The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, is surely the most feared person in Silicon Valley.
Over the past few days, the mathematics world has been abuzz over the news that Sir Michael Atiyah, the famous Fields Medalist and Abel Prize winner, claims to have solved the Riemann hypothesis.
In mid-August the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Transportation Security Administration announced Metro has paid $100,000 each for several TSA-approved portable terahertz millimeter-wave screening…
During the opening ceremony of Alibaba's 2018 computing conference last week, Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, invited the MC to taste some tea on the stage—but, first, to distinguish between tea roasted by hand and by machine…
In the summer of 1995, a second-year grad student called Sergey Brin was giving a tour of Stanford University to prospective students. Larry Page, an engineering graduate from the University of Michigan, was one of those being…
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 to discuss leadership and to promote Hennessy's new book, …
As one of The New York Times's three Surfacing residents, I've grown accustomed to entering unfamiliar places.
It seems like every few months there's a new cellphone, laptop or tablet that is so exciting people line up around the block to get their hands on it.
Eric Schmidt, who has been the CEO of Google and executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, predicts that within the next decade there will be two distinct internets: one led by the U.S. and the other by China.
Dodos. Western black rhinoceros. Tasmanian tigers. Bennett's seaweed. The list of extinct animal and plant species goes on and on.
There's an arms race underway to develop the next generation of computers—known as "quantum" computers—and there's no guarantee that the United States is going to win.
David Patterson—University of California professor, Google engineer, and RISC pioneer—says there's no better time than now to be a computer architect.
On a crisp California afternoon in early December 1968, a square-jawed, mild-mannered Stanford researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage at San Francisco's Civic Auditorium and proceeded to blow everyone's mind about …
I recently came across two tweets—or rather, thousands of tweets sharing the same two ideas over and over again.
Many Americans see the future crowding into the present and some of the innovations ahead unnerve them, especially as they reshape ideas about human dominion.
In the two years since Russia made headlines for targeting an American political organization–the Democratic National Committee–and undermining Hillary Clinton's race for the presidency, Russian information warfare tactics have…
Mars has loomed large throughout human history, our imaginations filling its red vistas with fantastic detail long before our space missions returned even rudimentary photos.
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, to talk about AI workforce issues. Here's what they had…
Thirty years ago in December, the modern exchange of scholars between the U.S. and China began.
Knowledge, to paraphrase British journalist Miles Kington, is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing there's a norm against putting it in a fruit salad.
Artificial Intelligence is a greater concern than antibiotic resistance, climate change or terrorism for the future of Britain, the incoming president of the British Science Association has warned.
Ten years! Ten years since the start of operations for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), one of the most complex machines ever created.
At its core, cyberwarfare refers the use of digital attacks by one country or nation to disrupt the computer systems of another with the aim of create significant damage, death or destruction.
Smart gadgets are everywhere.
As millions of people came online in the late 1990s they needed help figuring out what each webpage was about, and how to find what they were looking for.
Exactly 10 years ago Tuesday, a newly promoted vice president named Sundar Pichai stood before a group of tech reporters in a conference room at Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters. There, he revealed the Chrome …
Guess what? I just got hold of some embarrassing video footage of Texas senator Ted Cruz singing and gyrating to Tina Turner. His political enemies will have great fun showing it during the midterms. Donald Trump will call him…
Alan Turing's crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking.
Warfare has always been about exerting political will.
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