The metaverse remains a work in progress, but improvements in how it handles ethical concerns and addresses cultural issues could push it further along the path to mass adoption. In recent years the concept of the metaverse has gained increasing resonance in both research and public discourse. In the December issue of Communications of the ACM, Tiziana Catarci, Giuseppina De Nicola, and Daniel Raffini investigate how the metaverse is changing the concept of user experience, identify the technical and ethical shortcomings it still faces, and explore the cultural factors favoring its adoption in South Korea.

If you regularly work with open-source code or produce software for a large organization, you're already familiar with many of the challenges posed by collaborative programming at scale. And the scale of the problem has gotten much worse. This is what led a group of researchers at MSR (Microsoft Research) to take on the task of complicated merges as a grand program-repair challenge—one they believed might be addressed at least in part by machine learning. To understand the thinking that led to this effort and then follow where that led, Erik Meijer and Terry Coatta spoke with three of the leading figures in the MSR research effort, called DeepMerge