Essential Skills for Next-Gen Product Managers
Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just adding new features to our products. It is rewriting the entire rulebook for what it means to be a product manager (PM).| Communications of the ACM
BLOG@CACM Oct 29 2025| cacm.acm.org
Early NSF-funded SDN research. In 2001, a National Academies report, Looking Over the Fence at Networks: A Neighbor’s View of Networking Research,30 pointed to the perils of Internet ossification: an inability of networks to change to satisfy new needs. The report highlighted three dimensions of ossification: intellectual (backward compatibility limits creative ideas), infrastructure (it is hard to deploy new ideas into the infrastructure), and system (rigid architecture led to fragile, ...| cacm.acm.org
Breaking the dogma that AI requires huge computing power and huge datasets could open up new technological horizons.| Communications of the ACM
Artificial intelligence is making common digital defense tools obsolete.| Communications of the ACM
Treating AI literacy as central to engineering is the difference between staying relevant and being sidelined.| Communications of the ACM
A practical playbook for how a product manager navigates AI.| Communications of the ACM
McDonald's said it was committed to cybersecurity and to holding third-party vendors to high data protection standards.| Communications of the ACM
While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the AGI dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought.| Communications of the ACM
Submit articles for inclusion in CACM’s Practice section, dedicated to enhancing practitioners’ understanding of computing and improving job performance.| Communications of the ACM
With industrial-scale energy appetites, AI datacenters are the steel mills of the modern era.| Communications of the ACM
For researchers, reflecting on their own work is part of good scientific practice. This is common across all scientific disciplines, including software research.a Though critical self-reflection is a staple in research, the software research community seems to take it further, often grappling with feelings of insignificance and questioning the relevance of their work. In the past two years, such discussions have been nearly impossible to track. Two prominent examples illustrate this: In 2022,...| cacm.acm.org
Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just adding new features to our products. It is rewriting the entire rulebook for what it means to be a product manager (PM).| Communications of the ACM
In March 1972, the U.S. Air Force started a review of a Honeywell Multics system to understand whether it could be used in secure environments. The report was issued in mid-1974 and concluded that Multics, while not secure, was better than its peers and might be a reasonable starting point for a secure system.24 The report raised the potential of adding a back door (it was called a “trap door”) to an innocent system call. When passed a specific, very unlikely input, the system call allowe...| cacm.acm.org
In early 2024, a Hong Kong-based clerk at multinational consulting engineering firm Arup was duped into transferring about $25 million to scammers who used AI to impersonate the company’s CFO, and other senior executives, in a live video meeting. The fraud only became apparent when the employee checked in with headquarters in London.| Communications of the ACM
Training models with synthetic data presents both a danger and a boon to artificial intelligence (AI). While some groups have aggressively pursued the use of model-generated data to train successors for greater accuracy and generalization, others have warned about the risks posed by AI ingesting its own output. The two views are not at odds. The question is when and where things go wrong.| cacm.acm.org
When we refer to "the Internet" we refer not only to the global system of interconnected computer networks but also to the set of applications that utilize this network, including email, the Web, search engines, social media, and the like. To understand where this Internet comes from, we have to revisit the emergence of online communities in the early and mid-1980s. Consider, for example, the WELL, which began in 1985 as a dial-up bulletin board system, self-described as "a cherished watering...| cacm.acm.org
The World Wide Web (Web) emerged as a new medium in the mid-1990s. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1989, but its exploding popularity was also enabled by the release of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993 and the Internet becoming commercially available in 1995. A communication revolution was launched.| cacm.acm.org
Computers that combine living human brain cells with silicon chips to form a neural network can now be used by researchers to conduct experiments in different fields.| Communications of the ACM
The goal of generative AI tools, powered by large language models (LLMs), is to finish the task assigned to them; to provide a complete response to a prompt. As is now well-established, models sometimes make things up, or hallucinate, to achieve this. In natural language outputs, hallucinations have degrees of seriousness—minimal in shopping lists, possibly consequential in scientific texts. In code generation, hallucinations are easier to spot and the consequences are clear: the code doesn...| Communications of the ACM
Economists have developed different types of models describing the interaction of agents in markets. Early models in general equilibrium theory describe agents taking prices as given and do not consider the incentives of agents to manipulate prices strategically. With appropriate convexity assumptions on the preferences, such models can be cast as convex optimization problems for which efficient algorithms are known to find a competitive equilibrium. Price-taking behavior might be a reasonabl...| cacm.acm.org
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most potent force multipliers the criminal underground has ever seen. Generative models that write immaculate prose, mimic voices, and chain exploits together have lowered the cost of sophisticated attacks to almost nothing. | Communications of the ACM
Amazon Web Services (AWS) strives to deliver reliable services that customers can trust completely. This requires maintaining the highest standards of security, durability, integrity, and availability—with systems correctness serving as the cornerstone for achieving these priorities. An April 2015 article published in Communications of the ACM, titled “How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods,” highlighted the approach for ensuring the correctness of critical services that have since...| cacm.acm.org
Engineering Culture| cacm.acm.org
In this Inside Risks column, we explore memory-safety standardization, which we argue is an essential step to promoting universal strong memory safety in government and industry, and, in turn, to ensure access to more secure software for all. During the last two decades, a set of research technologies for strong memory safety—memory-safe languages, hardware and software protection, formal approaches, and software compartmentalization—have reached sufficient maturity to see early deploymen...| cacm.acm.org
1991 and All That| cacm.acm.org
Last fall, Eric Klopfer decided to conduct an experiment in his undergraduate computer science class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He divided the class into three groups and gave them a programming task to solve in the Fortran language, which none of them knew.| cacm.acm.org
We are excited to announce that Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication. This means that more than six decades of CACM’s renowned research articles, seminal papers, technical reports, commentaries, real-world practice, and news articles are now open to everyone, regardless of whether they are members of ACM or subscribe to the ACM Digital Library.| cacm.acm.org
