Communications of the ACM
Consumers vs. Citizens in Democracy's Public Sphere
Attempting to balance the challenging trade-offs between individual rights and our obligations to one another.
From ACM Opinion
Yoshua Bengio, Revered Architect of AI, Has Some Ideas About What to Build Next
The Turing Award winner wants AI systems that can reason, plan, and imagine
From ACM Opinion
This Tech Would Have Spotted the Secret Chinese Chip in Seconds
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, spies in China managed to insert chips into computer systems that would allow external control of those systems.
From ACM Opinion
How Programmable Calculators and a Sci-Fi Story Brought Soviet Teens Into the Digital Age
Despite the ubiquity of computers in modern society, the vast majority of today's students never study computer science or computer programming.
From ACM Opinion
John Hennessy, Chairman of Alphabet, on Smart Risks, Employee Activism, and the Dangers of Short-Term Thinking
Last week, Alphabet chair and former Stanford University president John Hennessy joined former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer on the stage of the Computer History Museum...
From ACM Opinion
David Patterson Says It's Time for New Computer Architectures and Software Languages
David Patterson—University of California professor, Google engineer, and RISC pioneer—says there's no better time than now to be a computer architect.
From ACM Opinion
Intel Execs Address the AI Talent Shortage, AI Education, and the 'Cool' Factor
Last week, I sat down with Intel's Gadi Singer, vice president and general manager of artificial intelligence architecture, and Chris Rice, head of AI talent acquisition...
From ACM Opinion
Darpa Plans a Major Remake of .S. Electronics
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is launching a huge expansion of its Electronics Resurgence Initiative, boosting the program to US $1.5 billion...
From ACM Opinion
Forging Voices and Faces: The Dangers of Audio and Video Fabrication
In 1963, before he could give the speech he'd prepared for his trip to Dallas, U.S. president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In March 2018, a company re-created...
From ACM Opinion
To Illustrate the Dangers of Cyberwarfare, the Army Is Turning to Sci-Fi
At first glance, Dark Hammer looks a lot like any other science fiction comic book: On the front cover, a drone flies over a river dividing a city with damaged...
From ACM Opinion
How to Design a New Chip on a Budget
We recently had an interesting exchange with bunnie Huang, hardware guru and creator of Chumby, NetTV, and the Novena laptop, among other things. He's also theHacking...
From ACM Opinion
Q&a: The Ethics of sing Brain Implants to pgrade Yourself
Neurotechnology is one of the hottest areas of engineering, and the technological achievements sound miraculous: Paralyzed people have controlled robotic limbs and ...
From ACM Opinion
Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges--The Aliens Are All Asleep
Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong of the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, working with Milan Ćirković of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia...
From ACM Opinion
How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics' Brain Race
In October 2016, inside a sold-out arena in Zurich, a man named Numa Poujouly steered his wheelchair up to the central podium.
From ACM Opinion
Blossom: A Handmade Approach to Social Robotics from Cornell and Google
As excited as we are about the forthcoming generation of social home robots (including Jibo, Kuri, and many others), it's hard to ignore the fact that most of them...
From ACM Opinion
Human-Level AI Is Right Around the Corner, or Hundreds of Years Away
Artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly, and its impact on our daily lives will only increase.
From ACM Opinion
Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X, on the Future of Ai, Robots, and Coffeemakers
Astro Teller has an unusual way of starting a new project: He tries to kill it.
From ACM Opinion
The Security Challenges of Online Voting Have Not Gone Away
Online voting is sometimes heralded as a solution to all our election headaches.
From ACM Opinion
Six Creative Ways to Solve Biomedicine's Big Data Problem
Biomedical research generates an obscene amount of data. Now, three funding agencies are trying to spur the development of tools and platforms to improve researchers'...
From ACM Opinion
What Would Marvin Minsky Read?
Marvin Minsky was one of the founders of artificial intelligence, and with John McCarthy, he created MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...
From ACM Opinion
Why Fully Autonomous Robot Cars Hail from the 20th Century
A vision of fully autonomous, self-driving cars allowing human owners to nap or read in the car seems to come from the future.12