Articles & Research
Research, policy briefings and practical guidance from the Society and its members — written for practitioners, employers and legislators. Coverage includes AI releases, big-tech announcements, bioinformatics, the Texas Triangle build-out and frontier engineering programs.
Latest
Timeline
Optimus: a humanoid robot from prototype to production line
Four years from an AI Day slide to a converted Fremont assembly line — and still no commercial sale.
August 2026 · 6 min read
Analysis
Grok, Colossus and the compute arms race
xAI built a 100,000-GPU cluster in 122 days, doubled it, and merged twice. The externalities arrived with the electricity.
August 2026 · 7 min read
Article
A national consortium to build trust in AI
ACS joins federal partners, universities and industry to strengthen assurance practice for high-impact AI systems.
August 2026 · 6 min read
Policy briefing
Statute catches up: the EU AI Act, two executive orders and NIST
What actually became binding between 2023 and 2026, and what practitioners must now document.
August 2026 · 6 min read
Report
Thirteen flights: Starship's test campaign and the Raptor line
From a four-minute failure in April 2023 to a V3 vehicle deploying next-generation Starlink satellites.
August 2026 · 7 min read
Research
The state of the American computing profession
Pay, mobility and skills gaps across 48,000 members and 190 accredited programs, with a Texas Triangle deep dive.
August 2026 · 9 min read
Archive
Every article the Society has published, by year of publication.
2026 (16)
- August 2026 · TimelineOptimus: a humanoid robot from prototype to production lineFour years from an AI Day slide to a converted Fremont assembly line — and still no commercial sale.
- August 2026 · AnalysisGrok, Colossus and the compute arms racexAI built a 100,000-GPU cluster in 122 days, doubled it, and merged twice. The externalities arrived with the electricity.
- August 2026 · ArticleA national consortium to build trust in AIACS joins federal partners, universities and industry to strengthen assurance practice for high-impact AI systems.
- August 2026 · Policy briefingStatute catches up: the EU AI Act, two executive orders and NISTWhat actually became binding between 2023 and 2026, and what practitioners must now document.
- August 2026 · ReportThirteen flights: Starship's test campaign and the Raptor lineFrom a four-minute failure in April 2023 to a V3 vehicle deploying next-generation Starlink satellites.
- August 2026 · ResearchThe state of the American computing professionPay, mobility and skills gaps across 48,000 members and 190 accredited programs, with a Texas Triangle deep dive.
- July 2026 · InterviewWhy AI assurance must go deeper than testingA Fellow of the Society on benchmarks, blind spots and what competent assurance actually requires.
- July 2026 · Policy briefingCompetence requirements for high-impact AI systemsWhat a licensed profession should require of the engineers deploying consequential automated decisions.
- July 2026 · ReportFrom Cortex to robotaxi: Austin's driverless yearA 50,000-GPU cluster at Giga Texas, ten cars in June 2025, and a metro-wide geofence a year later.
- July 2026 · GuidanceAI assurance: a practitioner's checklistThe evidence, evaluation and monitoring practices ACS assessors expect to see in professional portfolios.
- June 2026 · BlogWhy the fab is a software problem nowAdvanced packaging, yield analytics and the growing overlap between semiconductor and data engineering careers.
- June 2026 · InterviewCertifying the people who fly the robotaxisA Fellow on safety cases, remote operations and where autonomy competence standards must go next.
- May 2026 · ReportPowering compute: the grid and the data centerHow ERCOT-scale demand growth reshapes siting, cooling and the professional duties of infrastructure teams.
- May 2026 · AnalysisTesla's bet on end-to-end AI: from FSD v12 to the AI5 chipReplacing 300,000 lines of hand-written control code with a neural network, and the silicon that has to run it.
- February 2026 · BriefingSilicon for inference: Blackwell, Trillium, Ironwood and MI300The accelerator roadmap that reshaped data-center design between 2023 and 2026.
- January 2026 · ReportTexas's chip belt: Samsung, TI and the CHIPS Act windfallTwo federal awards, two fab programs and a state fund reshaped semiconductor manufacturing between Taylor and Sherman.
2025 (9)
- December 2025 · ReportFrom Frontera to Stargate: Texas becomes an AI compute stateAcademic leadership systems and gigawatt-scale commercial campuses now compete for the same grid.
- November 2025 · BriefingBeyond chips and cars: Central Texas's space manufacturing clusterFirefly Aerospace's Briggs and Cedar Park expansion, and a state space fund modelled on the semiconductor one.
- September 2025 · TimelineThe reasoning race: OpenAI from GPT-4o to GPT-5Three years in which the frontier moved from faster multimodal chat to models that spend inference time thinking.
- July 2025 · AnalysisNot every move sticks: Oracle, Dell and Apple in AustinA headquarters announcement, two years of headcount reduction and a campus that kept building.
- June 2025 · AnalysisAnthropic's Claude and the agentic turn in software engineeringSonnet, Opus and the shift from autocomplete to long-running coding agents.
- June 2025 · ReportThe Texas migration: Starbase, Giga Texas and two headquarters movesHow three companies consolidated their corporate and engineering centres of gravity in Texas.
- May 2025 · ReportOpen-weight contenders: Llama, Qwen and the DeepSeek shockHow downloadable model weights went from hobbyist curiosity to a strategic procurement option.
