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
Forget Turing—i Want to Test Computer Creativity
What are the elements of the Turing test?
From ACM Opinion
What Are Moocs Good For?
A few years ago, the most enthusiastic advocates of MOOCs believed that these "massive open online courses" stood poised to overturn the century-old model of higher...
From ACM Opinion
Artificial Intelligence Isn't a Threat—Yet
Does artificial intelligence threaten our species, as the cosmologist Stephen Hawking recently suggested?
From ACM Opinion
Boston Researcher Cynthia Breazeal Is Ready to Bring Robots Into the Home. Are You?
The MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group flanks the soaring atrium on the fourth floor of the Wiesner Building, a wall of metal panels along the southern edge...
From ACM Opinion
We Might Be Able to 3-D-Print an Artificial Mind One Day
I'm an artificial-intelligence skeptic.
From ACM Opinion
Father of Web Tells Russia's Putin: Internet Is Not a 'cia Project'
The inventor of the World Wide Web said on Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was incorrect when he alleged the Internet was a project created by U.S...
From ACM Opinion
Get Your Head Around the 13 Boldest Ideas in Science
Science is full of mind-blowing and counterintuitive concepts.
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Intelligently Discuss Artificial Intelligence
Tesla CEO Elon Musk worries it is "potentially more dangerous than nukes."
From ACM Opinion
Tech's Lost Chapter: An Oral History of Boston's Rise and Fall
In the popular telling, the dawn of personal computing begins in the summer of 1976, when Steve Wozniak showed off the Apple I at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer...
From ACM Opinion
Ransomware Is the Future of Consumer Cybercrime
It's 2020, bitter cold outside, you’re running late for work, and the Linux box that controls your car isn't going to start unless you wire $20 worth of Bitcoin...
From ACM Opinion
Looking to Mars to Help Understand Changing Climates
Where now it stands the Plain of Gold did once my river flow.
From ACM Opinion
Baer's Odyssey: Meet the Serial Inventor Who Built the World's First Game Console
Even if you're a devoted fan of video games, there's a decent chance you're not familiar with the name Ralph H. Baer.
From ACM News
Trends to Watch in 2015: From Algorithmic Accountability to the ber of X
Year-end technology prediction lists can be dull fodder devoted to pie-in-the-sky concepts, outlandish marketing claims or rehashes of familiar trends.
From ACM Opinion
What Could Be Lost as Einstein's Papers Go Online
When I heard that Albert Einstein's papers were going to be published free online, I was thrilled—at least initially.
From ACM Opinion
The Last Astronauts to Fly to Hubble Talk About Their Wild Mission
On a sunny afternoon in May, 2009, seven astronauts strapped themselves into the space shuttle Atlantis and rocketed toward the heavens.
From ACM News
Search Gives s Superpowers
Machine learning—an area of AI focusing on systems that "learn" from data in order to navigate future similar scenarios—is one of the ways we’ve managed to give...
From ACM Opinion
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
In September of last year, Chinese authorities announced an unorthodox standard to help them decide whether to punish people for posting online comments that are...
From ACM Opinion
Sure, Artificial Intelligence May End Our World, But That Is Not the Main Problem
The robots will rise, we're told.
From ACM Opinion
Finding an Image with an Image and Other Feats of Computer Vision
"We found that people were searching for squirrels just to favorite them, just to click 'like.' And the same with buses."
From ACM Opinion