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
Bletchley Park's Rebirth and Why It Matters
Twenty five years ago, the historic World War II codebreaking center Bletchley Park faced demolition.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Robot Caregivers
Each time I make a house call, I stay much longer than I should.
From ACM Opinion
Being a Better Online Reader
Soon after Maryanne Wolf published "Proust and the Squid," a history of the science and the development of the reading brain from antiquity to the twenty-first...
From ACM Opinion
Three Questions For Robotics Inventor Cynthia Breazeal About Social Robots
As an academic, Cynthia Breazeal pioneered research into social interaction between humans and robots, developing Kismet, a robot that used facial expressions in...
From ACM Opinion
The Moral Hazards and Legal Conundrums of Our Robot-Filled Future
The robots are coming, and they're getting smarter.
From ACM Opinion
Defending the Grand Vision of the Human Brain Project
"A grass roots effort is under way to stop the project... 'Mediocre science, terrible science policy,' begins the spirited letter…"
From ACM Opinion
How to Terraform the Moon
Space fans were startled—and perhaps a little skeptical—in May when the Russians announced that they intend to build a manned moon base.
From ACM Opinion
Harnessing the Speed of Light
The fields of data communication, fabrication, and ultrasound imaging share a common challenge when it comes to improving speed and efficiency: light's diffraction...
From ACM Opinion
The Trouble With Brain Science
Are we ever going to figure out how the brain works?
From ACM Opinion
How Not to Build a Brain
Building a brain sounds like a worthy goal, one that makes it seem as though the future is within reach.
From ACM Opinion
Early-niverse Explorer Looks For Answers
On March 17, a panel of four astrophysicists held a press conference at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., to announce that they...
From ACM Opinion
Forget Turing, the Lovelace Test Has a Better Shot at Spotting AI
When a chatbot called Eugene Goostman passed Alan Turing's famous measure of machine intelligence in June by posing as a Ukrainian teenager with questionable language...
From ACM Opinion
Arm Tries to Spread Its Chips to Forests, Felds, and Factories
Forest fire on the way? Building stress getting too high? Farmland too moist?
From ACM Careers
Keeping Time By Rubidium at the Naval Observatory
You know when you dial a number, and a man reads you the exact time at the tone? That precise timekeeping starts at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.
From ACM Opinion
How My Dad's Equation Sparked the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence
A few days before Halloween in 1961, a young astronomer was mulling over a fairly serious problem.
From ACM Opinion
Ray Kurzweil Says He's Breathing Intelligence Into Google Search
The big announcements at Google's I/O event in San Francisco Wednesday didn't mention Web search, the technology that got the company started and made it so successful...
From ACM Opinion