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 Technology Has Restored the Soul of Politics
In 1979, I was an aeronautical-engineering major at San Jose State University, sneaking time in the laser lab to make holograms or running over to the computer...
From ACM Opinion
Forget Yolo: Why 'big Data' Should Be the Word of the Year
"Big Data" hasn't made any of the words-of-the-year lists I've seen so far. That's probably because it didn't get the wide public exposure given to items like "...
From ACM Opinion
Who Owns the Content You pload Online?
The outrage over Instagram's announcement that it is changing its terms and conditions has turned the spotlight on the relationship between websites and users who...
From ACM News
How Google Is Taking the Knowledge Graph Global
Earlier this month, Google shared a fascinating statistic. The number of items in the company's Knowledge Graph—its database of people, places, and things, and...
From ACM Opinion
A Plea to Google: Protect Our Email Privacy
We recently learned that even the director of the CIA, David Petraeus, can't seem to secure his private email conversations properly, and over the past month tech...
From ACM Opinion
I Am Not Big Brother
I've grown accustomed to reading inaccurate accounts of my day job. I'm in political data.
From ACM Opinion
'biology Is a Manufacturing Capability'
Soon we'll be able to engineer living things with mechanical precision, says Tom Knight, father of synthetic biology.
From ACM Opinion
How Can Computational Science Surpass the Software Error Plateau?
Computation plays a crucial role in generating scientific results, but also adds to its complexity. The ability to reproduce code and data that generates results...
From ACM Opinion
No Longer Vaporware: The Internet of Things Is Finally Talking
The rise of the machines has begun: Steve Sande’s household fan is now self-aware.
From ACM Opinion
11 Big Tech Trends You'll See in 2013
Writing prediction pieces is a funny thing because there is really no such thing as "next year."
From ACM Opinion
No Warrant, No Problem: How the Government Can Still Get Your Digital Data
The U.S. government isn’t allowed to wiretap American citizens without a warrant from a judge. But there are plenty of legal ways for law enforcement, from the...
From ACM Opinion
Eight Questions For Rick Smolan About the Human Face of Big Data
If you work anywhere near anything that might be described as "Big Data" and have ever had trouble explaining to someone you care about why what you do matters,...
From ACM Opinion
How to Make Almost Anything
A new digital revolution is coming, this time in fabrication. It draws on the same insights that led to the earlier digitizations of communication and computation...
From ACM Opinion
Jeff Hawkins Develops a Brainy Big Data Company
Jeff Hawkins has been a pioneer of mobile devices, a distinguished lecturer in neuroscience, and a published author of a revolutionary theory of how the brain works...
From ACM Opinion
Jeff Bezos Wants Amazon in Every Pocket
"People don't want gadgets, they want services," Jeff Bezos has declared.
From ACM Opinion
How Far Away Is Mind-Machine Integration?
Okay, great: we can control our phones with speech recognition and our television sets with gesture recognition.
From ACM Opinion
Siri Versus Google Voice Search: Fight!
Voice-controlled smartphone searches are slowly becoming all the rage, thanks to tools like Apple's Siri and Google's "enhanced" voice search.
From ACM News