Search results for “site:cacm.acm.org”

The Semantic Reader Project – Communications of the ACM

The exponential growth in the rate of scientific publication4 and increasing interdisciplinary nature of scientific progress27 makes it increasingly hard for scholars to keep up with the latest developments. Academic search engines, such as Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar, help scholars...

Are You a Doomer or a Boomer? – Communications of the ACM

Some of us are doomers. Some of us are boosters. [See Marantz.] Some of us are Boomers, in demographics, tangent to that spectrum, with a jaded view of the AI revolution and the predictions that propel it. Alternative prognostications are offered below. This is not a generation gap or an attitude...

Research Against the Machine – Communications of the ACM

Nowadays, we all more or less live in the same worldwide, globalized, extractivist, and productivist system. Let us call this system the Machine, with the capital letter that it deserves. It makes no doubt that the Machine achieved amazing advances in crucial domains like health, technology, or...

In short: Discover how computer science research fuels the Machine's growth and learn about alternatives for a sustainable future. Uncover strategies to make it harder... (AI summary)

Catching the Vibe of Vibe Coding – Communications of the ACM

In early 2023, Matt Welsh wrote an opinion piece in Communications of the ACM that described programmers as dinosaurs waiting for the meteor to hit. Welsh, now director of AI Systems at Palantir Technologies, expressed in his article, “The...

Turning Servers Against the Cloud – Communications of the ACM

You expect the guardians at the gate of any system to keep attacks out; you don’t expect them to turn against internal systems and networks and ravage those on behalf of threat actors. Yet that’s what happened with cloud servers: they turned against internal systems. In March 2025, Server-Side...

Is It Math or CS? Or Is It Both? – Communications of the ACM

In November 2024 Communications Vardi’s Insights column, “What Is Theoretical Computer Science?”, Moshe Vardi raised an interesting point of whether theoretical CS is CS or math. The question is: What is math? Most people outside math...

Tools for Writing and Thinking – Communications of the ACM

A friend of mine is sick. Seriously sick. Recently, we messaged about it, and all of a sudden iMessage butted in and proposed an AI-generated response to their quite-serious message. Uneasy, I moved to one of my older Macs to continue the exchange—one too old for Apple’s new “intelligence.”...

An Algorithm for a Better Bookshelf – Communications of the ACM

Drop in at a library, and you’ll likely notice that most shelves aren’t full—librarians leave some empty space on each shelf. That way, when they get new books, they can slot them into place without having to move too many other books. It’s a simple-enough idea, but one that arises in a host of...

Good Algorithms Make Good Neighbors – Communications of the ACM

A host of different tasks—such as identifying the song in a database most similar to your favorite song, or the drug most likely to interact with a given molecule—have the same basic problem at their core: finding the point in a dataset that is closest to a given point. This “nearest neighbor”...

Multiplication Hits the Speed Limit – Communications of the ACM

A paper posted online in March 2019 presents what may be essentially the fastest possible algorithm for one of the oldest problems in mathematics: whole number multiplication. The new algorithm, which can multiply two n-digit numbers in approximately n(logn) steps, breaks all previous records and...