The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
Science fiction has imagined some pretty wild ideas about the universe and our place in it.
Since terrorists struck Paris last Friday night, the debate over whether encryption prevents intelligence services from stopping attacks has reignited.
A strawberry Christmas cake, sexy pants, a pool table, three red jet planes, a hippy bandana, a dog sled, a jetpack, a pair of Adidas trainers, a Tudor throne, a bullet stopped in mid-flight, an iced frappé, an entire shopping…
Online ad networks and search engines love it when you surf around.
Is the ability to send encrypted messages making it hard to stop terrorists?
Humans will become a multi-planet species by making it to Mars, but no farther.
Last month, I met Edward Snowden in a hotel in central Moscow, just blocks away from Red Square.
The ease of use, accuracy and efficiency of the genome-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 has led to its broad adoption in research, as well as to preliminary applications in agriculture and in gene therapies involving non-reproductive…
Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky.
Looks like the inner planets formed *after* the gas giants moved to their current position, and Jupiter ejected a fifth giant, too!
If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution.
Google's move to give away its latest machine-learning software, key to its speech- and photo-recognition programs, isn’t as crazy as it may appear.
Within the last year there have been 16 so-called fiber cuts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
What are the big challenges ahead for you?
A few weeks ago, I (and a zillion other people) reported on a star about 1,500 light-years away that was acting … weirdly.
It was the end of a long combat patrol near a district called Adhamiyah, in northwest Baghdad, in the fall of 2008.
If you are wondering whether exposure to some chemical could increase your chances of getting colon cancer, you could easily find supportive evidence from animal experiments. You might then discover that epidemiological studies…
John Miller reckons he can get into pretty much any safe.
No area of physics causes more confusion, not just among the general public but also among physicists, than quantum mechanics.
"I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords." So goes the joke every time artificial intelligence threatens to supersede humans in another job.
In an exclusive interview, he spoke to reporter Deborah Gage in San Diego, where about 1,200 of Intel's executives, portfolio companies, partners and customers have gathered for the annual Intel Capital Global Summit.
Pedro Domingos's new book is a compelling but rather unquestioning insider view of the search for the ultimate in machine learning.
Humans settle around water, especially in the desert.
Starting a cross-country drive to New York in Los Angeles is pretty inconvenient, unless your cross-country drive is also a vision quest to see the Internet.
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the General Theory of Relativity, the most beautiful theory in the history of science, and in its honor we should take a moment to celebrate the visualized "thought experiments" that…
Imagine you're shopping for a new car, and the salesperson says, "Did you know, this car doesn't just drive on the road."
ACM Fellow and A.M. Turing Award recipient Fred Brooks reflects on his career.
How can customers tell they are getting it?
Implications of the U.S. Supreme Court's new test for patentable subject matter.
Examining the effects of electronic health records on the safety of patients in medical facilities.