Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2017
From The Eponymous Pickle
First Impressions: People, Brands?
Quite interesting results. Does a lapse of time still not heal the first impression? Is this also the case with a brand?
Science: First Impressions Are Even More Long-Lasting Than You Think
New research produces some bad news…
From Apophenia
Why America is Self-Segregating
The United States has always been a diverse but segregated country. This has shaped American politics profoundly. Yet, throughout history, Americans have had to grapple with divergent views and opinions, political ideologies,…
From Schneier on Security
Should Elections Be Classified as "Critical Infrastructure"?
I am co-author on a paper discussing whether elections be classified as "critical infrastructure" in the US, based on experiences in other countries: Abstract: With the Russian government hack of the Democratic National Convention…
From Schneier on Security
FDA Recommendations on Medical-Device Cybersecurity
The FDA has issued a report giving medical devices guidance on computer and network security. There's nothing particularly new or interesting; it reads like standard security advice: write secure software, patch bugs, and so …
From Phys.org Technology News
Science DMZ is focus of latest library of network training videos aimed at global audience
For members of the established research and education (R&E) networking community, attending conferences or sitting in on workshop sessions is the normal way to learn about the latest equipment, architecture, tools and technologies…
From The Eponymous Pickle
BPM Empowering IoT and Defining Analytics
A favorite topic. How Business Process Modeling (BPM) could be used with analytics and AI to really understand and improve business process. Here in the Jan-Feb 2017 Analytics Mag, the emphasis is put on IoT. Good thoughts…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
White House Report on Ensuring Long-Term U.S. Leadership in Semiconductors
The following blog post is by CCC Vice Chair and Executive Council member and University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Mark D. Hill. Last week the US White House released Ensuring Long-Term U.S. Leadership in Semiconductors.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Softbank Pepper Sales Robot
A relook at the SoftBank humanoid Pepper robot. Seems the test they mention that showed increases in sales is far too short, and could have largely been driven by publicized novelty. In Recode:
SoftBank’s humanoid robot Pepper…
From insideHPC
Penn State Institute for CyberScience to Host HPC Workshops
The Penn State Institute for CyberScience (ICS) is hosting a series of free training workshops on high-performance computing techniques. These workshops are sponsored by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment…
From insideHPC
Compute Canada Receives Funding for National Supercomputing Platform
Today the Canada Foundation for Innovation announced an award of $69,455,000 through its Major Science Initiative Fund for the Compute Canada project. This award will be used to continue the operation of the national advanced…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Research Scientist for HPC at PNNL
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is seeking a Research Scientist for High Performance Computing in our Job of the Week. "The HPC group is seeking a Scientist to actively participate in challenging software and…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
How Important Are Number Bases for pre-University Computer Science?
Do high school or younger computer science students really need to understand number-base conversion and binary, decimal, and hexadecimal number systems? Obviously most students are comfortable using decimal numbers. How important…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Everything is a Virtual Assistant Now
CW look at the future of virtual assistants, based on the explosion of solutions delivered and embedded, shown at CES last week. Good points made about 'supporting' interaction.
Amazon's Alexa won CES this week. by Mike Elgan…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks Forward to New Technologies in 2017
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team shares the things we're looking forward to in 2017. "From the iPhone 8 to storage innovations and camera technologies in the fight against crime, it is looking like 2017 is going to be…
From BLOG@CACM
'Figure It Out' Isn't Enough: Striking a New Balance Between Understanding, Problem-Solving, and Design in Introductory CS Classes
Intro CS courses should help students understand programs more and problem-solve less.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facial Recognition by Baidu and KFC China
Long have discussed facial recognition uses. Here a test at the point of sale at KFC China. Evan Schuman makes a good case that the proposed use is dangerous, especially in US and European cultures. Consider also other uses…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Predicting the future job market: the librarians
People spend a lot of time worrying that robots and computers are going to wipe out all jobs. My belief is that the job market is a lot more complex and simplistic reasonings (“better robots means fewer jobs”) are likely misleading…
From insideHPC
Scaling Hardware for In-Memory Computing
The two methods of scaling processors are based on the method used to scale the memory architecture and are called scaling-out or scale-up. Beyond the basic processor/memory architecture, accelerators and parallel file systems…
From XRDS
How cloud computing could improve your research.
Processing large datasets or working with huge data is a usual stage in almost any kind of research. The problem appears when processing these data requires long processing time on any kind of personal laptop. In order to solve…
From Apophenia
Did Media Literacy Backfire?
Anxious about the widespread consumption and spread of propaganda and fake news during this year’s election cycle, many progressives are calling for an increased commitment to media literacy programs. Others are clamoring for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM's Cognitive Advantage Report
What is cognition? Why should we care? Who is using it? How do we get started? Comprehensive look. Get it below. Good information and statistics. This blog covers the topic.
The cognitive advantage report
Cognitive computing…
From Phys.org Technology News
America's crumbling infrastructure
No matter how big the issue—national security, health care, gun rights—it's been nearly impossible for Washington lawmakers to find common ground given the deep rancor and partisan division among them. But fixing the nation's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI and Digital Advertising
AI and deeper analytics continues to drive more intelligent decisions. I always ask: To what degree will the decisions be autonomous? And how will they be integrated with human insight?
Harley-Davidson Boosts Digital Marketing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Performance Management
McKinsey on Performance Manangement.
Ahead of the curve: The future of performance management
By Boris Ewenstein, Bryan Hancock, and Asmus Komm
Most corporate performance-management systems don’t work today, because they are rooted…
From Schneier on Security
Attributing the DNC Hacks to Russia
President Barack Obama's public accusation of Russia as the source of the hacks in the US presidential election and the leaking of sensitive e-mails through WikiLeaks and other sources has opened up a debate on what constitutes…
From Writing
Yevgeniy Brikman on the devRant Podcast
devRant is a place you can talk (or rant) about your life as a programmer with other programmers. The devRant folks are also putting together a series of podcast interviews. The first episode was with Andy Hunt, author of The…
From Writing
Yevgeniy Brikman on the devRant Podcast
devRant is a place you can talk (or rant) about your life as a programmer with other programmers. The devRant folks are also putting together a series of podcast interviews. The first episode was with Andy Hunt, author of The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intel Corp and AI
An overview of Intel Corp's work in AI.
The Artificial Intelligence Era Is Here.
AI is the next big wave in computing. Like major transformations before it, AI is poised to usher in a better world. Intel technology and programs…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Case Based Reasoning Driving Chatbots
I was reminded about the possibility of using, even powering chatbots using case based reasoning (CBR) methods and intelligence architecture. We had looked at this for some simple cases by constructing decision trees and building…
From insideHPC
Barry Bolding from Cray Shares Four Predictions for HPC in 2017
In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Cray's Barry Bolding gives some predictions for the supercomputing industry in 2017. "2016 saw the introduction or announcement of a number of new and innovative
…