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
Why Big Pharma Wants to Collect 2 Million Genomes
Five months after announcing its intentions to gather genome sequences from 2 million people, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has selected geneticist David Goldstein...
From ACM Opinion
An Ode to the Rosetta Spacecraft as It Flings Itself Into a Comet
Today, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will engage its thrusters for one final maneuver: a suicidal plunge toward the comet it has been orbiting...
From ACM Opinion
Y2k 2.0: Is the .s. Government Set to 'give Away the Internet' Saturday?
Remember the projected Y2K bug disaster? The world's computers would supposedly go haywire as the clock ticked to January 1, 2000, thus destroying the world and...
From ACM Opinion
Why Data Is the New Coal
"Is data the new oil?" asked proponents of big data back in 2012 in Forbes magazine. By 2016, and the rise of big data's turbo-powered cousin deep learning, westated Fortune...
From ACM Opinion
Grading the Presidential Candidates on Science
Two weeks ago, Scientific American asked for your help in grading the presidential candidates on their answers to 20 questions about various aspects of scientific...
From ACM Opinion
The Internet Is No Place For Public Elections
Despite what your local election officials may tell you, you can’t trust the Internet with your vote.
From ACM Opinion
What If the Aliens We Are Looking For Are Ai?
For more than a century we have been broadcasting our presence to the cosmos.
From Communications of the ACM
Cloud Calipers
Naming the next generation and remembering that the cloud is just other people's computers.
From ACM Opinion
Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 Review: The Finest Soccer Game Ever Made
There are many ways to interpret the beautiful game.
From ACM Opinion
An 'interview' With Google's New Digital Assistant
Alphabet Inc.'s Google unit introduced a new digital assistant Wednesday. Bloomberg News put the system through its paces by asking questions, some of which were...
From ACM Opinion
For the Debaters: What Shall We Do About the Tech Careening Our Way?
Here's a question I’m hoping comes up at Monday's presidential debate: Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump, what would you do about self-driving trucks?
From ACM Opinion
Are the Experts Worried About the Existential Risk of Artificial Intelligence?
If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI.
From ACM Opinion
Big Step For Quantum Teleportation Won't Bring S Any Closer to Star Trek. Here's Why
Two teams have set new distance records for quantum teleportation: using the weirdness of quantum mechanics to instantly transfer the condition or "state" of one...
From ACM Opinion
Why Scientists Must Share Their Research Code
Many scientists worry over the reproducibility of wet-lab experiments, but data scientist Victoria Stodden's focus is on how to validate computational research:...
From ACM Opinion
Paperless Voting Could Fuel 'rigged' Election Claims
Voters in four competitive states will cast ballots in November on electronic machines that leave no paper trail—a lapse that threatens to sow distrust about a...
From ACM Opinion
Before Apple And Facebook, There Was Something More Revolutionary
It's easy to think that the modern era in communication began in the 1990s with the birth of the Internet.
From ACM Opinion
The Next President Will Decide the Fate of Killer Robots, and the Future of War
The next president will have a range of issues on their plate, from how to deal with growing tensions with China and Russia, to an ongoing war against ISIS.
From ACM Opinion
How an Inventor You've Probably Never Heard of Shaped the Modern World
Many of the inventors who fueled the digital revolution have become household names.
From ACM Opinion
How Tech Giants Are Devising Real Ethics For Artificial Intelligence
For years, science-fiction moviemakers have been making us fear the bad things that artificially intelligent machines might do to their human creators.
From ACM Opinion