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 Future Where Everything Becomes a Computer Is as Creepy as You Feared
More than 40 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft with a vision for putting a personal computer on every desk.
From ACM Opinion
Editing the Internet's Second Screen
The great social media cleanup of the past two years hasn't seemed to leave it much cleaner.
From ACM Opinion
How Do You Find an Alien Ocean? Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out
The data was like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.
From ACM Opinion
How Sci-Fi Like WarGames Led to Real Policy During the Reagan Administration
This year, John Badham's WarGames—one of the movies most beloved by hackers, techies, and tech policy wonks (like me!)—celebrates its 35th anniversary.
From ACM Opinion
Why Do Computers se So Much Energy?
Microsoft is currently running an interesting set of hardware experiments.
From ACM Opinion
Introducing the Internet Bill of Rights
Should American citizens get a new Bill of Rights for the internet?
From ACM Opinion
This Tech Would Have Spotted the Secret Chinese Chip in Seconds
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, spies in China managed to insert chips into computer systems that would allow external control of those systems.
From ACM Opinion
Behind the Scenes of Japan's Daring Asteroid Mission
As Japan lands a third probe on Ryugu asteroid, Nature looks at the Hayabusa2 mission in more detail.
From ACM Opinion
Clicks, Lies and Videotape
This past April a new video of Barack Obama surfaced on the Internet. Against a backdrop that included both the American and presidential flags, it looked like...
From ACM Opinion
50 Years Old, '2001: A Space Odyssey' Still Offers Insight about the Future
Watching a 50th anniversary screening of "2001: A Space Odyssey," I found myself, a mathematician and computer scientist whose research includes work related to...
From ACM Opinion
Brett Kavanaugh and the Information Terrorists Trying to Reshape America
Since the advent of Donald Trump's candidacy, there's been a ton of focus on botnets and sockpuppets—automated and semiautomated social media accounts that use...
From ACM Opinion
Why We're Training the Next Generation of Lawyers in Big Data
Artificial intelligence is transforming the traditional delivery of legal services.
From ACM Opinion
How Programmable Calculators and a Sci-Fi Story Brought Soviet Teens Into the Digital Age
Despite the ubiquity of computers in modern society, the vast majority of today's students never study computer science or computer programming.
From ACM Opinion
Why Silicon Valley Should Fear Europe's Competition Chief
Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, is surely the most feared person in Silicon Valley.
From ACM Opinion
Has One of Math's Greatest Mysteries, the Riemann Hypothesis, Finally Been Solved?
Over the past few days, the mathematics world has been abuzz over the news that Sir Michael Atiyah, the famous Fields Medalist and Abel Prize winner, claims to....
From ACM Opinion
Will L.A.'s Anti-Terrorist Subway Scanners Be Adopted Everywhere?
In mid-August the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Transportation Security Administration announced Metro has paid $100,000 each...
From ACM Opinion
Why Alibaba Is Betting Big on AI Chips and Quantum Computing
During the opening ceremony of Alibaba's 2018 computing conference last week, Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, invited the MC to taste some tea on the stage—but...
From Communications of the ACM
The Obscene Coupling Known as Spaghetti Code
Teach your junior programmers how to read code.
From ACM Opinion
Google at 20: How Two 'Obnoxious' Students Changed the Internet
In the summer of 1995, a second-year grad student called Sergey Brin was giving a tour of Stanford University to prospective students. Larry Page, an engineering...
From ACM Opinion