Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2015
From The Eponymous Pickle
Customization Nation with Services and Supply Chain
In Retailwire: Thoughts about the meaning of services in retail. Beyond the classic offering of a selection of products. New changes in the relationship of retailer and manufacturer. I like the idea that customers are building…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Metamind vs Watson
Useful piece in KDNuggets: In recent conversations with decision makers in the enterprise, see they are always emphasizing the need for more technology as a service. " ... MetaMind Competes with IBM Watson Analytics and Microsoft…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Washington News – Alerts and Updates
General News • USACM issued a press statement on President Obama’s comments on privacy and security in his State of the Union address. • ACM’s Annual Report FY2014, published this month in the Communications of the ACM, features…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Changing Role of the CIO
The changing role. But consider the role too of formulating and directing technical innovation strategy as it applies to the needs of the company.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Extensible Distributed Systems Workshop
Contributions to this post were made by Lorenzo Alvisi, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UT Austin and Robbert van Renesse, Principal Research Scientist…
From Schneier on Security
Subconscious Keys
I missed this paper when it was first published in 2012: "Neuroscience Meets Cryptography: Designing Crypto Primitives Secure Against Rubber Hose Attacks" Abstract: Cryptographic systems often rely on the secrecy of cryptographic…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Reinventing Supply Chains
From Bain: Reinventing. Something we did every few years, and quite successfully. Most recently just a few years ago. Here are two public examples: A Data visualization optimization aided simulation model, with gamingan…
From Schneier on Security
Police Using Radar that Sees Through Walls
In the latest example of a military technology that has secretly been used by the police, we have radar guns that can see through walls....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brands Want Actionable Insight
In AdAge: What we have said for a long time, and why we are still uncertain about the BigData term. " ... Agencies: Does Your Data Pass the 'So-What' Test? ... ". Also, I would add, analytics is the driving force to find insight…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Computer Scientist Recipient of 2015 NAS William O. Baker Award
Congratulations to Benjamin Recht, assistant professor of electrical engineering, computer science, and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, for receiving the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research…
From Putting People First
Big Data and Small: Collaborations between ethnographers and data scientists
In the past three years, Heather Ford — an ethnographer and now a PhD student — has worked on ad hoc collaborative projects around Wikipedia sources with two data scientists from Minnesota, Dave Musicant and Shilad Sen. In this…
From Putting People First
New Wikipedia page on “Design for behaviour change”
The new Wikipedia page on “Design for behaviour change” starts as follows: “Design for behaviour change is a sub-category of design, which is concerned with how design can shape, or be used to influence human behaviour. All approaches…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council Nominations Due Next Friday!
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council nomination deadline is next Friday, February 6, 2015. See complete details — including nominating instructions — below: The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Science for the Masses
Paper by a colleague. Kirk Borne. This is not just about Astronomy science data, but broadly applicable to science and industryThe Revolution in Astronomy Education: Data Science for the MassesKirk D. Borne (George Mason University)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
High Speed 3D Microscope
In Kurzweil: A microscope to take high speed 3D recordings of living things. " ... A Columbia University scientist has developed a new microscope that can image freely moving living things in 3D at very high speeds — up to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Content Engineering and AI
Short piece by Omri Astel made me think about how ad content can be engineered based upon the audience. Early steps have been taken in this direction. For example, with Watson User Modeling. See this Description/Documentation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Phones Altering Brains
In the BBC: Based on EEG studies. It is notable that this is a small N study: " .. Study author Arko Ghosh, from the Institute of Neuroinformatics of the University of Zurich, said: "I was really surprised by the scale…
From Schneier on Security
The IDEA Encryption Algorithm with a 128-bit Block Length
Here's an IDEA-variant with a 128-bit block length. While I think it's a great idea to bring IDEA up to a modern block length, the paper has none of the cryptanalysis behind it that IDEA had. If nothing else, I would have expected…
From Apophenia
Baby Boaz
Boaz Lotan Boyd saw the blizzard coming and knew it was time for him to enter this world. At 4PM on Monday, January 26, a little ball of fuzzy cuteness let out a yelp and announced his presence at a healthy 6 pounds 14 ounces…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of January 26
January 27 Conference: The 2015 State of the Net Conference takes place. 8 a.m., The Newseum, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue Hearing: The Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ontologies of Jobs and their Related Tasks and Data
Last year I posted the text below. Am now in the midst of working on an effort to classify jobs and included tasks to determine how they can be linked to cognitive and data focused solutions. Below I link to a very useful-…
From Computational Complexity
A nice problem from a Romanian Math Problem Book
(All of the math for this problem is here)My Discrete Math Honors TA Ioana showed me a Romanian Math Problem book(She is Romanian) and told the following problem: (All ai in this post are assumed to be natural numbers) Show…
From The Eponymous Pickle
EU Internet of Things Architecture Project
I was pointed to this site which reports on the completion of an EU project on IOT architecture. I like its form. Its first goal: " ... an architectural reference model for the interoperability of Internet-of-Things systems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wrist Smart Marketing
In Retailwire: In-store broadcasting to Smart Watches. More from InMarket. I see they are looking at the behavioral interaction between shopper and wearable. We were also most concerned with what the shopper really wanted…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Platfora Solution
This Platfora solution was recently mentioned to me. Examining." ... The only complete solution out there. Platfora is the only end-to-end software platform to run natively on Hadoop and provide raw data preparation, in-memory…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence
The following is a guest blog post by Tom Dietterich, current president for The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Eric Horvitz, former president of AAAI. The first winter AAAI meeting is occurring…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Can Big Data Give us Bionic Brains?
Deloitte Analytics report talks about "Bionic Brains"Juha Hulkkonen, Business Development Leader at IBM, writes: "The So What" section in Deloitte Analytics report is good plain language discussion of how cognitive computing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Internet of Things from Davos
Correspondent Shoumen Datta of MIT sends along his PDF presentation on the Internet of Systems from Davos. Always an interesting and a strongly visual resource. Now emphasizing the systems aspects.
From Schneier on Security
Basaaly Moalin: The One "Terrorist" Caught by Section 215 Surveillance
Remember back in 2013 when the then-director of the NSA Keith Alexander claimed that Section 215 bulk telephone metadata surveillance stopped "fifty-four different terrorist-related activities"? Remember when that number was…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 26 January 2015
A new semester starts for me today. Since I only teach semester courses that means a whole new group of students to meet and teach. I have spent much of the weekend retooling my plan for the semester based on what I learned last…