ACM TechNews Top Articles of 2020

Three times each week, ACM provides coverage in brief of established and emerging areas of computer science, the latest trends in information technology, and related science, technology, engineering, and mathematics news to a global audience of more than 110,000 readers, in the form of ACM TechNews. A benefit of ACM membership, ACM TechNews is assembled from hundreds of relevant English-language technology publications from all over the world, in order to help keep ACM's members informed and up to date on a wide range of technology topics.

ACM tracks readers' click on the dozen or so links in each ACM TechNews edition that provide access to the full texts of each of ACM TechNews article abstract, in order to stay on top of readers' topic preferences. We use that capability to dig through the data to determine which of the more than 2,800 article abstracts delivered during the course of the year were most popular with readers, based on the numbers of clicks each received to access the full article.

Looking at the 10 most clicked-on ACM TechNews articles during the course of 2020, one of the most popular topics is, once again, programming and programming languages. Other topics of major interest reflect the major news of the year, including best practices for virtual conferences, cybersecurity, autonomous vehicles, and algorithmic bias.

The most popular single ACM TechNews article abstract clicked on last year was in the Friday, May 29 edition; the link took readers to the full text of the ZDNet article "Programming languages: Developers reveal what they love and loathe, and what pays best."

The 10 most frequently clicked-on content links in ACM TechNews during 2020 were:

Rank	Article	Publication	Date	URL
1	Programming languages: Developers reveal what they love and loathe, and what pays best	ZDNet	May 28, 2020	https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-languages-developers-reveal-what-they-love-and-loathe-and-what-pays-best/
2	ACM Releases Report on Best Practices for Virtual Conferences	HPC Wire	April 16, 2020	https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/acm-releases-report-on-best-practices-for-virtual-conferences/
3	Programming language security: These are the worst bugs for each top language	ZDNet	Dec. 12, 2020	https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-language-security-these-are-the-worst-bugs-for-each-top-language/
4	Top Programming Languages 2020	IEEE Spectrum	July 22, 2020	https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/top-programming-language-2020
5	China's Military Is Tied to Debilitating New Cyberattack Tool	The New York Times	May 7, 2020	https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/world/asia/china-hacking-military-aria.html
6	Folding@Home Now More Powerful Than World's Top 7 Supercomputers, Combined	Tom's Hardware	March 21, 2020	https://www.tomshardware.com/news/folding-at-home-worlds-top-supercomputers-coronavirus-covid-19
7	Countries agree regulations for automated driving	The Japan Times	June 26, 2020	https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/06/26/business/tech/countries-agree-regulations-automated-driving/#.XvW-I-cpA2w
8	Data Visualization's Breakthrough Moment in the COVID-19 Crisis	Nightingle	April 30, 2020	https://medium.com/nightingale/data-visualizations-breakthrough-moment-in-the-covid-19-crisis-ce46627c7db5
9	Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm	The New York Times	June 24, 2020	https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html
10	California city bans predictive policing in U.S. first	Reuters	June 24, 2020	https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-tech-trfn/california-city-bans-predictive-policing-in-u-s-first-idUSKBN23V2XC

 

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Lawrence M. Fisher is Senior Editor/News for ACM Magazines.