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 insideHPC
Alison Kennedy Named Hartree Centre Director
Today the STFC Hartree Centre in the U.K. announced that Alison Kennedy will be joining the centre as its new Director at the end of March 2016. As Director, Alison will drive the continued growth and development of the Hartree…
From insideHPC
C-DAC Deploys 25 Param Shavak Desktop Supercomputers Across India
India's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has developed an affordable supercomputer for universities conducting high-end research. Already deployed at 25 institutions, the Param Shavak is a GPU-accelerated …
From insideHPC
Call for Submissions: EuroMPI in Edinburgh
EuroMPI has issued its Call for Submissions. The aim of this conference is to bring together all of the stakeholders involved in developments and applications related to the Message Passing Interface (MPI). As the preeminent …
From insideHPC
ECMWF to Upgrade Cray XC Supercomputers for Weather Forecasting
Today Cray announced a $36 million contract to upgrade and expand the Cray XC supercomputers and Cray Sonexion storage system at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). When the project is completed, the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Jerry Kaplan on the State of AI: Humans Can Still Apply
Jerry Kaplan talk at Google. Kaplan was one of the founders of Teknowledge, who we partnered with in the 1980s. The partnership led , among other efforts, to a coffee blending system that saved many millions of dollars in"…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
More of Vinge’s “predictions” for 2025…
In my previous post, I reviewed some of the predictions made in the famous science-fiction book Rainbows end. The book was written in 2006 by Vernor Vinge and set in 2025. The book alludes to a massive book digitalization effort…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft R Server
In CWorld: Continued movement by big IT players into advanced analytics services." ... Microsoft this week took the next step following its acquisition of Revolution Analytics last year by unwrapping an advanced-analytics platform…
From Schneier on Security
Shodan Lets Your Browse Insecure Webcams
There's a lot out there: The feed includes images of marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 25 January 2016
THe school year is pretty much half over for me. Last week we wrapped up the first semester exams. I give semester projects, which inspired some posts in the last week or so, and spent a good amount of time grading them. Today…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Looking forward at BI
Forward view of Business Intelligence. PDF eBook by IBM:" ... Making smarter business decisions quickly and confidently drives business value across an entire organization. To accomplish thisin today’s competitive global marketplace…
From Computational Complexity
When do we stop giving the original reference?
I was preparing a talk which included my result that there is a sane reduction 4-COL \le 3-COL (the paper is here) when I realized that if I am going to claim the reduction is by Gasarch then I should find out and credit the…
From insideHPC
How Containers will Enable Ubiquitous CAE as a Common Tool for Every Engineer
Over at the UberCloud, Wolfgang Gentzsch writes that, despite the ever increasing complexity of CAE tools, hardware, and system components engineers have never been this close to ubiquitous CAE as a common tool for every engineer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Experience versus Innovation
General look in Innovation Excellence. A simplistic way to look at this is it is a form of 'generate and test'. With inexperienced youth generating and experienced people testing the ideas. But things like organization and…
From insideHPC
Video: Using Google Compute Engine Pre-Emptible VMs for Cancer Research
In this video from the HPC in the Cloud Educational Series, Marco Novaes, Solutions Engineer with the Google Cloud Platform team explains how the Broad Institute was able to use Google Pre-Emptible VMs to leverage over 50,000…
From The Eponymous Pickle
RFID and Beacons
We experimented with this in lab settings to test in store product interactions. More likely meaningful in areas like apparel. A further enablement of Beacons.RFID Pops Up in Mobile Interactive StoresShopWithMe pop-up stores…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Creating Business Value Through Graph Analytics
Graph Analytics is an interesting topic, but how it creates value is often hard to describe. A well known vendor Neo4j, provides some good examples of its value and use. Its more than just a descriptive methodBusiness Value…
From Putting People First
The grand illusion of empowerment
Financial times journalist/anthropologist Gillian Tett deconstructs the idea that the internet hands power to the people. In fact, she writes, in most countries power remains firmly in the hands of the elite. The bitter — and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Slopegraph Visualizations
Have seen them often, but was unaware of the term. Most packages today support them, from Tableau to Python to R. I like the simplicity. In ForumOne:" ... Slopegraphs are a great means for comparing data point, often between…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Look at Bayes Theorem
In Sciam: Bayesian thinking is growing. Here a largely non technical look at its value and limitations. Nice read. In general I find methods driven by Bayesian are underused as opposed to over used. The error of confirmation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson and Vineyards
IBM has been talking much about weather data and internet of things. So it is natural to see this piece about a process control style application to the watering of vineyards in CA. The broad idea is not new, we saw it being…
From insideHPC
SDSC Health Division to Create Cancer Research Infrastructure
The Health Cyberinfrastructure Division of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is participating in a multi-million dollar project with City of Hope Cancer Center to create a research cyberinfrastructure that includes a …
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Program Director at Engility
engilityEngility in California is seeking an HPC Program Director in our Job of the Week. "Engility is recruiting for a Sr. HPC Program Director to lead a large Scientific Program within the government space. This individual …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Martin Lindstrom: Small Data
I see that former colleague Martin Lindstrom has a new book forthcoming: Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends . Have not seen it yet, but I like the premise. Take a look at their pre publicity. Looking at getting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Answering Why
Why? A Discussion about Cognitive Architectures and Deep Thinking!Jack Park from TopicQuests Foundation " ... a foundation dedicated to the support and evolution of open source knowledge gardening ... " gave a provocative presentation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Google Glass
In CWorld: Look at the possible evolution of Google Glass, and likely competitors. Still just attentive (and intrusive) rather than VR immersive.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Remembering Photos with Deep Learning
In CACM: Deep learning photo memorability" ... Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) say they have developed an algorithm that can predictThe…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Three Hundred Thousand Drones Registered with the FAA
In CWorld: Look to the skies today, they will be changing. More unexpected consequences will be arriving.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Have some Raspberry Pi
Just starting this book. Not very technical, but you need to be somewhat geeky to engage. Quite an impressive amount of software comes along: Starting with Scratch, Python and Mathematica. Want to understand how the IOT will…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: North Coast Squid
North Coast Squid is a local writing journal from Manzanita, Oregon. It's going to publish its fifth edition this year. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Innovation at Electrolux
Open Innovation at Electrolux. Appliance manufacturer we worked with for a while. The how is always interesting, but also the kinds of application being addressed: " .... she presented several Electrolux open innovation success…