Communications of the ACM

A planning approach to managing risk.

The science of manipulating small particles unleashes big issues.

Inaccurate impressions of the opportunities of 21st century CS are shrinking the next generation of IT professionals. You can help by dispelling incorrect beliefs about employment and by helping improve pre-college education.

In a world saturated with RFID tags, protecting the privacy of individuals is technically difficult. Without a proper alignment of interests it may be impossible.

Cheap, tiny, plentiful radio-frequency identification tags will make it possible to tag almost everything, spurring a revolution in how physical objects interact with information services.

The iBracelet and the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform promise the ability to infer human activity directly from sensor readings.

Interacting with a self-describing, self-locating world sprinkled with RFIG tags, physical objects come alive through augmented reality labels and context-sensitive annotation.

Configuring themselves through Elope middleware, tagged physical objects and rooms let users seamlessly integrate their content and invoke services.

Interactive RFID-enhanced museum exhibits let visitors continue their scientific exploration beyond the museum's walls. But museums must still help them understand the technology and address their data privacy concerns.

Cheap tags and technology simple and secure enough to ensure personal data privacy are required before retailers implement and consumers trust and confidently use them on a mass scale.

Consumers need to feel they have control over the RFID infrastructure before they routinely trust its services.

Want consumers to adopt RFID-based systems? Make the perceived (and real) risk acceptable through convenience, variety, and lower prices.

How the use of technology affects what we know and how we know it.