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
Forgotten Heroes of the Enigma Story
Alan Turing's crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking.
From ACM Opinion
Are We Ready for the Future of Warfare?
Warfare has always been about exerting political will.
From ACM Opinion
3-D Printed Gun Blueprints Are Back, and Only New Laws Can Stop Them
Attorneys general from 20 states celebrated on Monday when a district court judge in Seattle extended an injunction against the sharing of 3-D printed gun blueprints...
From ACM Opinion
Math Shows How DNA Twists, Turns and nzips
If you've ever seen a picture of a DNA molecule, you probably saw it in its famous B-form: two strands coiling around each other in a right-handed fashion to form...
From ACM News
Here's What We Know about Google's Mysterious Search Engine
President Trump thinks Google's search engine is "rigged." By featuring more mainstream news outlets and relatively fewer conservative sites in the results he sees...
From ACM Opinion
Detecting 'DeepFake' Videos in the Blink of an Eye
A new form of misinformation is poised to spread through online communities as the 2018 midterm election campaigns heat up. Called "deepfakes" after the pseudonymous...
From ACM Opinion
The Four Ways that Ex-Internet Idealists Explain Where It All Went Wrong
A long time ago, in the bad old days of the 2000s, debates about the Internet were dominated by two great tribes: the Optimists and the Pessimists.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape
It should come as no surprise that recent advances in big-data analytics and artificial intelligence have created strong incentives for enterprises to amass information...
From ACM Opinion
Trump Says He Will 'Address' Google's 'Suppressing' of Conservative News
On Tuesday morning, the 45th president of the United States woke up around 5:30am Eastern Time and decided to begin his Tuesday by berating the "Fake News Media...
From ACM Opinion
It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs
When we learn about the Industrial Revolution in school, we hear a lot about factories, steam engines, maybe the power loom.
From ACM Opinion
How D-Wave's Quantum Machine Could Help Exotic Physics
Picture a computer. Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you were probably thinking of your laptop, or maybe even your smartphone if you're being smart...
From ACM Opinion
Future Elections May Be Swayed by Intelligent, Weaponized Chatbots
The battle against propaganda bots is an arm's race for our democracy. It's one we may be about to lose.
From ACM Opinion
Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism
A barista gets burned at work, buys first-aid cream at Target, and later that day sees a Facebook ad for the same product.
From Communications of the ACM
When Machine Learning is Facially Invalid
Observations on the use of machine learning and facial inferences to classify people using inexplicable data.
From Communications of the ACM
Navigating with Accelerating Technology Change
Mathematical tools such as S-curves locate inflection points in technology-accelerated social spaces; where we move next depends on our navigational skills.
From Communications of the ACM
An Academic's Observations from a Sabbatical at Google
How experiences gained in industry can improve academic research and teaching.
From Communications of the ACM
Is Software the Result of Top-Down Intelligent Design or Evolution?
Considering the potential danger to individuals of rapid coevolution.
From ACM Opinion
I Just Hacked a State Election. I'm 17. And I'm Not Even a Very Good Hacker.
It took me around 10 minutes to crash the upcoming midterm elections.
From ACM Opinion