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Oculus Chief Scientist Speaks About Virtual Reality in the Lab and on Your Face
From ACM Opinion

Oculus Chief Scientist Speaks About Virtual Reality in the Lab and on Your Face

While many of us are impatient with virtual reality—the best headsets are still too expensive, they need to be tethered to beefy computers, and there isn't all...

Kitchen of the Future: Smart and Fast but Not Much Fun
From ACM Opinion

Kitchen of the Future: Smart and Fast but Not Much Fun

Wandering among the engineers and strategy directors and managers of something called "connected customer experience" at the Smart Kitchen Summit, one had to wonder...

Provoking Iran Could Have ­nseen Cyber Consequences
From ACM Opinion

Provoking Iran Could Have ­nseen Cyber Consequences

On Friday, President Trump announced that he will not certify Iran's cooperation with the 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated by the Obama Administration.

Would You Buy a Self-Driving Future From These Guys?
From ACM Opinion

Would You Buy a Self-Driving Future From These Guys?

When the owner of an automated Tesla was killed in a crash last year, the carmaker's founder, Elon Musk, urged journalists to peer into the future.

The Future of Dna Sequencing
From ACM Opinion

The Future of Dna Sequencing

Forty years ago, two papers1, 2 described the first tractable methods for determining the order of the chemical bases in stretches of DNA. Before these 1977 publications...

The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions
From ACM Opinion

The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions

We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence and robotics—hysteria about how powerful they will become, how quickly, and what they...

What Facebook Did to American Democracy
From ACM Opinion

What Facebook Did to American Democracy

In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the timeline: before the 2016 election, and after.

Apple's Tim Cook on Iphones, Augmented Reality, and How He Plans to Change Your World
From ACM Opinion

Apple's Tim Cook on Iphones, Augmented Reality, and How He Plans to Change Your World

Earlier this year, video emerged of a new iPhone feature, long before it was released. It showed the phone creating a magical portal in the middle of a city street...

The Scientist Who Spots Fake Videos
From ACM Opinion

The Scientist Who Spots Fake Videos

Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, specialises in detecting manipulated images and videos. Farid, who provides his...

Is Your Bank Data Yours?
From ACM Opinion

Is Your Bank Data Yours?

Who owns the information in your bank account? Transactions, balance history, every other detail?

China's AI Awakening
From ACM Opinion

China's AI Awakening

On a tropical island that marks the southern tip of China, a computer program called Lengpudashi is playing one-on-one poker against a dozen people at once, and...

Why Is There No Nobel Prize in Technology?
From ACM Opinion

Why Is There No Nobel Prize in Technology?

As the world focuses its attention on this year's recipients of the planet's most prestigious prize, the Nobel, it feels like something's missing from the list:...

Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue
From ACM Opinion

Algorithms Have Already Gone Rogue

For more than two decades, Tim O'Reilly has been the conscience of the tech industry.

How the Chinese Cyberthreat Has evolved
From ACM Opinion

How the Chinese Cyberthreat Has evolved

With more than half of its 1.4 billion people online, the world's most populous country is home to a slew of cyberspies and hackers.

Let's ­se the Government's Massive Databases to Make Better Policy
From ACM Opinion

Let's ­se the Government's Massive Databases to Make Better Policy

Members of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking appear before Congress this week to present their final report (pdf). 

Misinformation Is the New Normal of Mass Shootings
From ACM Opinion

Misinformation Is the New Normal of Mass Shootings

On the morning after the deadliest shooting in modern American history, there was a certain predictability in the response to a tragedy that left at least 59 dead...

Forget Killer Robots; Bias Is the Real AI Danger
From ACM Opinion

Forget Killer Robots; Bias Is the Real AI Danger

Google's AI chief isn't fretting about super-intelligent killer robots. Instead, John Giannandrea is concerned about the danger that may be lurking inside the machine...

Are Computers Already Smarter Than Humans?
From ACM Opinion

Are Computers Already Smarter Than Humans?

Who's smarter—you, or the computer or mobile device on which you're reading this article? The answer is increasingly complex, and depends on definitions in flux...

Red-Pilled: My Bizarre Week ­sing the Alt-Right's Vision of the Internet
From ACM Opinion

Red-Pilled: My Bizarre Week ­sing the Alt-Right's Vision of the Internet

Scroll with me here. Somebody named BeatlesBaby makes "a very badass chicken curry." Look, there's a nice sepia-tinted pencil drawing of Ned Stark from Game of...

The Coming Software Apocalypse
From ACM News

The Coming Software Apocalypse

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service.
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