Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2016
From Schneier on Security
Integrity and Availability Threats
Cyberthreats are changing. We're worried about hackers crashing airplanes by hacking into computer networks. We're worried about hackers remotely disabling cars. We're worried about manipulated counts from electronic voting booths…
From Putting People First
[Report] Consumers more frustrated by smart home apps than devices
![[Report] Consumers more frustrated by smart home apps than devices](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
New report by Argus Insights suggests disappointing apps break user experience, may cause decline in consumer delight over time. The Smart Home ecosystem comprises both hardware devices and software apps and together they are…
From Putting People First
Replacing Personas with Characters
Because personas focus on creating a story made up of a customer’s attributes, instead of a story that explains a purchase, personas leave the brain in a unsatisfied state, argues Alan Klement. To fix this, in just a split second…
From Putting People First
Solving health care problems through design methodology
Stephen Klasko (an MD with an MBA, CEO of Jefferson Health System and Thomas Jefferson University) and Bon Ku (MD, a professor of emergency medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital) joined the Knowledge@Wharton show on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kate, a Platform for Machine Intelligence
... Wayne Imaino from IBM Almaden Research Center, presented: “Kate, a Platform for Machine Intelligence." Slides here. .... Please find the schedule of presenters herefor the next several calls and please sign up for making…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automating Multiple Streams of Biometric Analysis
I see that iMotions is out with a method that can analytically combine eye tracking, facial expression, ECG and more. Have not used their devices and methods, but combining streams of data would be interesting. This is analogous…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Attend the International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences
Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from institutions in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States are invited to apply for the seventh International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences, to be…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Customer Centricity
Our long time Wharton Correspondent Peter Fader in Forbes. Podcast: " .... Customer centricity is something we all intend to do–it sounds like it means being “into” your customers. You are interested and focused on them right…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at the Top HPC Tech Stories from 2015
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the Top Technology Stories for High Performance Computing in 2015. "From 3D XPoint memory to Co-Design Architecture and NVM Express, these new approaches are poised to have a…
From insideHPC
Alan Alda to Receive Public Welfare Medal from National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is presenting its 2016 Public Welfare Medal to actor, director, writer, and science communicator Alan Alda in recognition of his "extraordinary application of the skills honed as an actor to communicating…
From insideHPC
Hartree Centre Collaborates to Transform UK Pharmaceutical Development
A new major collaborative project is set to transform the UK pharmaceutical industry by enabling the manufacturing processes of the innovative medicines of the future to be designed digitally. The STFC Hartree Centre is a partner…
From insideHPC
Shared Memory and MPI 3.0
As multi-socket, then multi-core systems have become the standard, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become one of the most popular programming models for applications that can run in parallel using many sockets and cores…
From insideHPC
Compute Canada Collaborates on National Research Data Platform
Today Compute Canada and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) announced a collaboration to build a scalable national platform for research data management and discovery. The partnership joins information management…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Are You Teaching Cloud Computing to HS Students?
Looking to learn from CS teacI hate reinventing the wheel. One of the things I would like to learn more about is teaching the use of cloud services like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure to high school students. I’d probably…
From Computational Complexity
We Still Can't Beat Relativization
As we celebrate our successes in computational complexity here's a sobering fact: We have had no new non-relativizing techniques in the last 25 years. A little background: In 1975, a few years after Cook established the P vBaker…
From Schneier on Security
Psychological Model of Selfishness
This is interesting: Game theory decision-making is based entirely on reason, but humans don't always behave rationally. David Rand, assistant professor of psychology, economics, cognitive science, and management at Yale University…
From Putting People First
The Power of Privacy – documentary film
In this half-hour film (commissioned by The Guardian and Silent Circle), Aleks Krotoski travels the world to undergo challenges that explore our digital life in the 21st century. Watch her be stalked and hacked, fight to get …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Art and Science of Customer Data at Kroger
More peeks into the value of analytics in retail. All analytics is art and science. Design and algorithms." ... Supermarket retailers walk a fine line as they work to connect with shoppers on mobile devices without alienating…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Personalizing Product Offerings
Design to allow such personalization is key. In Inc: Why Business Personalization is the Key to Long-Term Success ... We're leaving the old business model of offering standard product selections behind and embarking on a new.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More from Cognitive Assistance Symposium
More from: AAAI FSS-15 Cognitive Assistance Symposium - Part 2by Frank Stein, Director of Analytics Solution Center at IBM. At the link, more from other parts of the report." ... This is a continuation from my earlier post…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Deepmind can Beat a Top Go Player
First it was checkers, then chess, and now finally the Japanese game Go. AI continues to evolve. From Google. AlphaGo by Deepmind." .... This paper published in Nature on 28th January 2016, describes a new approach to computer…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Try It You’ll Like It
There are lots of cool gadgets out there these days. A lot of them are being promoted as ways to get students excited about developing software. For young students we have all sorts of drag and drop programming languages. And…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Minsky The Theorist
Marvin Minsky’s contributions to complexity theory Cropped from BBC feature on AI Marvin Minsky, sad to relate, passed away last Sunday. He was one of the great leaders of artificial intelligence (AI), and his early work helped…
From insideHPC
Call for Submissions: GPU Hackathon at the University of Delaware
The Call for Submissions is open for the upcoming GPU Programming Hackathon at University of Delaware (UDEL). The event takes place from May 2-6, 2016 at UDEL in Newark, Delaware.
The post Call for Submissions: GPU HackathoninsideHPC…From The Eponymous Pickle
Complex Storytelling in a Digital, Analytical Age
Storytelling is a requirement in any business. It describes the business process. And if you are changing a business process, you need to accurately describe the change you propose. However complex. But analytics gives additional…
From insideHPC
Princeton Plasma Physics Lab Wins 80 Million Processor Hours on Titan Supercomputer
The U.S Department of Energy has awarded a total of 80 million processor hours on Titan supercomputer to an astrophysical project based at the DOE's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). The grants will enable researchers…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Data Science Seminar- Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and Data Science
The AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows at the National Science Foundation (NSF) have organized another talk in their Data Science Seminar Series from Michael I. Jordan on Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and…
From insideHPC
ANSYS Release 17.0 Provides 10X Performance Improvement
Today ANSYS announced that engineers across disciplines – from structures to fluids to electromagnetics to systems – will realize step-change improvements in the way they develop products using the newly released ANSYS 17.0. …
From insideHPC
Long Live the King – The Complicated Business of Upgrading Legacy HPC Systems
"Upgrading legacy HPC systems relies as much on the requirements of the user base as it does on the budget of the institution buying the system. There is a gamut of technology and deployment methods to choose from, and the picture…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Assisting Online Buyers
The idea of assisting buyers online with cognitive AI is a very old idea. Very natural too, because it is a resource and data intensive interaction. Insert the virtual assistant in the stream between buyer and company. …