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
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
A Conversation with Crispr-Cas9 Inventors Charpentier and Doudna
At the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in October, CRISPR-Cas9 inventors Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier accepted the Gruber Genetics Prize...
From ACM Opinion
Eric Schmidt on How to Build a Better Web
Turning Point: The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria declares a war on Twitter.
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
Huge MIT Media Lab Inventions That Transformed Our World
For the last 30 years, the MIT Lab has been a breeding ground for technological progress that’s pushed the world into the future.
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 ACM Opinion
Better Than Sci-Fi
Science fiction has imagined some pretty wild ideas about the universe and our place in it.
From ACM Opinion
Metadata Surveillance Didn't Stop the Paris Attacks
Since terrorists struck Paris last Friday night, the debate over whether encryption prevents intelligence services from stopping attacks has reignited.
From ACM Opinion
What Digital Trash Dumped in Games Tells S About the Players
A strawberry Christmas cake, sexy pants, a pool table, three red jet planes, a hippy bandana, a dog sled, a jetpack, a pair of Adidas trainers, a Tudor throne,an...
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
Stopping Whatsapp Won't Stop Terrorists
Is the ability to send encrypted messages making it hard to stop terrorists?
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
Edward Snowden Explains How to Reclaim Your Privacy
Last month, I met Edward Snowden in a hotel in central Moscow, just blocks away from Red Square.
From ACM Opinion
Crispr: A Path Through the Thicket
The ease of use, accuracy and efficiency of the genome-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 has led to its broad adoption in research, as well as to preliminary applications...
From ACM Opinion
Get Ready For Your Digital Model
Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky.
From ACM Opinion
Leading Theory of Solar System Formation Just Disproved!
Looks like the inner planets formed *after* the gas giants moved to their current position, and Jupiter ejected a fifth giant, too!
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