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
The Privacy Problem with Digital Assistants
For the last century, we've imagined a future where we're surrounded by robotic butlers that are classy, smart, and discreet.
From ACM Opinion
Checklist of Worst-Case Scenarios Could Help Prepare For Evil AI
Artificial intelligence—what's the worst that can happen? For Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, the sky’s the...
From ACM Opinion
Why Seti Researchers Must Change the Way They Announce First Contact
One of humanity’s most significant events will be the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in universe. Back in the 1980s, a group of astronomers involved in...
From Communications of the ACM
What Are You Trying to Pull?
A single cache miss is more expensive than many instructions.
From Communications of the ACM
The Risks of Self-Auditing Systems
Unforeseen problems can result from the absence of impartial independent evaluations.
From ACM Opinion
The Oracle-Google Case Will Decide the Future of Software
The legal battle between Oracle and Google is about to come to an end. And nothing less is as stake than the future of programming.
From ACM Opinion
To Write Better Code, Read Virginia Woolf
The humanities are kaput. Sorry, liberal arts cap-and-gowners. You blew it. In a software-run world, what's wanted are more engineers.
From ACM Opinion
Nasa and the Author of 'the Martian' Tell s Exactly How We'll Get to Mars
In "The Martian," Matt Damon plays a NASA astronaut who's been stranded on Mars and has to figure out how to survive until the space agency can devise a daring...
From ACM Opinion
Google Doubles Down on AI
Google announced something for everyone yesterday at its 10th annual I/O developer conference.
From ACM Opinion
How Will Virtual Reality Change Our Lives?
And it's not just gamers who are benefiting from the immersive possibilities it offers.
From ACM Opinion
Eske Willerslev Is Rewriting History With Dna
As a boy growing up in Denmark, Eske Willerslev could not wait to leave Gentofte, his suburban hometown. As soon as he was old enough, he would strike out for the...
From ACM Opinion
What If Facebook Gave S an Opposing-Viewpoints Button?
Imagine if you could flip a switch on Facebook, and turn all the conservative viewpoints that you see liberal, or vice versa. You'd realize your news might look...
From ACM Opinion
Peek Into the Weird and Wonderful Age of AI (yes, There's a Chatbot)
On March 23, Microsoft revealed Tay, a Twitter bot trained to chat like a millennial. It worked … too well.
From ACM Opinion
Doom Is a Gleefully Gory Ballet Set in a Nightmare
My instinct upon leaping into id Software's hyper-gruesome Doom, a gonzo shooter out May 13 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, is to dawdle.
From ACM Opinion
The Coming Horror of Virtual Reality
If Kitchen, a five-minute virtual-reality demo created by the Japanese studio Capcom, were a short film, few viewers would be moved to panic by its misery of horror...
From ACM Opinion
Okcupid Study Reveals the Perils of Big-Data Science
On May 8, a group of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid, including usernames, age, gender,...
From ACM Opinion
Should We Synthesise a Human Genome?
At Harvard today, an invitation-only group of about 150 scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, met to discuss if and how to construct from scratch an entire human...
From ACM Opinion
IBM Researcher: Fears Over Artificial Intelligence Are 'overblown'
The debate over artificial intelligence has divided some of Silicon Valley's brightest minds.
From ACM Opinion
After Three Weeks in China, It's Clear Beijing Is Silicon Valley's Only True Competitor
After selling my startup, Shopkick, to SK Planet in 2014, and handing over my CEO role a year later, I packed up my 1- and 3-year-old sons and my wife Angel, and...
From ACM Opinion