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 The Eponymous Pickle
Culture: Data and Analytics Everywhere
In O'Reilly: What does it mean to be data driven? An often unspoken thought in the enterprise. We are even if we do not know it today. " .... Data analysis can change an organization’s future -- but only if it’s used in…
From Schneier on Security
Horrible Story of Digital Harassment
This is just awful. Their troll -- or trolls, as the case may be -- have harassed Paul and Amy in nearly every way imaginable. Bomb threats have been made under their names. Police cars and fire trucks have arrived at their house…
From insideHPC
GPUs & Liquid-Cooling Speed APEXX 5 Advanced Computer Workstation
Apexx5_hero_web_smallToday BOXX Technologies introduced the redesigned APEXX 5, the "world’s most advanced professional workstation." Built to accommodate demanding engineering, architectural, VFX, and animation workflows, the…
From Putting People First
Human-machine interactions and the coming age of autonomy
Melissa Cefkin is a Principal Scientist & Design Anthropologist at Nissan Research in Silicon Valley where she explores the potential of having autonomous vehicles as interactive agents in the world. In an article that was published…
From Putting People First
Remaking Ford into a user-experience driven company
Ford CEO Mark Fields recently declared that Ford would be remade as a user-experience driven company: “We have obviously a lot experience in the car business, over 113 years, and our differentiation is going to be clearly the…
From Putting People First
The privatization of human rights: illusions of consent, automation and neutrality
The privatization of human rights: illusions of consent, automation and neutrality by Emily Taylor Published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Chatham House 2016 The Internet enables the free flow of information…
From XRDS
Is Your Research Reproducible?
When a scientific experiment achieves the expected result, researchers hurry up to draft a manuscript, submit it and cross their fingers for acceptance. When that paper gets accepted for publication – a happy camper! However,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marvin Minsky and AI
I see that Marvin Minsky, AI pioneer, died a few days ago. " ... American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author …
From insideHPC
Apply Now for Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing
Computational scientists now have the opportunity to apply for the upcoming Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC), to take place from July 31-August 12, 2016. "With the challenges posed by the architecture…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Forecasting the East Coast Storm
Well, that was a whopper! The Washington, DC area received its first blizzard in many years this past weekend. For a city that normally only receives 15.4 inches of snow spread out over an entire season, the two plus feet of…
From insideHPC
Siemens to Acquire CD-adapco
siemensToday Siemens AG in Germany announced plans Monday to acquire HPC software maker CD-adapco in a stock purchase agreement valued at $970 million. "As part of its Vision 2020, Siemens is acquiring CD-adapco and sharpening…
From Putting People First
The computational anthropologist
When people think of quantitative analytics, big data, and statistics, they rarely picture an anthropologist. The truth is that although anthropology is well known for gathering qualitative data, anthropologists are trained to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Invests in Bangalore Data Analytics
I spent some time in Bangalore, gave a talk to a future looking group there, and found some exciting things going on. In Computer Weekly:Retail giant Wal-Mart is investing heavily in its IT development centre in Bangalore, turning…
From insideHPC
Bright Computing & BitNet Manage Simulation Infrastructure at FNSS in Turkey
Today Bright Computing announced that it has collaborated with BitNet in Turkey to provide an infrastructure management solution to FNSS. As is a leading manufacturer and supplier of tracked and wheeled armored combat vehicles…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sony and IOT
In GigaOM: " .. The first is that Sony is forming Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) from all the units contributing to Playstation, hardware, software, and network, effective April 1. Sony has set the new company up with a…
From insideHPC
175 Teams to Compete in ASC16 Student Supercomputer Challenge
The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC16) Training kicked off in Beijing on January 26. First initiated and organized in China, ASC16 has gained support from experts and technology organizations in US, Europe, and Asia.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Linking Cortana AI to Mail
Been disappointed by the value of Microsoft's virtual agent Cortana. Too often just acting as a front end to their search engine Bing. Now they are said to be adding more intelligence and inferring tasks from email. In CWorld…
From insideHPC
E4 Computer Engineering Collaborates with Ci on HPC Technologies
Today Centerprise International (Ci) in the UK announced a collaboration with E4 Computer Engineering to develop next-generation datacenter technologies for HPC. "This is an exciting development for both companies, as it combines…
From insideHPC
SGI to Deliver Advanced Data Processing for Nagaoka University of Technology
Today SGI Japan announced that the Nagaoka University of Technology has selected the SGI UV 300, SGI UV 30EX and SGI Rackable servers and SGI InfiniteStorage 5600 for its next education and research integrated high-performance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Opens its Deep Learning Toolkit
Been taking a deeper look at the neural net based process of deep learning. Now Microsoft has released its own Deep Learning toolkit. There are many good resources online at a number of technical levels. I have related our…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Plans For Missing School
The standing joke, which is not so funny really, is that creating a sub plan for missing a day of school is more work than working a day at school. It’s a tough task for a conscientious teacher. With a limited number of teaching…
From XRDS
A Historical Account of Four Women who Made the Internet of Things Possible
A Historical Account of Four Women who Made the Internet of Things Possible The Internet of Things as a field has been continuously growing since 1982, when it was first thought of. Such is its speed of growth, however, thatContinue…
From insideHPC
The GPUltima: Up to a Petaflop of Networked GPUs in a Single Rack
As developers have begun requiring more GPUs to process complex applications, manufacturers have looked for new ways to add GPUs to systems. Most solutions involve adding numbers of high bandwidth slots to a system, typically…
From Schneier on Security
Data Driven Policing
Good article from The Washington Post....
From Putting People First
Designing for Crisis, Design for Real Life
It’s easy to design for the idealized user, someone who’s smart, calm, and informed. It’s less easy, and thus more important, to design for a more realistic user: still smart, but harried and uncertain. The best designs handle…
From Putting People First
[Book] Every Thing We Touch: A 24-Hour Inventory of Our Lives
Every Thing We Touch: A 24-Hour Inventory of Our Lives [Tumblr page] by Paula Zuccotti Viking Books, November 2015 256 pages What’s the first thing we touch when we wake up? How do our favourite things reveal our hopes and fears…
From Blog@Ubiquity
The Backdoor is a Victory for Terrorists
When authorities realized the Paris terrorists used strong encryption to send messages to one another they went off the encryption deep end. Now, many nations are considering legislation to ban strong encryption. If strong encryption…
From insideHPC
Time-lapse Video: Edison Supercomputer Moves to Berkeley
In this video, engineers move the NERSC Edison Supercomputer from Oakland to Berkeley. The one week long move is condensed into :41 seconds in this time lapse video, shot during the entire process. Edison is a Cray XC30, with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Comes to the Factory Floor
IBM Works with IOT Startup. Expected this direction much earlier, we worked on similar maintenance related approaches. See Wi-Next. See competitive (?) work in GE Predix Cloud.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Feb. 3 deadline for Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships
The Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship Program lets graduate students from across the country immerse themselves in a year of focused high-performance computing (HPC) and data-intensive research using the Blue Waters supercomputer…