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 Communications of the ACM
Surrounded By Machines
A chilling scenario portends a possible future.
From Communications of the ACM
Do You Own the Software You Buy?
Examining the fine print concerning your rights in your copies of purchased software.
From ACM Opinion
How the Internet Gets Inside s
When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming...
From ACM Opinion
Cubelets: Modular, Affordable Robotics For Kids and Students
Robotics can be a tricky subject to teach children, and it's hard to know where to start. Cubelets is a system of modular cubes that each have one use, interaction...
From ACM Opinion
My Puny Human Brain
Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.
From ACM News
An Html For Numbers
The Age of Data is just around the corner, right where it has been for years. As someone who spends a lot his time creating visualizations, I've been hoping for...
From ACM Opinion
Gadget Politics: Why Tech Fans Share the Love and Hate
I’ve been a consumer technology critic for over 10 years. During that time, hate mail has been part of my job every day.
From ACM Opinion
A Worthwhile Contest For Artificial Intelligence
If IBM's Watson machine defeats people on TV's Jeopardy this week, does that mean that computers are smarter than humans? Maybe not. But the performance could...
From ACM Opinion
Vint Cerf Re-Thinks the Internet in Stanford Talk
To most, a wine cellar is just a cool place to keep some vintage vino. For Vint Cerf, the revered former Stanford engineering professor and graduate of the university...
From ACM News
Thought Police? DARPA Wants to Know How Stories Influence Human Mind, Actions
Since it sounds like a not-so-basic- science fiction script, you won't be surprised that the scientific masterminds at the Defense Advanced Research Projects...
From ACM Opinion
Nasa's Kepler Astronomer Geoff Marcy Discusses Latest Exoplanet Discoveries
Does life exist anywhere in the universe except on Earth?
From ACM News
Bipartisan Alliance Beats Back Patriot Act Sneak Attack in House Vote
Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives, an unlikely alliance of House Democrats and Republicans stood up for civil liberties and successfully beat back...
From ACM Opinion
Forgive Me, Father, For I Have Linked
Our Father, who art in pixels, linked be Thy name, Thy Web site come, Thy Net be done, on Explorer as it is on Firefox.
From ACM News
Mind vs. Machine
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial...
From ACM Opinion
World Web War I: Why Egypt's Digital prising Is Different
We've seen cyberwar declared before, but the one playing out in Egypt is my own candidate for World Web War I.
From ACM Opinion
Susan Wojcicki: The Most Important Googler You've Never Heard Of
Yes, Google started in Susan Wojcicki's rented garage. But in her mind, that might be the single least important fact about her long and deep relationship with...
From ACM Opinion
Keep Assange Free, Keep Internet Free
It is time for the United States to drop the case against WikiLeaks. Pressing forward with efforts to prosecute an Internet publisher at home while standing up...
From ACM Opinion
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything...
From ACM Opinion
Space Stasis
What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.
From ACM Opinion