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
Driverless Cars Are Like Elevators
One of the challenges in describing the potential of self-driving cars is that they promise to do so much.
From ACM Opinion
Google's New Autoreply Sounds Great!!!!
On April 1, 2009, Google unveiled Gmail Autopilot, a plug-in that promised to read and generate contextually relevant replies to the messages piling up in users'...
From ACM Opinion
Big Data's Mathematical Mysteries
At a dinner I attended some years ago, the distinguished differential geometer Eugenio Calabi volunteered to me his tongue-in-cheek distinction between pure and...
From ACM Opinion
Dark Clouds Over the Internet
The Internet is routinely described as borderless, and that is often how it feels.
From ACM Opinion
Crispr Is Getting Better. Now It's Time to Ask the Hard Ethical Questions
When Chinese scientists announced in April they had edited human embryos using a new genetic tool called Crispr, the headlines blared "designer babies," and the...
From Communications of the ACM
Creating a New Generation of Computational Thinkers
Experiences with a successful school program in Scotland.
From Communications of the ACM
Increasing the Participation of Individuals with Disabilities in Computing
Lessons learned from a decade of practice.
From Communications of the ACM
Pickled Patches
On repositories of patches and tension between security professionals and in-house developers.
From Communications of the ACM
Why Our Theories of Innovation Fail Us
Until we moderate our fascination with creating ideas, we will not achieve the rate of innovations we seek.
From ACM Opinion
Oh the Places We Won't Go: Humans Will Settle Mars, and Nowhere Else
Humans will become a multi-planet species by making it to Mars, but no farther.
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence: 'homo Sapiens Will Be Split Into a Handful of Gods and the Rest of s'
If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill which...
From ACM Opinion
Why Google Is Willing to Give Away Its Latest Machine-Learning Software
Google's move to give away its latest machine-learning software, key to its speech- and photo-recognition programs, isn’t as crazy as it may appear.
From ACM Opinion
The Cyberthreat nder the Street
Within the last year there have been 16 so-called fiber cuts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
From ACM Opinion
I'm Going to Make Facebook's AI Predict What Happens in Videos
What are the big challenges ahead for you?
From ACM Opinion
Tangled Up in Entanglement
No area of physics causes more confusion, not just among the general public but also among physicists, than quantum mechanics.
From ACM Opinion
The Hot New Job in Silicon Valley Is Being a Robot's Assistant
"I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords." So goes the joke every time artificial intelligence threatens to supersede humans in another job.
From ACM Opinion
The Master Algorithm: A World Remade By Machines that Learn
Pedro Domingos's new book is a compelling but rather unquestioning insider view of the search for the ultimate in machine learning.
From ACM Opinion
The Room Where the Internet Was Born
Starting a cross-country drive to New York in Los Angeles is pretty inconvenient, unless your cross-country drive is also a vision quest to see the Internet.
From ACM Opinion