Communications of the ACM
Defining a Role for AI Ethics in National Security
Mariarosaria Taddeo, an associate professor and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and Dstl Ethics Fellow…
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AI Pioneer: 'The Dangers of Abuse Are Very Real'
Yoshua Bengio is one of three computer scientists who last week shared the US$1-million A. M. Turing award—one of the field's top prizes.
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Robots on the Run
Young animals gallop across fields, climb trees and immediately find their feet with enviable grace after they fall.
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Beware of Plausible Predictions of Fantasy Materials
The hunt is on for materials that have exotic properties, to enhance quantum computers, touch screens and electronic displays, and to double the efficiency of solar...
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How to Land a Journal Cover
Researchers: Felice Frankel will make photographers of you all. Photography—both macro- and microscopic—is an essential tool in science, because pictures are both...
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Technologies to Watch in 2019
Seven specialists forecast the developments that will push their fields forward in the year ahead.
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Cinematic and Scientific Techniques Combine to Show How a Long-Extinct Creature Moved
The trolls and orcs in The Lord of the Rings films aren't real. The dragons and dire wolves on the hit television show Game of Thrones are simulated. The dinosaurs...
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Dreaming of Death Rays: The Search for Laser Weapons
Lasers first emerged nearly 60 years ago, but the idea of using powerful beams of heat or light is hardly new.
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Classical and Quantum Computers Are Vying for Superiority
Will 2019 be the year when quantum computers show they have the right stuff? Google says so; one of the company's labs, in Santa Barbara, California, has promised...
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Trolling, Hacking and the 2016 S Presidential Election
Late in 2016, then-US President Barack Obama mused in an interview with The New Yorker magazine that he had probably been elected because his campaign had begun...
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Behind the Scenes of Japan's Daring Asteroid Mission
As Japan lands a third probe on Ryugu asteroid, Nature looks at the Hayabusa2 mission in more detail.
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Forgotten Heroes of the Enigma Story
Alan Turing's crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking.
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How D-Wave's Quantum Machine Could Help Exotic Physics
Picture a computer. Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you were probably thinking of your laptop, or maybe even your smartphone if you're being smart...
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Billion-Dollar Telescopes Could End p Beyond the Reach of S Astronomers
Every ten years, US astronomers set research priorities for the following decade.
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The Ethics of Computer Science: This Researcher Has a Controversial Proposal
In the midst of growing public concern over artificial intelligence (AI), privacy and the use of data, Brent Hecht has a controversial proposal: the computer-science...
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AI Can Be Sexist and Racist; It's Time to Make It Fair
When Google Translate converts news articles written in Spanish into English, phrases referring to women often become "he said" or "he wrote."
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The Researchers Who Study Alien Linguistics
Sheri Wells-Jensen is fascinated by languages no one has ever heard—those that might be spoken by aliens.
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The Illusion of Time
According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn't correspond to physical reality.
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Regulate Artificial Intelligence to Avert Cyber Arms Race
Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent, sophisticated and destructive. Each day in 2017, the United States suffered, on average, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks...
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The Ageless Appeal of 2001: A Space Odyssey
In 1968, film-maker Stanley Kubrick and his screenwriting colleague, science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, presented 2001: A Space Odyssey. Half a century later...
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