Communications of the ACM
50 Years of Pascal
The Pascal programming language creator Niklaus Wirth reflects on its origin, spread, and further development.
From ACM Opinion
The U.S. Needs a High-Tech Manhattan Project
The United States needs to wrest the high-tech initiative from China and re-establish American dominance in telecommunications, computation, artificial intelligence...
From ACM Opinion
Why We Can't Develop Voting Software That Works
Ever wonder why we could write software to get to the Moon, but not to count votes? Here are five reasons.
From ACM Opinion
We Need to Talk About 'Cloud Neutrality'
Given how critical the cloud has become for a huge swath of the tech economy, maybe we should ask ourselves whether this infrastructure should be in the hands of...
From ACM Opinion
Challenging the Myth of the 10x Programmer
A pervasive belief in software engineering is that some programmers are much better than others, and that their skills, abilities, and talents exert an outsized...
From ACM Opinion
Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About…Anything
In "Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot", we present Meena, a 2.6-billion-parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model.
From ACM Opinion
Why Connected Cars May Never Come
John Paré tells the story of his first trip in an autonomous vehicle.
From ACM Opinion
Virtual Reality Has An Accessibility Problem
Virtual reality has been touted as an "empathy machine" that lets users see what it's like to have a disability—but people with disabilities often can't use it....
From ACM Opinion
Does Artificial Intelligence Technology Foreshadow a New Arms Race?
The possibility of an artificial intelligence arms race poses a threat to international security similar to that of a conventional or nuclear armament race.
From ACM Opinion
AI Isn't a Solution to All Our Problems
It's simply a tool—and hardly a perfect one
From ACM Opinion
Google and Amazon Make Us Worse People
The narrowing of choice online all but forces us into decisions driven by impulse and necessity, eroding our values and conscience over time.
From Communications of the ACM
Guiding Students to Develop Essential Skills
Students should interact with one another to practice skills and construct their own understanding, with assistance from a teacher acting as a coach and guide —...
From Communications of the ACM
When Human-Computer Interaction Meets Community Citizen Science
Empowering communities through citizen science.
From Communications of the ACM
Numbers Are for Computers, Strings Are for Humans
How and where software should translate data into a human-readable form.
From Communications of the ACM
Are You Sure Your Software Will Not Kill Anyone?
Using software to control potentially unsafe systems requires the use of new software and system engineering approaches.
From Communications of the ACM
Are We Losing Momentum?
Estimating when the second half of the world will come online.
From ACM Opinion
We're Banning Facial Recognition. We're Missing the Point.
The whole point of modern surveillance is to treat people differently, and facial recognition technologies are only a small part of that.
From ACM Opinion
Don't Give Your Dot-org Domain Away to a Private Company
One of the Internet's most trusted assets — the dot-org domain used by nonprofits from UNICEF to your local food bank — is being hijacked.
From ACM Opinion
We're Approaching the Limits of Computer Power – We Need New Programmers Now
Ever-faster processors led to bloated software, but physical limits may force a return to the concise code of the past.
From ACM Opinion
Host of Problems with Facebook Deepfake Ban, Expert Says
Facebook's newly announced ban on deepfake videos presents a number of challenges in the fight against the spread of misinformation, says Tim Weninger, associate...
From Communications of the ACM