- April 2025 · AnalysisAI drug discovery goes commercial — and meets the regulatorIsomorphic Labs' near-$3bn partnerships, the FDA's first AI credibility framework, and Texas compute.
- January 2025 · ReportPangenomes, cell atlases and CRISPR's first US approvalThree reference-scale projects that changed what a biological dataset looks like.
2024 (2)
- November 2024 · ReportAlphaFold3, ESM3 and a Nobel Prize for computationIn eighteen months, structure prediction moved from proteins alone to whole biomolecular complexes — and won chemistry's highest honor.
- March 2024 · ExplainerRFdiffusion and the arrival of designer proteinsA diffusion model bolted onto a structure-prediction network turned protein design from search into generation.
2022 (4)
- December 2022 · BriefingChatGPT's launch and the sudden public encounter with generative AIOpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022, and within days millions of people were forming their first direct impressions of large language models.
- September 2022 · AnalysisThe CHIPS Act and the remaking of the Texas semiconductor corridorFederal legislation and a $17 billion Samsung fab in Taylor, Texas mark the most significant reshoring of chip manufacturing in a generation.
- July 2022 · AnalysisGitHub Copilot goes general: who answers for AI-generated code?GitHub's AI pair programmer became available to all developers on 21 June 2022, raising sharp questions about liability and licensing.
- January 2022 · BriefingLog4Shell and the case for knowing what is in your softwareA single logging library flaw disclosed in December 2021 forced the industry to confront how little it knew about its own dependencies.
2020 (2)
- December 2020 · BriefingSolarWinds: the supply chain becomes the attack surfaceThe December 2020 discovery of a compromise inside SolarWinds' Orion software forced a reckoning over trust in the software supply chain.
- November 2020 · AnalysisApple's M1 and the end of an x86 assumptionApple's November 2020 launch of the M1 chip began the Mac's transition away from Intel, and signalled where computing architecture was heading.
2018 (2)
- May 2018 · TimelineCambridge Analytica and GDPR: 2018's reckoning on personal dataThe Cambridge Analytica scandal broke weeks before the EU's GDPR took effect, crystallising a global debate over how personal data should be governed.
- January 2018 · RetrospectiveMeltdown and Spectre: when the hardware abstraction brokeThe January 2018 disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre showed that speculative execution, a decades-old performance trick, was a security liability across the industry.
2017 (2)
- September 2017 · TimelineEquifax: a breach, a delay and the case for a clear disclosure dutyEquifax discovered its breach in late July 2017 but did not disclose it publicly until 7 September, a delay that reshaped the debate over data-breach law.
- May 2017 · AnalysisWannaCry: what a ransomware worm taught the profession about patchingA ransomware worm that exploited a known, already-patched Windows flaw disrupted hospitals worldwide and made patch management a governance issue.
2016 (2)
- October 2016 · BriefingThe day cameras and DVRs broke the internet: Mirai, Dyn and the IoT reckoningThe October 2016 Dyn attack, powered by a botnet of ordinary home devices, exposed how little accountability existed for connected-device security.
- March 2016 · RetrospectiveAlphaGo, Lee Sedol and the match that redrew AI's timelineIn March 2016 a DeepMind program beat a Go legend 4-1, and the professions built on software had to catch up fast.
2015 (3)
- November 2015 · AnalysisTensorFlow and the democratisation of machine learningGoogle's decision to open-source TensorFlow in November 2015 put production-grade machine learning tools into the hands of any developer, raising new questions of competence and responsibility.
- October 2015 · AnalysisThe Volkswagen defeat device: an engineering ethics case studyVolkswagen's 2015 admission that it used software to cheat emissions tests is a reminder that code can be built deliberately to deceive regulators and the public.
- August 2015 · BriefingThe Jeep hack: when a software flaw becomes a safety recallA 2015 remote hijacking of a Jeep Cherokee triggered a 1.4 million-vehicle recall and redefined automotive engineering as a safety-critical software discipline.
2013 (2)
- October 2013 · TimelineSix enrollments on day one: Healthcare.gov and public-sector software assuranceThe botched October 2013 launch of the federal insurance marketplace became a case study in procurement, testing and accountability failures.
- June 2013 · AnalysisThe Snowden disclosures and the ethics of building surveillance at scaleEdward Snowden's 2013 leaks forced engineers to confront how ordinary technical work can be repurposed for mass surveillance.
2012 (2)
- October 2012 · RetrospectiveAlexNet and the autumn of 2012: when deep learning left the labA convolutional network's win at ImageNet in October 2012 reset the trajectory of computing — and the profession's obligations with it.
- February 2012 · BriefingA $35 board and a skills crisis: the Raspberry Pi launchesThe Raspberry Pi Foundation's low-cost computer sold out within hours, reigniting a transatlantic debate about how computing is taught in schools.
ACS Competency Framework
The national reference for computing skills, used for admission, promotion and job design.
Code of Conduct
The four professional duties every member accepts on joining the register.
CPD library
Free annual continuing professional development modules and ethics training for members.
Employer toolkits
Templates for competency-based hiring, professional registration schemes and apprenticeships.
Press office
Journalists can reach the ACS press office in Austin for expert comment on computing, AI, semiconductors, autonomy and space systems, including out-of-hours briefings.
Contact the press desk →