night owl, wants to schedule a work call with you at 9 p.m. In...
From ACM Careers
Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley's Elite
On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That's more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO...
From ACM Opinion
The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest For the New AI
There's a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.
From ACM Opinion
Google's Chief Internet Evangelist on Creating the Interplanetary Internet
When some future Mars colonist is able to open his browser and watch a cat in a shark suit chasing a duck while riding a roomba, they will have Vint Cerf to thank...
From ACM News
China Sees Cyberwar as Reducing .s. Advantage in Future Conflict
It's one thing to read news concerning the latest report to Congress by the U.S. Department of Defense on China's latest military activities. But with regard to...
From ACM Opinion
Personal Information Is the Currency of the 21st Century
The currency of the 21st century digital economy is your personal information. It has no transaction costs and does not decrease in value when the supply increases...
From ACM Opinion
Why Fbi and CIA Didn't Connect the Dots
The FBI and the CIA are being criticized for not keeping better track of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the months before the Boston Marathon bombings.
From ACM Opinion
How Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen See the Future
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is ready for a future where his smart mattress monitors sleep patterns and alerts the curtains to allow daylight in, waking...
From ACM Opinion
Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the .s. Government?
The real capabilities and behavior of the U.S. surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done...
From ACM Opinion
Digital Tattoos, Mind-Reading Headphones: The Shape of Things to Come?
Forecasting future technology has never been easy. In the 1950s, scientists and technologists envisaged that by now the world would be free from disease, traversed...
From ACM Opinion
When Will Smartglasses and Other Wearable Computers Hit the Mainstream?
Google has stoked our collective imagination via relentless promotion of its Google Glass wearable computer in recent months.
From ACM Opinion
Why I Love the National Internet Sales Tax Plan
The Internet, in the popular imagination, is supposed to be free—"the last bastion of our economy untouched by the government," as they say on Fox News.
From ACM Opinion
Governments Won't Need to Issue Ids: Data Brokers Will Identify You For Them
Our government collects a lot of information about us. Tax records, legal records, license records, records of government services received—it's all in databases...
From ACM Opinion
The Meaning of (making) Life
Christina Agapakis is a rising star among the new generation of biology researchers. Trained in the science of custom-building organisms known as synthetic biology...
From ACM Opinion
Nate Silver: What Big Data Can't Predict
Statistician Nate Silver isn't famous because he's a mathematical genius. (Although, he is.)
From ACM Opinion
Here's Why Bitcoin Is the Future of Money
The interesting thing about Bitcoin isn't what it is today. What's interesting is that this experiment is turning into a serious proving ground for the idea of...
From ACM Opinion
Christoph Bregler on the Future of Surveillance
Surveillance camera images of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev catalyzed not only the manhunt which caught them, but calls for more surveillance cameras around the...
From ACM Careers
Why the Anatomy Lab Remains a Fixture of Medicine
For hundreds of years, physicians have been dissecting the dead to learn about the inner workings of the human body.
From ACM Opinion
How Ray Kurzweil Will Help Google Make the ltimate AI Brain
Google has always been an artificial intelligence company, so it really shouldn't have been a surprise that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading scientists in the field...
From ACM Opinion