Communications of the ACM
From ACM Opinion
Robots on the Run
Young animals gallop across fields, climb trees and immediately find their feet with enviable grace after they fall.
From ACM Opinion
How 2D Semiconductors Could Extend Moore's Law
The number of components in electronic circuits has doubled every two years since the 1960s—a trend known as Moore's law.
From ACM Opinion
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...
From ACM Opinion
Technologies to Watch in 2019
Seven specialists forecast the developments that will push their fields forward in the year ahead.
From ACM Opinion
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...
From ACM Opinion
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.
From ACM Opinion
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...
From ACM Opinion
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."
From ACM Opinion
Before Reproducibility Must Come Preproducibility
From time to time over the past few years, I've politely refused requests to referee an article on the grounds that it lacks enough information for me to check...
From ACM Opinion
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...
From ACM Opinion
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...
From ACM Opinion
Fourier's Transformational Thinking
When you listen to digital music, the harmonies and chords that you hear have probably been reconstructed from a file that stored them as components of different...
From ACM Opinion
Does Your Code Stand p to Scrutiny?
Computer code written by scientists forms the basis of an increasing number of studies across many fields—and an increasing number of papers that report the results...
From ACM Opinion
How to Make Replication the Norm
Replication is essential for building confidence in research studies, yet it is still the exception rather than the rule.
From ACM Opinion
Five Priorities For Weather and Climate Research
Meteorology is entering a new era. Demand is growing worldwide for forecasts of storms, floods and droughts.
From ACM Opinion
Five Ways to Fix Statistics
As debate rumbles on about how and how much poor statistics is to blame for poor reproducibility, Nature asked influential statisticians to recommend one change...
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Dna Sequencing
Forty years ago, two papers1, 2 described the first tractable methods for determining the order of the chemical bases in stretches of DNA. Before these 1977 publications...
From ACM Opinion
Metrology Is Key to Reproducing Results
Imagine you are a policymaker who needs to know how much carbon is stored in the South American forest.
From ACM Opinion
Quantum Teleportation Is Even Weirder Than You Think
A BBC headline last week, 'First object teleported to Earth's orbit', has to be one of the most fantastical you'll see this year. For once, it seems the future...
From ACM Opinion
Information Technology: A Digital Genius at Play
The US mathematician and electrical engineer Claude Shannon, whose life spanned the tumultuous, technologically explosive twentieth century, is often called the...12