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6 days ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Julie Stewart |Robin Hill |Sam Greengard
“I am not smart enough for this.”That thought kept popping into Molly Kelly’s head during her first coding class. She glanced at her three classmates, who looked nervous, too. They weren’t sitting in a high school or college classroom. They were adults learning Web development in a six-month course offered behind the walls of the maximum-security Indiana Women’s Prison, where they were all serving time.
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1 week ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Robin Hill |Sam Greengard
Those of us inclined to lob accusations of hubris at new forms of artificial intelligence, on the grounds that we observed (and possibly fomented) the same kind of affliction in the classical forms, should at least clarify the analogy. What are the similarities that advise caution, and what are the differences that might alleviate it? We address primarily the large language model, and draw attention to its use of text. Consider a traditional linguistics class of some years ago.
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2 weeks ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Moshe Vardi |Robin Hill |Esther Shein |Sandrine Ceurstemont
Share Download PDF Join the Discussion View in the ACM Digital Library Opinion Apr 29 2025 Big Tech, You Need Academia. Speak Up! The Computing Research Association says NSF budget cuts would put the future of U.S. innovation and security at risk. Opinion Apr 28 2025 In Pursuit of Professionalism Given the sensitivity and even danger of the human realms affected by computer science, we need to address the establishment of our work as a profession. News Apr 22 2025 The Outlook for Programmers...
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Doug Meil |Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill
Public cloud computing platforms have made delivering data and analytics easier than ever. They are certainly easier and more powerful compared to when such solutions were deployed on-premise not long ago, but not always necessarily easy. There are still many decisions to be made. It is also worth reflecting on how these choices have evolved in the past 10-15 years, as well as the principles that haven’t changed.
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Jan 6, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Thomas Haigh |Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill
In the first four parts of this Communications Historical Reflections column series, I have followed the artificial intelligence (AI) brand from its debut in the 1950s through to the reorientation of the field around probabilistic approaches and big data during the AI winter that ran through the 1990s and early 2000s. Aside from the brief flourishing of an expert system industry in the 1980s, the main theme of that long history was disappointment.
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Jan 6, 2025 | 
cacm.acm.org | Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill
Our recent posts have considered different ways of using Generative AI to help you think. We started with a bunch of faces, a bunch of disciplines, a bunch of roles. These were surprising uses of Generative AI in that they aren’t what people have been thinking of using it for. Let’s turn to the wonderous thing we do to get started on any project. Making lists is a hard skill to learn, but it serves us well in so many situations.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Vasant Dhar |R. Colin Johnson |Marc Rotenberg |Robin Hill
Artificial intelligence (AI) captured the world’s attention in 2023 with the emergence of pre-trained models such as GPT, on which the conversational AI system ChatGPT is based. For the first time, we can converse with an entity, however imperfectly, about anything, as we do with other humans. This new capability provided by pre-trained models has created a paradigm shift in AI, transforming it from an application to a general-purpose technology that is configurable to specific uses.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | R. Colin Johnson |Marc Rotenberg |Robin Hill |Sam Greengard
Deep fake videos have become so convincing that we now depend on human fact checkers to flag them for us (for instance, this Kari Lake deep fake). Contemporary researchers have also recently uncovered the fact that voice alone can be subtly manipulated to persuade people to adopt favored opinions using vocal cues including pitch shifting, tempo adjustments, stereotypical phonation, speech-pattern alterations, and vowel-enunciation alterations.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Marc Rotenberg |Robin Hill |Sam Greengard
There is no Nobel Prize for computer science, but this year the Nobel Committee made three awards with deep ties to computing and innovation. Viewed together, the Nobel Committee may also be making a statement about the current state of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the challenges ahead. Demis Hassabis, a former chess prodigy and the founder of Google DeepMind, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work, along with John Jumper, on protein folding.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Robin Hill |Sam Greengard |Alex Williams
In my computing ethics class, I introduce the question what ethical issues are faced by us, computer scientists, that are not faced by other professions; an answer would meet our definition of professional ethics. Most professions pledge to uphold the public good, and most professionals expect to take more trouble with their projects than is visible to outsiders, assuming a burden of quality for its own sake.
