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 Nsa's Cyber-King Goes Corporate
Keith Alexander, the recently retired director of the National Security Agency, left many in Washington slack-jawed when it was reported that he might charge companies...
From ACM Opinion
The Weird Reasons Why People Make p False Identities on the Internet
Sockpuppetry—using false identities for deception—is centuries old, but the advent of the web has made creating sockpuppets, and falling for their tricks, easier...
From ACM Opinion
Why Is Science Fiction So Hard to Define?
Time Out, the weekly listings magazine, recently ranked the 100 best sci-fi movies of all time.
From ACM Opinion
Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch
Video gaming differentiates itself from the older forms of escapism—literature, theatre, film, television—with interactivity.
From ACM Opinion
How to Invent a Person Online
On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio.
From ACM Opinion
When Robots Come For Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?
Non-human employees are filling positions in all sorts of workplaces, and they are proving themselves to be fast, accurate, and reliable—more so than their human...
From ACM Opinion
How the .s. Stumbled Into the Drone Era
On Sept. 7, 2000, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, a U.S. Predator drone flew over Afghanistan for the first time.
From ACM Opinion
How to Talk About Blowing Things p in Cyberspace, According to the Military
Bombs are relatively simple, when you boil everything down.
From ACM Opinion
The Fasinatng … Frustrating … Fascinating History of Autocorrect
Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn...
From Communications of the ACM
Slow Search
Seeking to enrich the search experience by allowing for extra time and alternate resources.
From Communications of the ACM
Fostering Computational Literacy in Science Classrooms
An agent-based approach to integrating computing in secondary-school science courses.
From ACM Opinion
Id Shows Off Double-Jumping, Skull-Crushing New Doom at Quakecon
The bad news is that only people who were actually at Dallas' QuakeCon last night were able to see the world-premiere gameplay footage from the next Doom game,...
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
Calling All Hackers: Help S Build an Open Wireless Router
EFF is releasing an experimental hacker alpha release of wireless router software specifically designed to support secure, shareable Open Wireless networks.
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
Take a Virtual Voyage Into Darwin's Library
In his celebrated journey around the world on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836, Charles Darwin collected a plethora of information on the geology, animals, plants...
From ACM Opinion