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
Bitcoin Mining Guzzles Energy and Its Carbon Footprint Just Keeps Growing
A somewhat neglected issue in discussions of bitcoin is the tremendous increase in power consumption used by miners. The rising power required to mine bitcoin conflicts...
From ACM Opinion
What I Learned from the People Who Built the Atom Bomb
When I began my career in elementary particle physics, the great figures who taught and inspired me had been part of the Manhattan Project generation that developed...
From ACM Opinion
How Hardy Is Webb? A Q&a About the Toughness of Nasa's Webb Telescope
Just how resilient does a space telescope have to be to survive both Earth's environment and the frigid, airless environment of space?
From ACM Opinion
Could Intelligent Machines of the Future Own the Rights to Their Own creations?
Intellectual property may be the legal term for creations, including literary or artistic, but there is something inherently human about it as well.
From ACM Opinion
The Mission to Learn Everything We Always Wanted to Know About the Universe
The Cosmic Microwave Background was created as the first atoms formed hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang, and it retains information about the formation...
From ACM Opinion
The F.c.c. Wants to Let Telecoms Cash In on the Internet
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission wants to let Comcast, Verizon and other broadband companies turn the internet into a latter-day version of...
From ACM Opinion
Connectivity Hacking Back Makes a Comeback—but It's Still a Really Bad Idea
In spite of the billions of dollars companies collectively spend each year on cyberdefenses, hackers keep defeating them.
From ACM TechNews
The AI Guru Behind Amazon, ber, and nity Explains What AI Really Is
In an interview, Danish computer scientist Danny Lange, who has invented machine-learning platforms for technology giants such as Uber and Amazon, addresses the...
From ACM Careers
Google, Amazon Find Not Everyone Is Ready For AI
Executives at ascendant tech titans like Amazon and Google tend to look down on their predecessor IBM.
From ACM Opinion
Apple Is Sharing Your Face with Apps. That's a New Privacy Worry.
Poop that mimics your facial expressions was just the beginning.
From ACM News
The Genesis of Kuri, the Friendly Home Robot
Over the course of thousands of years, dogs have evolved alongside humans to be awesome.
From ACM Opinion
How an nderwater Sensor Network Is Tracking Argentina's Lost Submarine
On 15 November, Argentina's Navy lost contact with the ARA San Juan, a small diesel-powered submarine that had been involved in exercises off the east coast of...
From ACM Opinion
Five Ways to Fix Statistics
As debate rumbles on about how and how much poor statistics is to blame for poor reproducibility, Nature asked influential statisticians to recommend one change...
From ACM Opinion
The Quantum Spy Author David Ignatius on the Future of High-Tech Espionage
The intersection of quantum computing and espionage may feel like a faraway future. But in his latest novel, David Ignatius, Washington's own John le Carré, tackles...
From Communications of the ACM
Lousy Advice to the Lovelorn
The 37% rule is rarely applicable in real-world situations. It is certainly entirely wrong-headed as advice for getting married.
From Communications of the ACM
The Death of Big Software
We are past the tipping point in the transition away from 20th-century big software architectures.
From Communications of the ACM
Community Colleges: A Resource For Increasing Equity and Inclusion in Computer Science Education
Challenging a simplistic pathway metaphor.
From Communications of the ACM
The Forgotten Engineer
Engineering has been marginalized by the unhealthy belief that engineering is the application of science.
From ACM Opinion