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
A Fuzzy and Shifting Line Between Hacker and Criminal
In January 2011, I was assigned to cover a hearing in Newark, where Daniel Spitler, then 26, stood accused of breaching AT&T's servers and stealing 114,000 email...
From ACM Opinion
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer Does Not Fear Dropbox or an Office-Less Ipad
When Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer does his bounding these days, it's often in front of an 82-inch interactive display mounted on the wall of...
From Communications of the ACM
Reflections on Stanford's MOOCs
New possibilities in online education create new challenges.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Divorce Design from Manufacturing
The software company Autodesk doesn't manufacture anything.
From ACM Opinion
Neil Degrasse Tyson: Science Funding Can 'guarantee Your Economic Future'
Neil deGrasse Tyson came to Washington on Wednesday to deliver the science-specific version of President Barack Obama's second inaugural address.
From ACM Opinion
IBM Predicts Cognitive Systems As New Computing Wave
At year's end, IBM selects a new innovation that has the potential to change the world.
From ACM Opinion
What the Fbi Doesn't Want You To Know About Its 'secret' Surveillance Techniques
The FBI had to rewrite the book on its domestic surveillance activities in the wake of last January’s landmark Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones.
From ACM Opinion
Google's Kurzweil on Teaching Human Language to Computers
Famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil joined Google last month to work on "some of the hardest problems in computer science," specifically machine learning and...
From ACM Opinion
Seven More Questions For Sap's Co-Ceo Bill Mcdermott
The last time we heard from SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, he talked a great deal about a then-upcoming product strategy called HANA. The idea was to move all of SAP's...
From ACM Opinion
The Future According to Google's Larry Page
When Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group, the giant advertising agency, visited Google this past fall, CEO Larry Page sent a car to pick him up at the Rosewood...
From ACM Opinion
On Stephen Hawking, Vader, and Being More Machine Than Human
Click-click-click: This is what you hear when having a conversation with Stephen Hawking. No voice, no other sounds, no facial expressions.
From ACM Opinion
Ben Horowitz on the Impact of Software Everywhere
Ben Horowitz may have the skeleton key to the decimation—sorry, transformation—of our economic and political lives.
From ACM Opinion
Why Smart Glasses Might Not Make You Smarter
Steve Mann built his first smart eyeglasses when he was still in high school and has continued to improve on his designs ever since—as a graduate student at MIT...
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Medicine Is Now
In our era of instant gratification, the world of medicine seems like an outlier.
From ACM Opinion
The Father of Fractals
In nature,technology and art the most common form of regularity is repetition: a single element repeated many times, as on a tile floor. But another form is possible...
From ACM Opinion
How Big Data Can Solve America's Gun Problem
Big data might have stopped the massacres in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek.
From ACM Opinion
We Don't Need More Data Scientists; Just Make Big Data Easier to se
Virtually any article today about big data inevitably turns to the notion that the country is suffering from a crucial shortage of data scientists.
From ACM Opinion